Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf.
Virginia Woolf
1. Life (1882-1941)
Her father Leslie Stephen
was an eminent Victorian
man of letters.
She grew up in a literary
and intellectual
atmosphere with free
access to her father’s library
Leslie Stephen with Virginia Woolf.
Childhood experiences of death and sexual abuse led to depression
the death of her mother
when she was 13
her stepbrothers
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Virginia Woolf
1. Life (1882-1941)
Suicide
The Second World War increased her
anxiety and fears. After rewriting drafts
of her suicide note, she put rocks into
her pockets and drowned herself in the
River Ouse.
Virginia Woolf.
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Virginia Woolf
2. Literary career
The Bloomsbury Group  In 1904
she moved to Bloomsbury and became a
member of the Bloomsbury Group. This
meant the rejection of traditional morality
and artistic convention.
Experimentation  best known as one
The Bloomsbury Group
of the great experimental novelists during
the modernist period.
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Virginia Woolf
2. Literary career
Evolution of her style in her main novels
•
The Voyage Out (1915)
•
Night and Day (1917)
•
Jacob’s room (1922)
•
Mrs. Dalloway (1925)
•
To the Lighthouse (1927)
Traditional
narratives
Narrative experimentation with the
novel
A more completely developed
“stream-of-consciousness
technique”
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Virginia Woolf
2. Literary career
A feminist writer  the themes of androgyny, women and writing
• Mrs. Dalloway (1925)
Describes Clarissa Dalloway and
Sally Seton’s relationship as young
women
• Orlando (1928)
Deals with androgyny
• A Room of One’s Own (1929)
Shows Woolf’s concern with the
questions of women’s subjugation
and the relationship between women
and writing
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Virginia Woolf
3. A modernist novelist
• Main aim  to give voice to the complex
inner world of feeling and memory.
• The human personality  a continuous
shift of impressions and emotions.
• Narrator  disappearance of the
omniscient narrator.
• Point of view  shifted inside the
characters’ minds through flashbacks,
associations of ideas, momentary
impressions presented as a continuous flux.
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Vanessa Bell, Mrs St John Hutchinson, 1915,
Tate Gallery, London
Virginia Woolf
4. Woolf vs Joyce
Woolf’s stream of
consciousness
Joyce’s stream of
consciousness
never lets her characters’
thoughts flow without control,
maintains logical and
grammatical organisation
characters show their
thoughts directly through
interior monologue,
sometimes in an incoherent
and syntactically
unorthodox way
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Virginia Woolf
4. Woolf vs Joyce
Moments of being
Epiphanies
Rare moments of insight
during the characters’ daily
life when they can see
reality behind appearances
The sudden spiritual
manifestation caused by a
trivial gesture, an external
object  the character is
led to a self-realization
about himself/herself
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5. Mrs Dalloway (1925)
• Takes place on a single ordinary day
in June 1923.
• Follows the protagonist through a
very small area of London, from the
morning to the night of the day on
which she gives a large formal party.
Cover for the first edition of Mrs.
Dalloway, London, Hogarth Press,
1925.
• Clarissa Dalloway’s party is the
climax of the novel and unifies the
narrative by gathering all the people
she thinks about during the day.
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5. Mrs Dalloway (1925)
Clarissa Dalloway
Vanessa Redgrave as Mrs. Dalloway in Marleen Gorris’s
1997 film adaptation
•
A London society lady of fifty-one,
the wife of a Conservative MP,
Richard Dalloway, who has
conventional views on women’s
rights.
•
Had a possessive father, refused
Peter Walsh, a man who would force
her to share everything.
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Virginia Woolf
5. Mrs Dalloway (1925)
Clarissa Dalloway
Vanessa Redgrave as Mrs. Dalloway in Marleen
Gorris’s 1997 film adaptation
•
Characterized by opposing feelings:
her need for freedom and
independence and her class
consciousness.
•
Her life appears to be an effort towards
order and peace, an attempt to
overcome her weakness and sense of
failure.
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Virginia Woolf
5. Mrs Dalloway (1925)
Septimus Warren Smith
• A young poet and lover of
Shakespeare.
• When the war broke out,
enlisted for patriotic reasons.
Rupert Graves as Septimus in Marleen Gorris’s 1997 film
adaptation
• An extremely sensitive man who
can suddenly fall prey to panic
and fear, or feelings of guilt.
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Virginia Woolf
5. Mrs Dalloway (1925)
Septimus Warren Smith
• A character specifically
connected with the war.
• Suffers from headaches and
insomnia.
Rupert Graves as Septimus in Marleen Gorris’s 1997 film
adaptation
• Finally commits suicide.
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Virginia Woolf
6. To the Lighthouse (1927)
No traditional plot  a series of experiences, memories, emotions
and feelings held together by symbols.
The story develops over a period of ten years.
Divided into three sections:
1. The Window  It starts just
before World War I. It is set
during a summer afternoon
and evening in a summer
home on the Isle of Skye in
the Hebrides
The original St. Ives lighthouse, built by John Smeaton in
1830.
