Virginia WooH

1882-1941

To the outside observer, Virginia Woolf was an ex­ceptionally lucky person. She was the daughter of Sir Leslie Stephen, an eminent Victorian scholar, critic, and writer. Throughout her life, she moved in the company of highly intelligent and articulate writers, artists, critics, and philosophers. Her fa­ther's first wife was the daughter of the novelist William Makepeace Thackeray, and Virginia her­self married a keenly intelligent writer, Leonard Woolf. Her elder sister, Vanessa, was an excellent painter who married the eminent art critic Clive Bell. Roger Fry, whose biography she wrote, and whose insights as a critic of painting did much to revolutionize British taste by introducing the work of the Post-Impressionists, was a close friend. So were John Maynard Keynes, the economist; Lytton Strachey, the bio'grapher; Bertrand Russell, the phi­losopher; and E. M. Forster, the novelist. Bound to­gether by a common outlook, working and living in the Bloomsbury section of London, the Woolfs and some of their friends formed an intellectual circle known as the "Bloomsbury Group."

Beneath this surface, however, she had con­stantly to fight a mental instability that led to sev­eral severe breakdowns and eventual suicide at the age of fifty-nine. A penetrating critic herself, she was painfully sensitive to the criticism of others.

Latent genius she undoubtedly possessed. The Waves, a poetic statement rather than a novel, stands out as a truly remarkable, highly stylized creation. More conventional in form, the novels To the Lighthouse and Mrs. Dalloway, the better essays in the two volumes of The Common Reader, and A Room of One's Own, a short de­fense of women's rights, have lost none of their freshness.

What made her fiction distinctive was its at­tempt to go beyond what she regarded as the tyr­anny of plot, to get close to life as it is actually ex­perienced. "Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives myriad impressions —trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with the sharpness of steel... Is it not the task of the novelist to convey this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit .,-..?" To approach the experience of life, she often employed the "stream-of-consciousness" technique in her novels. Although she did not invent this tech­nique, she refined and brightened by her own wit and observation the procedure by which the char­acters of a novel reveal themselves through their unspoken thoughts. Her method was to assemble in language of great poetic force tiny fragments of perception. She tried, as far as possible, to catch each moment as it passed rather than to thrust her characters into the contrivances of a plot.

Inevitably, Woolf's writing grew less and less concerned with ordinary life and concentrated more and more on moments of great subtlety and sensitivity. Her friend E. M. Forster characterized her as "a poet who wants to write something as near to a novel as possible." She recorded her own anxieties and frustrations in a diary, part of which was posthumously published as A Writer's Diary. The Death of the Moth and Other Essays was also published after her death. A complete edition of the Diaries in five volumes is in preparation. Vol­ume One appeared in 1977.