Virginia Woolf's Biography

V.Woolf

Virginia Adeline Stephen was born in London on January 25, 1882. She was the 3rd child of Sir Leslie Stephen, a Victorian man of letters, a famous scholar and philosopher who, among many literary occupations, was an editor of Cornhill Magazine and the Dictionary of National Biography. Her mother, Julia Jackson, born in India to a well siyuated family. After returning to England she became a model for Pre-Raphaelite painters such as Edward Burne-Jones. In 1867 she married Herbert Duckworth. They had three children (George b.1868, Stella b.1869 and Gerald b.1870). When he died in 1870, she befriended Leslie Stephen and they married on 26 March 1878. They had four children. Julia participated in the home education of her daughters, but a great deal of her emotional energy went into supporting her husband Leslie, who suffered from depression.

Julia Jackson

Julia Jackson

Julia with Virginia

The Stephen family lived at Hyde Park Gate in Kensington, a respectable English middle class neighborhood. While her brothers Thoby and Adrian were sent to Cambridge, Virginia and her sister were educated by private tutors and copiously read from her father’s vast library of literary classics. at home they met his famous friends who included G. E. Moore (1873–1958) and E. M. Forster (1879–1970). James Russell Lowell, the American poet, was Virginia's godfather. The common guests of the house were many artists and writers like Henry James, george eliot or the photographer julia margaret cameron, her mother's aunt.Young Virginia soon fell deep into the world of literature. Curiously enough, as a child, it took her longer than usual to begin speaking in coherent sentences.

Julia and Leslie

Leslie Stephen

She loved animals. She even had a squirell, a tamarin (mono titi) and a rat. She was calling her sister dolphin, and Vanessa was calling her “The Goat.” Later on Woolf’s dog, Hans, was known for interrupting parties by getting sick and relieving itself on the hearthrug. Also Woolf’s husband, Leonard, owned a pet monkey named, Mitz.

She was very close to her sister Vanessa. At an early age, Woolf would torment Vanessa, by scratching her nails against the wall. For a time, Woolf wrote while standing at a desk 107 cm tall because she wanted to be like a painter who could instantly step away from her canvas to get a better view, that was inspired by her sister who was a painter. When separated from her sister, Vanessa, Woolf wrote letters to her daily.

Horatio Brown, Julia Duckworth Stephen, George Duckworth, Gerald Duckworth, Vanessa, Thoby, Virginia Woolf, and Adrian Stephen

She later resented the degradation of women in a patriarchal society, rebuking her own father for automatically sending her brothers to schools and university, while she was never offered a formal education. Woolf’s Victorian upbringing would later influence her decision to participate in the Bloomsbury circle, noted for their original ideas and unorthodox relationships. As biographer Hermione Lee argues “Woolf was a ‘modern’. But she was also a late Victorian. The Victorian family past filled her fiction, shaped her political analyses of society and underlay the behaviour of her social group.”

Her mother, Julia died unexpectadley in May 1895 from rheumatic fever when Virginia was thirteen years old. It was a crushing blow to the children, but it nearly killed Leslie. His grieving was so intense, so demonstrative-and so hyperbolic-that it affected his children deeply. He wept openly in front of the children, and began to depend on his children to the extent that it seemed now that they were parenting him. He especially relied on Stella, who had to fall into the role of mother since both Vanessa and Woolf were still young girls, and since Leslie was completely helpless. To make matters, worse, Woolf had her first mental breakdown soon after her mother died. Stella looked after her young stepsiblings as best she could, turning away a number of suitors who asked for her hand in marriage.

George Duckworth, Woolf and Vanessa's handsome half-brother, was now twenty-seven years old. He had matured into a kind, overtly affectionate man who seemed deeply saddened not just by his mother's death, but also by his half-sisters' grief. He comforted them, was generous to them and made sure they were taken care of. That's what it looked like from the outside, Vanessa and Virginia suffered from sexual abuse.

Her stepsister Stella died in 1897. “The blow, the second blow of death struck on me, tremolous, filmy eyed as I was with my wings still creased sitting there on the edge of my broken chrysalis” she wrote in her diaries. That death provoke the first of over 12 nervous breakdowns she suffered from during her life. She already had a smaller mental breakdown when her mother had died, but this one was much more serious.

Stella

To lower her increasing anxieties as a teenager, Woolf’s family doctor, Dr. Seton, suggested she stop all lessons and play outside for four hours per day (remember Charlote Perkins's "The Yellow Room"?). A second severe breakdown followed the death of her father, Leslie Stephen, in 1904, when she was 22. During this time, Virginia first attempted suicide. She tried to kill herself by jumping out of a window, but the window she jumped from, however, was not high enough to cause serious harm and she was institutionalized. According to nephew and biographer Quentin Bell, “All that summer she was mad.” The death of her close brother Thoby Stephen, from typhoid fever in November 1906 had a similar effect on Woolf, to such a degree that he would later be re-imagined as Jacob in her first experimental novel Jacob’s Room and later as Percival in The Waves. These were the first of her many mental collapses that would sporadically occur throughout her life, until her suicide in March 1941.

