Viriginia Woolf
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One of the greatest female authors of all time, Virginia Woolf, produced a body of writing respected worldwide. Driven by uncontrollable circumstances and internal conflict, her life was cut short by suicide. Her role in feminism, along with the personal relationships in her life, influenced her literary works.
Virginia's relationships throughout her life contributed, not only to her literature, but the quality of her life as well. Perhaps the greatest influence in Virginia's life is her mother, Julia Stephen. "Julia Stephen was the most arresting figure which her daughter [Virginia Woolf] tried to resurrect and preserve" (Gordon 4). Woolf, a manic-depressive, found herself constantly searching for approval. "Virginia needed her mother's approval in order to 'measure her own stature" (Bond 38). Battling with a sense of worthlessness, Virginia's mother helped her temporarily rid herself of self-criticism and doubt. This however was short-lived. When Mrs. Stephen rejected Virginia, she felt her mother's disapproval directly related to the quality of her writing. "Virginia Woolf could not bear to reread anything she had written… Mrs. Stephen's rejection of Virginia may have been the paradigm of her failure to meet her own standards" (Bond 39). With the death of her mother Woolf used her novel, To the Lighthouse to "reconstruct and preserve" the memories that still remained. According to Woolf, "the character of Mrs. Ramsey in To the Lighthouse was modeled entirely upon that of her mother" (Bond 27). This helped Virginia in her closure when dealing with the loss and obsession with her mother. Although Virginia clung to the relationship with her mother, she favored her father, Leslie Stephen. Virginia resembled her father uncannily in character traits, in her writing and self-doubts, in her great and malicious sense of humor, in her marriage, in her frugality, in her fear of aging, and in her social consciousness. (Bond 59) They were both extremely outspoken while sparing no one's feelings with their comments. Virginia and Leslie both had strong personalities and rapid mood changes. Woolf portrayed her father, like her mother, through characterization in To the Lighthouse. Mr. Ramsey captures her father as a man of "baffling mutability, a lightening switch from the most lovable of men, to a 'famished wolfhound' and back again" (Gordon 22). This portrayal of Leslie Stephens relates to his uncontrollable rages and mood swings. Leslie Stephen not only controlled Virginia's mental development, but her intellectual development as well.
Both Virginia Woolf and Annie Dillard are extremely gifted writers. Virginia Woolf in 1942 wrote an essay called The Death of the Moth. Annie Dillard later on in 1976 wrote an essay that was similar in the name called The Death of a Moth and even had similar context. The two authors wrote powerful texts expressing their perspectives on the topic of life and death. They both had similar techniques but used them to develop completely different views. Each of the two authors incorporate in their text a unique way of adding their personal experience in their essay as they describe a specific occasion, time, and memory of their lives. Woolf’s personal experience begins with “it was a pleasant morning, mid-September, mild, benignant, yet with a keener breath than that of the summer months” (Woolf, 1). Annie Dillard personal experience begins with “two summers ago, I was camping alone in the blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia” (Dillard, 1). Including personal experience allowed Virginia Woolf to give her own enjoyable, fulfilling and understandable perception of life and death. Likewise, Annie Dillard used the personal narrative to focus on life but specifically on the life of death. To explore the power of life and death Virginia Woolf uses literary tools such as metaphors and imagery, along with a specific style and structure of writing in a conversational way to create an emotional tone and connect with her reader the value of life, but ultimately accepting death through the relationship of a moth and a human. While Annie Dillard on the other hand uses the same exact literary tools along with a specific style and similar structure to create a completely different perspective on just death, expressing that death is how it comes. ...
The first narrative is Virginia Woolf, the famous author. She is one of the main women in this complex story. Woolf has a troublesome life. She has multiple thoughts of suicide and death. She is anorexic and caught in a marriage that is doomed. The first chapter by Cunningham tells of Woolf's suicide drowning in 1941. Cunningham tells of the demons within Woolf's head and the consequently her fatal death from listening to these voices. The novel then moves to the stories of two modern American women who are trying to make rewarding lives for themselves.
Virginia Woolf and Elizabeth I had many of the same problems within their families. Before Elizabeth Tudor became the Queen of England, she had a series of unfortunate family events fall upon her. First, when she was only three years old, her mother Anne Boleyn was wrongly beheaded for treason by her husband King Henry VIII. After that, King Henry remarried a number of times and finally settled down with Catherine Parr. Henry’s third wife also produced him a son named Edward. After Elizabeth’s father passed away in 1547, Catherine became Queen of England. Shortly after Henry, Catherine died, which passed the throne to Elizabeth’s half-brother Edward. Edward died in 1553 at age fifteen, leaving the crown to his half-sister Mary Tudor. Five years later Mary died, and Elizab...
