Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf was born in 1882 in London to an upper class family involved in the artistic and literary communities. As a part of a well-to-do family, she had access to a vast diversity of literature at home and was enrolled at King’s College London from ages fifteen to nineteen. Both parents passed away when she was young, which is believed to have contributed to her struggle with depression, as well as sexual abuse from two of her brothers. Of Woolf’s three full siblings and four half siblings, she remained close to her sister and artist Vanessa Bell throughout their lives.
At age thirty, she married Leonard Woolf, starting “Hogarth Press” with him five years later. Although she sternly rejected Christianity for what she termed “egotism”, her husband was Jewish. Woolf tolerated, distained, and paradoxically enjoyed Leonard’s Jewish background and they were married until her death. During her marriage in 1922, however, Virginia began a sexual relationship with a female writer of the Bloomsbury group, a collaboration of thinkers, writers, and artists to which she belonged. The Bloomsbury group’s avant-garde manifesto emphasized the purpose of life as love, aesthetic, and knowledge. One of its phrases that carried on was “art for art’s sake”, relinquishing meaning from a work and appreciating it for “intrinsic value”. Sexually, pleasure was advocated above societal norms. Woolf’s writing career started when she was only eighteen, nearing the end of her time at King’s College London. Her first novel, The Voyage Out, was published nearly fifteen years later. Modernism heavily marked the work throughout her career, especially the aspect of self-consciousness in stream-of-consciousness. Woolf’s feminist influence is said to have come from a group of women she had met at King’s College London. Her feminist opinion frequently asserted frustration with patriarchal power, unbalanced between the genders. |