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Virginia Woolf
6. To the Lighthouse (1927)
2. Time
Passes  covers
about ten years. The
children grow up, war
breaks out, Mrs Ramsay
dies suddenly one night.
Her eldest son, Andrew, is
killed in battle, and her
daughter Prue dies too. The
summerhouse falls into a
state of decay for ten years
until the family comes back.
The original St. Ives lighthouse, built by John Smeaton in
1830.
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Virginia Woolf
6. To the Lighthouse (1927)
3.
The Lighthouse  lasts
less than one day. time
experienced, and especially
recaptured
in
memory,
replaces outer time. Mr
Ramsay, his son James and
his daughter Cam sail to the
lighthouse. Lily succeeds in
finishing her painting.
The original St. Ives lighthouse, built by John Smeaton in
1830.
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Virginia Woolf
7. To the Lighthouse: characters
MRS RAMSAY
•
A beautiful woman and loving wife,
constantly provides support to the
other characters in the novel.
•
As a mother, her main objective is to
preserve her son James’s sense of
hope and wonder in relation to the
lighthouse.
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Vanessa Bell, Virginia Woolf at Asheham, ca.
1910, National Portrait Gallery, London.
Virginia Woolf
7. To the Lighthouse: characters
MRS RAMSAY
•
She realizes that the beauty of
this world is ephemeral and
should be protected.
•
She has the ability to bring
together different things into a
whole.
•
After her death, Lily and the other
characters try to reach this unity.
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Vanessa Bell, Virginia Woolf at Asheham, ca.
1910, National Portrait Gallery, London.
Virginia Woolf
7. To the Lighthouse: characters
LILY BRISCOE
• A painter who fears her work
will end up in attics or under a
couch.
• Rejects the conventional
image of the woman
represented by Mrs Ramsay.
Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell painting,
1915, National Galleries of Scotland.
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Virginia Woolf
7. To the Lighthouse: characters
LILY BRISCOE
• Her portrait of Mrs. Ramsay
embodies her doubts: at the
beginning of the novel she cannot
make sense of the shapes and
colours that she tries to
reproduce.
Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell painting,
1915, National Galleries of Scotland.
• Undergoes a drastic change
evolving into an artist who
achieves her final vision.
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Virginia Woolf
8. To the Lighthouse: themes
a. Transience  the idea that nothing lasts runs
through the novel
 Mrs Ramsay does not want
her children to become adults.
 The house falls into decay.
 Death unexpectedly ends life.
St. Ives, Cornwall, the setting for The Lighthouse
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8. To the Lighthouse: themes
b.
Loss
 Minta loses her brooch on the
beach.
 The family loses some of its
members.
St. Ives, Cornwall, the setting for The Lighthouse
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8. To the Lighthouse: themes
c. Art  the ambition to stop the flux of time is embodied by
the artist Lily Briscoe.
d. The force of love 
Mrs Ramsay believes that
also love can create durable
memories making moments
permanent.
St. Ives, Cornwall, the setting for The Lighthouse
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Virginia Woolf
9. To the Lighthouse: symbolism
The sound of the sea  the
fullness of life and the imminence of
death, uncertainty.
The land and the house  idea of
shelter and stability.
The window  the dividing and
A scene from 2002’s The Hours, directed
by Stephen Daldry.
connecting point between the self and
society.
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Virginia Woolf
9. To the Lighthouse: symbolism
The lighthouse
A scene from 2002’s The Hours, directed
by Stephen Daldry.
•
a positive symbol linked to light,
comfort, hope and enthusiasm, a
reference point in a changing world.
•
the inaccessible destination leading
to frustration and threatening danger.
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Virginia Woolf
10. A Room of One’s Own (1929)
A contemporary edition of A Room
of One’s Own.
•
Woolf had been invited to give a
lecture on the topic of Women and
Fiction. She advanced the thesis
that “a woman must have money
and a room of her own if she is
to write fiction”.
•
Her essay is constructed as a
partly-fictionalized narrative of
the steps that led her to adopt this
thesis.
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Virginia Woolf
10. A Room of One’s Own (1929)
A contemporary edition of A Room
of One’s Own.
•
She dramatizes that mental process in the
character of an imaginary narrator (“call
me Mary Beton, Mary Seton, Mary
Carmichael or by any name you please--it
is not a matter of any importance”).
•
The narrator reflects on the different
educational experiences available to men
and women as well as on more material
differences in their lives.
•
The figure of Judith Shakespeare is
generated as an example of the tragic fate a
highly intelligent woman would have met.
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Virginia Woolf
10. A Room of One’s Own (1929)
•
She considers the achievements of the
major women novelists of the nineteenth
century and reflects on the importance of
tradition to an aspiring writer.
•
Woolf closes the essay with an
exhortation to her audience of women to
take up the tradition that has been so
hardly bequeathed to them, and to
increase the endowment for their own
daughters.
A contemporary edition of A Room
of One’s Own.
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Virginia Woolf
10. A Room of One’s Own (1929)
MAIN THEMES
 Women’s position in
fiction and in real life.
 Critique of patriarchal
society.
 Struggle for women’s
rights.
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