Write the introduction to Virginia Woolf.

Ans.

A critically acclaimed novelist and essayist, Woolf was a founding member of the intellectual circle known as The Bloomsbury Group. Her most famous works include the novels Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927), and the essay A Room of One’s Own (1929).

Woolf was born Adaline Virginia Stephen on January 25, 1882, in London. Her parents were Leslie Stephen, editor of the Dictionary of National Biography and Julia Prinsep Jackson Duckworth Stephen. Both parents had been married before and had children in addition to Virginia: Vanessa, born in 1879; Toby, born in 1880; and Adrian, born in 1883. Woolf was educated at home where she had free access to her father’s extensive library. In 1895 her mother died, and Woolf experienced the first of many psychological breakdowns that would plague her throughout her life. Her half sister Stella, thirteen years Woolf’s senior, assumed management of the household, a position she relinquished to Vanessa two years later. In 1904 Leslie Stephen died, and Woolf attempted suicide after suffering a second psychological crisis. During her recuperation, her sister Vanessa moved the family to the bohemian Bloomsbury section of London, where Woolf began her writing career and where the Thursday evening gatherings with Toby’s Cambridge friends constituted the beginning of the Bloomsbury Group.

In 1912 Woolf married Leonard Woolf, one of the original Bloomsbury members recently, returned from a seven year period of civil service in Ceylon. Soon afterwards Virginia suffered a serious mental breakdown involving another suicide attempt, she remained in severe mental distress for the next three years. During this period, Woolf completed her first novel The Voyage Out, published in 1975. Two years later, the Woolf established their own publishing company in the basement of their home; the Hogarth Press published not only Woolf’s work, but those of T. S. Eliot, Katherine Mansfield, and Sigmund Freud, among others.

Major Works

Although Woolf wrote a number of short stories, her best known fiction has always been her novels, particularly Mrs. Dalloway. To the Lighthouse, and to a lesser extent, Orlando (1928) and The Waves (1931). Mrs. Dalloway frequently compared to James Joyce’s 1922 work Ulysses, is an expansion of Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street, a short story, Woolf produced for Dial magazine in 1923. The events of the plot occur over a period of twenty four hours in the life of society hostess Clarissa Dalloway and culminate in a large, elaborate party. To the Lighthouse, a family novel with obvious connections to Woolf’s own early life. Notwithstanding the subtitle’s claim that Orlando is a biography, it is, in fact, a novel featuring an androgynous main character said to be modeled after Woolf’s friend and reputed lover. Vita Sackville-West. The Waves, a complicated exploration of the inevitable mutability of human life, is perhaps Woolf’s most complex work, considered by some, including-her husband, to be her masterpiece.