Feminist writer Virginia Woolf, one of the pioneers of modernism, is on the brink of death, her life full of painful losses, her free-spirited loves, her works, and her suicide, where she put an end to her pessimism about life.
Adeline Virginia Woolf was born on January 25, 1882, in London, one of the five children of writers Sir Leslie Stephen and Julia Duckworth.
It was the second marriage of her parents. Both had children from their first marriages and her father's daughter, Laura, from her first marriage was admitted to a mental institution at the age of twenty for mental problems. Virginia had four siblings: Vanessa, Julian, Thoby, and Adrian.
Adeline Virginia Woolf (25 January 1882 – 28 March 1941) was an English writer. She is considered one of the most important modernist 20th-century authors and a pioneer in the use of stream of consciousness as a narrative device.
When Virginia was thirteen, her mother died of a severe flu. Shocked by the death of her sister, Stella Duckworth, two years after her mother died, Virginia suffered from a nervous breakdown.
Thus, she laid the foundations of the depressive spirit that would not leave her alone until her death. Their grief is not limited to the deaths of their parents, Virginia and her sister Vanessa were abused by their half-brothers Gerald and George Duckworth when they were still children.
When her brother, Thoby Stephen, died at the age of twenty-five, Woolf expressed her longing for her brother with the character fiction she created in her work called Waves.
After her father's death in 1904, Woolf was depressed and moved to Bloomsbury with her siblings. During the Victorian era, girls were not sent to school because their education was not given as much attention as boys' education.
Bloomsbury Group
Moving to Bloomsbury with her siblings after her father's death, Virginia founded the Bloomsbury Group, which included writers, painters, critics, philosophers, and many other literary figures, which played a major role in the development of her writing.
In addition to the strict rules of the Victorian Era, the group had an intellectual structure that advocated free thought in all areas. Virginia Woolf, painter sister Vanessa Bell, economist John Maynard Keynes, Lytton Strachy, who introduced psychological studies for the first time in the biography genre, Edward Morgan Forster, one of the pioneers of modernism in England, art critic Arthur Clive Heward Bell, Post-impressionist painter Ruger Fry, British painter and costume designer Duncan Grant, literary critic Charles MacCharty, and writer and publisher Leonard Woolf, wife of Virginia Woolf, were members of the Bloomsbury Group.
The Authorship of Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf's difficult life was also reflected in her works. The death of her mother and siblings took an impressive tone with their severe depression. The impressiveness of her works was closely related to the fact that the fiction in her books carried traces of her own life and the reflection of her mood on her pen. Inspired by the way her sister, Vanessa, stood while painting, she wrote while standing on an easel.
Her second novel, Night and Day, which she wrote using the "flow of consciousness technique" and unlike her later novels, draws attention with a realistic style and plot, the characters depicted, and the situation of the period she wrote. Published in 1931, The Waves tells the lives of three men and three women from childhood to old age, ignoring the outside world, on the axis of the character's inner world.
Completed in 1925, her novel Mrs. Dalloway describes a woman's feelings and behaviors during the day using the retrospective method. The characters are Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Warren Smith, who have never met each other throughout the novel. Society and the administrative system are criticized in the novel. Mrs. Dalloway is the most successful example of the stream-of-consciousness technique.
Published in 1928, Orlando is Virginia Woolf's novel with feminist influences, dedicated to her love letter to the aristocratic poet Vita Sackville - West, with whom she had a lesbian love affair. It is a work that carries historical traces of English literature in the form of satire, which tells about the adventure of a noble-born as male with the change of gender.
Virginia Woolf's novel The Lighthouse, which is an autobiography published in 1927, is under the influence of dark and stifling thoughts in which she is trapped in her inner world. In this novel, Virginia reflected on her longing for her mother. Virginia Woolf, one of the pioneers of the modernist movement, has carried topics such as feminism, women, and sexuality into her writings.
Their Love and Marriage
As a teenager, Virginia liked family friend Violet Dickinson, who was seventeen years older than her. In her letter to Violet, she expressed her love for her, saying, "I wish you were a kangaroo and had a pouch to carry little kangaroos."
In 1909 she became engaged to her cousin Lytton Strachey. She married Leonard Woolf, who was a writer like herself, in 1912. The marriage of Virginia and Leonard Woolf was one of common interests and friendships. Leonard Woolf knew his wife's closeness to women and was not bothered by it.
Virginia Woolf's Suicide
Virginia and Leonard Woolf kept gasoline in their garage to end their lives by breathing exhaust fumes when the world they lived in was pessimistic. During the Second World War, her house was bombed twice when the Nazis targeted London while she was trying to finish her novel. Virginia Woolf, who suffered from severe depression due to her bipolar disorder and failed at even the simplest tasks, was psychologically exhausted. The despair she felt for life and the depression in her inner world was driving her to death. At the age of twenty-two, Woolf attempted suicide three times, and her last attempt was successful.
On March 28, 1941, leaving a letter to her sister Vanessa Bell and her husband Leonard Woolf, she went to the River Ouse near her home, filled her pocket with stones for weight, and immersed herself in the flow of water.