Roots
Adeline Virginia Stephen was born on January 25, 1882 into the late Victorian aristocracy in London. The family belonged to the upper middle-class and to the prestigious London literary community. Her father, Leslie Stephen was a prolific literary critic who held honorary doctorates from numerous universities including Oxford and Cambridge. He was a man of letters and the founder of the Dictionary of National Biography. Her mother, Julia Duckworth Stephen, a nurse, worked committedly with the sick and the poor throughout her life. Both parents had been married before. Her father to the daughter of the novelist Thackeray, Minnie, by whom he had a daughter Laura. She was mentally ill. Virginia's mother was married to a barrister, Herbert Duckworth, by whom she had three children, George, Stella and Gerald. Julia and Leslie Stephen had four children : Vanessa, Virginia, Thoby and Adrian. All the eight children lived with the parents and a number of servants at 22 Hyde Park Gate, Kensington.
Growing Up !
Although privileged, Woolf's parents were industrious and prodigious workers. This model of self-discipline greatly influenced her habits of writing. Reading also influenced Woolf's writing. Having grown up in a large literary household, Woolf had an uncensored access to her father's extensive library. She read voluminous amounts of material and always followed an arduous reading schedule. She chronicled her reading as well as her thoughts, by writing diaries from the time she was 15. She believed reading and writing worked together to create an ever evolving art form.
Virginia loved to hunt for butterflies and moths as a child. She used to smear the tree trunks with treacle to attract and capture the insects with her brothers and sisters. Then they used to pin their dead bodies to cork boards with their colorful wings outspread. This interest persisted till her adulthood. It is described by Nigel Nicolson in his book Virginia Woolf. Nigel was accompanied by Virginia on one of his bug-hunting trips. There according to him, Virginia gathered a copy for one of the character James in To the Lighthouse. The reason for this inference being that the character James was almost about Nigel's age. Nigel distinctly remembers and elaborates on her references to her own childhood, from which he gathered (later) that she had a far from happy childhood.
Virginia grew up in Hyde Park Gate, but long summer holidays were spent at Talland House in St Ives, Cornwall. St Ives played a large part in enhancing and influencing Virginia's imagination. It was the setting for her novel To the Lighthouse, despite it ostensibly being placed on the Isle of Skye. London or St Ives provided the principal settings of most of her novels, with a few exceptions.
Influences
There is a series of death and depressive stages in Virginia's life, which may have greatly added to her own low confidence and low self-esteem. There was a fierce contradiction in her own personality traits. She immensely adored her family and was very attached to them.
The other major contribution to her vast imagination was books. She read books from her father's vast and rich library. Father and daughter enjoyed lengthy, informative and intellectual discussions on works and great authors of the time. These being the very foundation of the development of Virginia's ability and creativity, she was already taking in a great deal of literary exposure, reading intensively and discussing various works at a tender age of 11. She detailed them and presented her own views about them. The surroundings of Virginia and the various experiences of traveling and settling down with her parents at places of scenic beauty also influenced her. Her education was sketchy and she never went to school. Her education occurred mostly at home. Her father informally guided her intellectual growth through reading. He also provided her with private tutors. She never attended school, a situation she deplores in her feminist tract, A Room of One's Own. Vanessa trained to become a painter. Their two brothers were sent to preparatory and public schools, and then to Cambridge. There Thoby made friends with Leonard Woolf, Clive Bell, Saxon Sydney-Turner, Lytton Strachey, and Maynard Keynes. This was the nucleus of the Bloomsbury Group.
Eventually…
Virginia was a nervous and delicate child. In 1985, her mother died unexpectantly and Virginia suffered her first mental breakdown. Her half-sister Stella took over the running of the household as well as coping with Leslie's demands for sympathy and emotional support. Stella married Jack Hills in 1897, but she too died suddenly on her return from her honeymoon. The household burden then fell upon Vanessa. As a child, Virginia was sexually harassed and abused by two of her stepbrothers. Her sisters and stepsisters were also sexually abused. After her first breakdown, she showed signs of mental instability, and her father's death, in 1904, triggered a severe mental breakdown, during which she heard voices and tried to commit suicide by throwing herself out of the window. While she was sick, Vanessa arranged for her siblings to move from 22 Hyde Park Gate to 46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury. At the end of the year, Virginia started reviewing with a clerical paper called The Guardian. In 1905, she started reviewing in The Times Literary Supplement and continued writing for that journal for many years. She also taught at Morley College, Waterloo Road, London from 1907. This was the first time she had ever held intellectual discussions with her social inferiors. In 1906, Thoby died of typhoid. And the following year, Vanessa married Clive Bell. Thoby had started Thursday evenings for his friends to visit, and this kind of arrangement was continued after his death by Vanessa and then by Virginia and brother Adrian when they moved to 29 Fitzroy Square. In 1911, Virginia moved to 38 Brunswick Square.