Though Woolf’s mental illness was periodic and recurrent, as Lee explains, she “was a sane woman who had an illness.” Her “madness” was provoked by life-altering events, notably family deaths, her marriage, or the publication of a novel. According to Lee, Woolf’s symptoms conform to the profile of a manic-depressive illness, or bipolar disorder. In the manic part she talked without any breaks. It is said that at one occasion she was talking for 48 hours straight! Woolf also struggled with anorexia, believing that her body was monstrous, and that her mouth and stomach were sordid in their demand for food. Leonard, her husband, documented her illness with scrupulousness. He categorized her breakdowns into two distinct stages:

“In the manic stage she was extremely excited; the mind race; she talked volubly and, at the height of the attach, incoherently; she had delusions and heard voices…she was violent with her nurses. In her third attack, which began in 1914, this stage lasted for several months and ended by her falling into a coma for two days. During the depressive stage all her thoughts and emotions were the exact opposite of what they had been in the manic stage. She was in the depths of melancholia and despair; she scarcely spoke; refused to eat; refused to believe that she was ill and insisted that her condition was due to her own guilt; at the height of this stage she tried to commit suicide.”

Virginia began to teach English literature and history at an adult-education college in London, in addition to writing articles and reviews for publications, includingThe Guardian, The Times Literary Supplement, and The National Review. Woolf continued her journalistic endeavors throughout her life, reviewing contemporary and classical literature in modernist reviews like the Athenaeum, The Dial and The Criterion. It was also during this time that Woolf became close friends with young men who shared and stimulated her intellectual interests. The majority of these friends her brother Thoby met at Trinity College, Cambridge in 1899, including Lytton Strachey, Leonard Woolf, and Clive Bell. This group started meeting for ‘Thursday Evenings’ at Gordon Square, London in 1906, which was soon followed by Vanessa Bell’s ‘Friday Club,’ to discuss the arts. With the emergence of these two literary and artistic circles, the unofficial ‘Bloomsbury Group’ came into existence.

For a time, Woolf considered marrying the British writer and fellow Bloomsbury Group-member Lytton Strachey, partially because he was a homosexual and she considered him more of a brother than a sexual partner.

In 1911, Virginia decided to live in a house in the Bloomsbury neighborhood near the British Museum with several men, none of whom was her husband. Some of her relatives were shocked, and her father’s old friend Henry James found her lifestyle rather too Bohemian. Her housemates were her brother Adrian, John Maynard Keynes, Duncan Grant, and Leonard Woolf, whom she married a year later. Grant and Keynes were lovers, and the heterosexual members of the group too were known for their unconventional relationships. Virginia’s sister, the painter Vanessa Bell, lived for much of her life with Grant, who was also her artistic collaborator, and the two had a daughter. Throughout all this, Vanessa remained married to Clive Bell, who early in marriage had a flirtatious relationship with Virginia, while Duncan had a series of homosexual love affairs. Most of the men in the Bloomsbury group had gone to Cambridge, and many had belonged to an intellectual club called the Apostles, which, under the influence of the philosopher G. E. Moore, emphasized the importance of friendship and aesthetic experience, a more earnest form of Oscar Wilde’s aestheticism.

The disparity Woolf saw in her parents’ marriage made her determined that “the man she married would be as worthy of her as she of him. They were to be equal partners.” Despite numerous marriage proposals throughout her young adulthood, including offers by Lytton Strachey and Sydney Waterlow, Virginia only hesitated with Leonard Woolf, a cadet in the Ceylon Civil Service. Virginia wavered, partly due to her fear of marriage and the emotional and sexual involvement the partnership requires. She wrote to Leonard: “As I told you brutally the other day, I feel no physical attraction in you. There are moments—when you kissed me the other day was one—when I feel no more than a rock. And yet your caring for me as you do almost overwhelms me. It is so real, and so strange.” Virginia eventually accepted him, and at age 30, she married Leonard Woolf in August 1912. For two or three years, they shared a bed, and for several more a bedroom. However, with Virginia’s unstable mental condition, they followed medical advice and did not have children.

Leonard and Virginia at their wedding

In 1917, for amusement, they founded the Hogarth Press,a small, independent publishing house by setting and handprinting on an old press Two Stories by "L. and V. Woolf." The volume was a success, and over the years they published many important books, including Prelude by Katherine Mansfield, then an unknown writer; Poems by T. S. Eliot; and Kew Gardens by Virginia Woolf. The policy of the Hogarth Press was to publish the best and most original work that came to its attention, and the Woolfs as publishers favored young and unknown writers. Vanessa participated in this venture by designing dust jackets for the books issued by the Hogarth Press.