I have chosen to write about Virginia Woolf, a British novelist who wrote A Room of One’s Own, To the Lighthouse and Orlando, to name a few of her pieces of work. Virginia Woolf was my first introduction to feminist type books. I chose Woolf because she is a fantastic writer and one of my favorites as well. Her unique style of writing, which came to be known as stream-of-consciousness, was influenced by the symptoms she experienced through her bipolar disorder. Many people have heard the word "bipolar," but do not realize its full implications. People who know someone with this disorder might understand their irregular behavior as a character flaw, not realizing that people with bipolar mental illness do not have control over their moods. Virginia Woolf’s illness was not understood in her lifetime. She committed suicide in 1941.
many other women writers today. She was "a pioneer of her own time, in her portrayal of
..., author, or artist, but above all as an intellectual individual with passion and talent in writing who changed literary history with each one of her works.
Woolf suggests a lot about human nature in her essay. For example, the way Woolf has described the moth one may come to think of it as unintelligent and that it does not contemplate that it will not be able to escape unless the window is opened by an outside force, however we cease to comprehend the initial purpose of why the moth wishes to escape; to get a taste of reality and see what it is truthfully like. This happens to be the same situation that Woolf is faced with as she fought against her psychological predicament. Nevertheless, death reigned over her as well, but she learned to accept and embrace death with her own mind, conquering the complexities that came along the way.
Each woman at one point has to decide whether or not they want to live. Virginia Woolf has her own demons. She is struggling to overcome the depression and suicidal impulses that have followed her throughout her life. Laura Brown is a housewife living in suburbia, where she looks after her son Richie and husband Dan. Laura is an avid reader who is currently making her way through Mrs. Dalloway. The farther she gets into the novel, the more Laura discovers that it reflects a dissatisfaction s...
Virginia Woolf, in her novels, set out to portray the self and the limits associated with it. She wanted the reader to understand time and how the characters could be caught within it. She felt that time could be transcended, even if it was momentarily, by one becoming involved with their work, art, a place, or someone else. She felt that her works provided a change from the typical egotistical work of males during her time, she makes it clear that women do not posses this trait. Woolf did not believe that women could influence as men through ego, yet she did feel [and portray] that certain men do hold the characteristics of women, such as respect for others and the ability to understand many experiences. Virginia Woolf made many of her time realize that traditional literature was no longer good enough and valid. She caused many women to become interested in writing, and can be seen as greatly influential in literary history
Virginia Woolf was a very powerful and imaginative writer. In a "Room of Ones Own" she takes her motivational views about women and fiction and weaves them into a story. Her story is set in a imaginary place where here audience can feel comfortable and open their minds to what she is saying. In this imaginary setting with imaginary people Woolf can live out and see the problems women faced in writing. Woolf also goes farther by breaking many of the rules of writing in her essay. She may do this to show that the standards can be broken, and to encourage more women to write. An example of this is in the very first line when Woolf writes, "But, you may say, we asked you to speak about women and fiction—what has that got to do with a room of one’s own(719)?" Why did Woolf start her story of like that? Maybe it was to show how different women really were from men. By starting out with this completely unconventional opening sentence she was already showing that the rules could be broken.
Blackstone, Bernard. Virginia Woolf: A Commentary. London: Hogarth Press, 1949. (An older but excellent essay.)
Virginia Woolf, a founder of Modernism, is one of the most important woman writers. Her essays and novels provide an insight into her life experiences and those of women of the 20th century. Her most famous works include Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), Orlando: A Biography (1928), The Waves (1931), and A Room of One's Own (1929) (Roseman 11).
Woolf was born into a family of many literature talents. Her father, Sir Leslie Stephan, was an author of the Dictionary of National Biography. Woolf had a sister, Vanessa, who was a very skilled painter; she also had two brothers Thoby and Adrian, who went to the University of Cambridge. Woolf was not given the opportunity to go to college like her two brothers. She never quite understood why, but it is said it could not be afforded at the time. From not being given this opportunity, Woolf considered herself as “ill-educated,” although she was becoming one of the most intelligent writers of her time. Being surrounded with all these great literature talents, Woolf was inspired to become her own literature success. She wasn’t fully comfortable with her writing until her move to Bloomsbury, which would turn her literature career around. The death of Woolf’s parents forced her, and her siblings to move to a small London neighborhood, Bloomsbury. (“Rosenbe...
Virginia Woolf’s eccentric style is what causes her writings to be distinct from other authors of her time. The unique characteristics of her works such as the structure, characterization, themes, etc are difficult to imitate and cause a strong impression in her literary pieces. “Virginia Woolf’s works are strongly idiosyncratic, strange, a surprise to ...
Throughout her life Virginia Woolf became increasingly interested in the topic of women and fiction, which is highly reflected in her writing. To understand her piece, A Room of One’s Own Room, her reader must understand her. Born in early 1882, Woolf was brought into an extremely literature driven, middle-class family in London. Her father was an editor to a major newspaper company and eventually began his own newspaper business in his later life. While her mother was a typical Victorian house-wife. As a child, Woolf was surrounded by literature. One of her favorite pastimes was listening to her mother read to her. As Woolf grew older, she was educated by her mother, and eventually a tutor. Due to her father’s position, there was always famous writers over the house interacting with the young Virginia and the Woolf’s large house library.