Marriage
Leonard Woolf was born in London. His father was a barrister. He studied at Cambridge and in 1904, he went into civil service to Ceylon. He returned in 1912, on leave. He soon decided that he wanted to marry Virginia. He proposed to her on January 11. After this, for many weeks, she was unwell and was strictly confined to bed. She was admitted to a hospital for many weeks. On May 29, 1912, she agreed to marry Leonard. Some symptoms still persisted and the whole of June was spent in bed. On August 10, she was married to Leonard in St. Pancras Registry Office.
The Soul Mate
Leonard was a wonderful companion and a proper husband for Virginia. Though Virginia's early sexual abuse in the formative young years rendered her a sexual failure in her marriage to Leonard, they were happy. Leonard took a great care of Virginia and strived to help her cope with her frequent fits of depression. It was a task that can be considered Herculean in its own right. Leonard was a constant support, a pillar on which Virginia leaned on, struggling with her own personality disorder. Leonard was the only strand of stability in the deprived, unstable, unhappy and confused life of Virginia. It was evident that Leonard was a man of utter devotion and love from the way he handled his wife's mental and physical condition. He thwarted the progress of his own career as a professor in Ceylon for the sake of his wife who would never leave England.
Leonard was an equal partner in Virginia's progress. The steep rise to fame as an imminent novelist was possible by providing her a platform to write and publish her works at the Hogarth Press, which they jointly owned. Virginia excelled as a writer because of her ability to eulogize her passions and base them as inspirations in her work. Her inner emotions, turmoils, struggles with her own mind and feelings, paradoxically proved a needed impetus for her success.
He observed carefully, that the majority of her inspirations were her relationships and affairs with various friends and relatives. It seemed as if Virginia was trying to voice her experiences and justifying the same. There was a feeling of guilt, shame, embarrassment, confusion and hatred towards her self, lurking at the back of her mind somewhere. The characters in her novels revealed the passions, her own secret dreams, hopes and feelings, and provided life to her lifeless, yet omnipresent cravings for stability and clarity.
The Stepsister - Laura
Leslie and Julia Stephen and their backgrounds were very different from one another. Two contrary bloodstream clashed in Virginia's veins. Her father felt a special affection for Virginia and doted on her more than the other children. The case of Laura Stephen, Leslie's child from his first marriage to Minnie Thackeray has vividly illustrated the lack of understanding and mismanagement of disturbed children in the family. Laura was a source of misery and sadness to Leslie, and an additional work and concern for Julia. It was a disturbing and a frightening specter to the other children of the household. Laura caused some of Virginia's fears about herself. Laura was later send to an asylum, where she died in 1945 at the age of 75.
The 'Incestuous' Stepbrother
The unwelcome sexual advances by Virginia's stepbrothers, George and Gerad Duckworth were also a very contributing factor in Virginia's psyche. After the death of her mother in 1895, George became a mother, a father and a caring elder brother to Virginia and her sister Vanessa. It was then that she suffered her first mental breakdown. She went through a period of morbid self-criticism, blamed herself for being vain and egotistical. She constantly compared herself unfavorably to Vanessa, and was greatly irritable. At first George's affection did not evoke any ill feeling because Virginia thought them to be totally that of a brother. But later she began to understand that he was crossing the demarcation line between a sister-brother relationship. In her memoirs, she has called him 'incestuous'. At the time of her mother's death, Virginia was 13 and George was 27. George's unwelcome attentions consisted of sexual groping and fondling, which emerged from his attempts to comfort her after her mother's death. But Virginia could not always distinguish them from his innocent expressions of affection and solicitude. Apart from these advances, George attempted to turn his shy and resistant half-sisters into his social assets. However, Virginia found his attempts to bring her out socially extraordinarily painful. She experienced them as an outrage, for her shyness and social ineptitude were not the usual ones of young girls. Instead, they were indications of her deep, pathological fear. His pompous officiousness and insensitivity in pushing her into social situations she couldn't manage, terrified her and exacerbated both her outward insecurities and her underlying fears. Another brother, Gerald, also 'sexually explored' her. But it was George who made the difference, who left in her coldness for sex, which later had its repercussions in her marriage. In one of her letters, she said that George had spoilt her life before it had begun, and that she had no enjoyment of her body. George dominated their lives for years.
A Loss
Leslie Stephen's health began to fail in 1899, and in 1902, he developed cancer. He died on February 22, 1904. Her father's slow dying was emotionally very difficult for her. It was very traumatic for Virginia who had not learned how to deal with the fact of death. Despite the terrible strain, Virginia was able to maintain control her emotions until her father's death and several months thereafter.
On the Threshold of Insanity
Consequently, Virginia suffered a second breakdown. She often thought about death and suicide. The symptoms of her second breakdown were more extreme than those of her first. She had lost the ability to distinguish inner and outer realities. She started having hallucinations. She also attempted suicide by throwing herself from a window. Headaches, sleeplessness, and other physical symptoms were once again present. These continued after the worst of the breakdown was over and returned at intervals for the rest of Virginia's life as danger signals.
