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

Virginia WoolfVirginia 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

Childhood experiences of death and sexual abuse led to depression

the death of her motherwhen she was 13

her stepbrothers

Virginia Woolf

Only Connect ... New Directions

Leslie Stephen with Virginia Woolf.

1. Life (1882-1941)

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.

Suicide

Virginia Woolf


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

of the great experimental novelists during

the modernist period.

Virginia Woolf


The Bloomsbury Group

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)

A more completely developed “stream-of-consciousness technique”

Narrative experimentation with the novel

Traditional narratives

Virginia Woolf


2. Literary career

A feminist writer the themes of androgyny, women and writing

• Mrs. Dalloway (1925)

• Orlando (1928)

• A Room of One’s Own (1929)

Describes Clarissa Dalloway and Sally Seton’s relationship as young women

Deals with androgyny

Shows Woolf’s concern with the questions of women’s subjugation and the relationship between women and writing

Virginia Woolf


• 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.

3. A modernist novelist

Virginia Woolf


Vanessa Bell, Mrs St John Hutchinson, 1915, Tate Gallery, London

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

Virginia Woolf


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

Virginia Woolf


4. Woolf vs Joyce

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.

• 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.

Virginia Woolf


Cover for the first edition of Mrs. Dalloway, London, Hogarth Press,

1925.

• 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.

Clarissa Dalloway

Vanessa Redgrave as Mrs. Dalloway in Marleen Gorris’s 1997 film adaptation

Virginia Woolf


5. Mrs Dalloway (1925)

• 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.

Virginia Woolf


Vanessa Redgrave as Mrs. Dalloway in Marleen Gorris’s 1997 film adaptation


Clarissa Dalloway


Septimus Warren Smith

• A young poet and lover of

Shakespeare.

• When the war broke out,

enlisted for patriotic reasons.

• An extremely sensitive man who

can suddenly fall prey to panic

and fear, or feelings of guilt.

Rupert Graves as Septimus in Marleen Gorris’s 1997 film adaptation

Virginia Woolf



Septimus Warren Smith

• A character specifically

connected with the war.

• Suffers from headaches and

insomnia.

• Finally commits suicide.

Virginia Woolf


Rupert Graves as Septimus in Marleen Gorris’s 1997 film adaptation

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

No traditional plot a series of experiences, memories, emotions and feelings held together by symbols.

The story develops over a period of ten years.

6. To the Lighthouse (1927)

Divided into three sections:

1.

Virginia Woolf


The original St. Ives lighthouse, built by John Smeaton in 1830.


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.

2.

Virginia Woolf




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.

3.

Virginia Woolf



• 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.

7. To the Lighthouse: characters

MRS RAMSAY

Virginia Woolf


Vanessa Bell, Virginia Woolf at Asheham, ca. 1910, National Portrait Gallery, London.


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.

Virginia Woolf


Vanessa Bell, Virginia Woolf at Asheham, ca. 1910, National Portrait Gallery, London.

• 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.

LILY BRISCOE


Virginia Woolf


Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell painting, 1915, National Galleries of Scotland.

• 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.

• Undergoes a drastic change evolving into an artist who achieves her final vision.

LILY BRISCOE


Virginia Woolf


Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell painting, 1915, National Galleries of Scotland.

Transience the idea that nothing lasts runs through the novel

8. To the Lighthouse: themesa.

Mrs Ramsay does not want her children to become adults.

The house falls into decay.

Death unexpectedly ends life.

Virginia Woolf


St. Ives, Cornwall, the setting for The Lighthouse

b. Loss

Minta loses her brooch on the beach.

The family loses some of its members.

8. To the Lighthouse: themes

Virginia Woolf



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.

8. To the Lighthouse: themes

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 connecting point between the self and society.

Virginia Woolf


A scene from 2002’s The Hours, directed by Stephen Daldry.

9. To the Lighthouse: symbolism

The lighthouse

•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.

Virginia Woolf


A scene from 2002’s The Hours, directed by Stephen Daldry.

• 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.

10. A Room of One’s Own (1929)

Virginia Woolf


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.

Virginia Woolf





• 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.

Virginia Woolf



Women’s position in fiction and in real life.

Critique of patriarchal society.

Struggle for women’s rights.

10. A Room of One’s Own (1929) MAIN THEMES

Virginia Woolf


Documents

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