They rejected publishing James Joyce’s Ulysses, but they printed the first English translations of Sigmund Freud. J.H. Willis explains that Woolf “could experiment boldly, remaking the form and herself each time she shaped a new fiction, responsible only to herself as writer-editor-publisher…She was, [Woolf] added triumphantly, ‘the only woman in England free to write what I like.’ The press, beyond doubt, had given Virginia a room of her own.”

Woolf’s liberated writing parallels her relationships with women, who gave her warm companionship and literary stimulus. In her girlhood, there was Violet Dickinson; friend of the family 17 years older than Virginia herself. In her thirties, there was Katherine Mansfield; and in her fifties, there was Ethel Smyth. But none of these women emotionally aroused Virginia as did Vita Sackville-West. They met in 1922, and it developed into the deepest relationship that Virginia would ever have outside her family. Virginia and Vita were more different than alike; but their differences in social class, sexual orientation, and politics, were all were part of the attraction. Though Vita and Virginia shared intimate relations, they both avoided categorizing their relationship as lesbian. Vita rejected the lesbian political identity and even Woolf’s feminism. Instead, Vita was well-known in her social circles as a “Sapphist.” Virginia, on the other hand, did not define herself as a Sapphist. She avoided all categories, particular those that categorized her in a group defined by sexual behavior. Woolf’s relationship with Vita ultimately shaped the fictional biography Orlando, a narrative that spans from 1500 to the contemporary day. It follows the protagonist Orlando who is based on “Vita; only with a change about from one sex to another.”

When it was published in October 1928, Orlando immediately became a bestseller and the novel’s success made Woolf one of the best-known contemporary writers. In the same month, Woolf gave the two lectures at Cambridge, later published as A Room of One’s Own (1929), and actively participated in the legal battles that censored Radclyffe Hall’s lesbian novel, The Well of Loneliness. Despite this concentrated period of reflection on gender and sexual identities, Woolf would wait until 1938 to publish Three Guineas, a text that expands her feminist critique on the patriarchy and militarism.

The Bloomsbury Group gradually dispersed, beginning with the death of Lytton Strachey in 1932 and the suicide of his long-time partner Dora Carrington shortly thereafter. Virginia felt the loss of Lytton acutely in her life and her writing; years later she still thought as she wrote, ‘Oh but he won’t read this!” Roger Fry’s death in 1934 also affected Woolf, to such a degree that she would later write his biography (1940). As her friends died, she felt her own life begin to crumble. In January 1941, Woolf became severely depressed, partly due to the strain of completing her novel Between the Acts. She distrusted her publisher’s praise of the novel; she felt it was “too slight and sketchy.” She instead wanted to delay publication, deciding that it required extensive revision. Yet during this time, Woolf began feeling that she had lost her art; she felt if she could no longer write, she could no longer fully exist. It was “a conviction that her whole purpose in life had gone. What was the point in living if she was never again to understand the shape of the world around or, or be able to describe it?”

Woolf clearly expressed her reasons for committing suicide in her last letter to her husband Leonard: “I feel certain that I am going mad again: I feel we cant go through another of those terrible times. And I shant recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and cant concentrate.” On March 18, 1941 she may have attempted to drown herself. Over a week later on March 28, Virginia wrote the third of her suicide letters, and walked the half-mile to the River Ouse, filled her pockets with stones, and walked into the water.

Virginia's body was found by some children, a short way down-stream, almost a month later on April 18. An inquest was held the next day and the verdict was "Suicide with the balance of her mind disturbed." Her body was cremated on April 21 with only Leonard present, and her ashes were buried under a great elm tree just outside the garden at Monk's House, with the concluding words of The Waves as her epitaph, "Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death!"

The last words Virginia Woolf wrote were “Will you destroy all my papers.” Written in the margin of her second suicide letter to Leonard, it is unclear what “papers” he was supposed to destroy—the typescript of her latest novel Between the Acts; the first chapter of Anon, a project on the history of English literature; or her prolific diaries and letters. If Woolf wished for all of these papers to be destroyed, Leonard disregarded her instructions. He published her novel, compiled significant diary entries into the volume The Writer’s Diary, and carefully kept all of her manuscripts, diaries, letters, thereby preserving Woolf’s unique voice and personality captured in each line.

T.S. Eliot describes in his obituary for Virginia. “Without Virginia Woolf at the center of it, it would have remained formless or marginal…With the death of Virginia Woolf, a whole pattern of culture is broken.”

Sources:

http://flavorwire.com/143610/59-things-you-didnt-know-about-virginia-woolf/6

https://modernism.research.yale.edu/wiki/index.php/Virginia_Woolf

http://www.notablebiographies.com/We-Z/Woolf-Virginia.html

https://modernism.research.yale.edu/wiki/index.php/Mrs._Dalloway

https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/notebook-drafts-of-virginia-woolfs-mrs-dalloway-volume-ii

https://www.nytimes.com/books/97/06/08/reviews/woolf-dalloway.html

http://www.uah.edu/woolf/lecture3_04.htm

http://mrsdallowaymappingproject.weebly.com

http://www.uah.edu/woolf/dalloway.html