In the fall of 1904, Virginia began to recover. She made a poor and tenuous recovery from her breakdown after her father's death, as she had from earlier period of madness.
Virginia had undergone a lot till now. Added to this was Thoby's death in 1906, at the age of 26. His death was so horrifying that she could not face the reality of it. She loved him. Also, as was true of her mother, she had lost someone she believed she had not really known. When she wrote Jacob's Room (1922) and The Waves (1931), she tried to rediscover, eulogize, and memorialize him, but could not approach his memory directly. Thoby's death represented to Virginia the tragic theme of the Stephen family, the betrayal of life. He was young and promising. Virginia called on her fantasy solution to the problem of death. Virginia kept her bother 'alive'. She described in her letters how he looked each day. Virginia gave a brilliant, though macabre performance, and it apparently served to prevent an immediate emotional and mental collapse. Since about 1908, Virginia had been writing her first novel, The Voyage Out. It was finished by 1913 but, owing to a severe mental breakdown after her marriage, it was not published until 1915. The novel was fairly conventional in form. She then began writing her second novel Night and Day, which was published in 1919.
The Woolfs bought Monks House in the village of Rodmell. In 1917, the Woolfs bought a small hand-printing press in order to take up printing as a hobby and therapy for Virginia. By now they were living in Richmond (Surrey) and the Hogarth Press was named after their house. The Woolfs continued hand-printing until 1932. Soon they increasingly became publishers rather than printers. By about 1922, the Hogarth Press had become a business.
The year 1921 saw Virginia's first collection of short stories Monday or Tuesday. In 1922, her first experimental novel, Jacob's Room appeared. In 1925, Mrs. Dalloway was published, followed by To the Lighthouse in 1927, and The Waves in 1931. These three novels are generally considered to be her greatest claim to fame as a modernist writer.
The 1930s was a unhappy time for the Woolfs as the death of friends and the prospect of war increasingly overshadowed the decade. Virginia produced Flush (1933), The Years (1937), Three Guineas (1938) and in 1940, a biography of her friend Roger Fry who had died in 1934. She had practically completed her final novel Between the Acts when she committed suicide fearing the madness, which she felt engulfing her again. She filled her pockets with stones and drowned herself in the Ouse, near her home in Rodmell, Sussex on March 28, 1941
"There is or should be, an existence of yours beyond you."
Virginia's life was paradoxical. She was exceptionally astute and in many respects wise. She was resilient, though one can conclude that she was often frightened, depressed and fragile. Her fascination with life as well as a preoccupation with death was intense and lifelong. The various significant aspects of Virginia Woolf's life were its variability, discrepancies, ambivalences, vacillations and contradictions, hence its paradoxicality.
She knew it, often referring to them in her journals and letters. She structured many of her novels around dialectical themes and universalized her experiences. Her novels make it evident that the world was mediated to her and she interpreted it as a place quite insane. In it dissolution, chaos, meaninglessness, nothingness and death were constant threats. She created sense and sanity and reconciled some of the contradictions.
January 25, 1882 Birth of Adeline Virginia Stephen.
1895 Her mother's death.
Virginia suffered her first psychological breakdown.
1902 Began private lessons in Greek.
1904 Sir Leslie Stephen died.
Virginia's second serious breakdown.
1905 Virginia was 'discharged cured' by her doctor.
1906 Thoby died.
1912 Married Leonard Woolf.
1913 Attempted suicide.
1914 Recovered from her depression.
1917 Publication of Virginia : The Mark on the Wall and Three Jews.
1919 Night and Day published.
1925 The Common Reader published on April 23.
Mrs Dalloway published in May.
1928 Virginia received the Femina Vie Heureuse prize.
Orlando is published.
1931 The Waves published in October.
1937 Publication of The Years.
July 1940 Roger Fry : A Biography published.
March 28, 1941 Committed suicide by drowning herself.
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Things have dropped from me. I have outlived certain desires; I have lost friends, some by death… others through sheer inability to cross the street.
There is much to support the view that it is clothes that wear us, and not we, them; we may make them take the mould of arm or breast, but they mould our hearts, our brains, our tongues to their liking.
Where the Mind is biggest, the Heart, the Senses, Magnanimity, Charity, Tolerance, Kindliness, and the rest of them scarcely have room to breathe.
To enjoy freedom, we have to control ourselves.
We are nauseated by the sight of trivial personalities decomposing in the eternity of print.
It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.
We all indulge in the strange, pleasant process called thinking, but when it comes to saying, even to someone opposite, what we think, then how little we are able to convey !
One likes people much better when they're battered down by a prodigious siege of misfortune than when they triumph.
On the outskirts of every agony sits some observant fellow who points.
Literature is strewn with the wreckage of those who have minded beyond reason the opinion of others.
The history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.
Women have burnt like beacons in all the works of all the poets from the beginning of time.
Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and elicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.
If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people
