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6. Virginia Woolf (1882-1941)
Life

   Virginia Woolf was born in London, daughter of the distinguished critic, Sir Leslie Stephen. She did not receive formal education in schools, but was educated by her father in his home library. As a little girl, she had met many famous scholars, who were her father’s gests or friends. Her mother died when she was in her early teens. In the following years, she had witnessed the death of her half sister, Stella Duckworth, her father after a long suffering of cancer and the death of one of her brothers. After the death of her father, Woolf moved with her sister Vanessa and two brothers to Bloomsbury, London in 1904. Many former Cambridge friends of her brothers gathered in the family’s place. Those intellectuals formed the well known the Bloomsbury Group, which had great influence on formation of British avant-garde in art and literature. Virginia Woolf was one of the key members of the group. She married Leonard Woolf in 1912, who was a member of the group. Since 1905 she had been contributor of several periodicals and founded with her husband, their own Press, Hegarth Press, which pioneered the publication of experimental and controversial writers. She committed suicide for mental illness in the River Ouse near her Sussex home 1941.
     Virginia Woolf was a talented English novelist, a distinguished feminist essayist and critic. She was one of the two figures who made the stream of consciousness novel attracted the world’s attention in the literary field. Her pioneering efforts in innovating the novel writing established her as the most well-known female modernist writer. She rebelled against Victorian realism and believed that the most significant existence of people is in their mental and emotional world. Her vision of life was that life’s essential wholeness was built through a succession of “moments of being”. The belief was well exhibited in her major novels. Her early novels The Voyage Out (1915), Night and Day (1919), and Jacob’s Room (1922) already distinguished herself in dealing with theme and wring skills. The following Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Light House (1927), and The Waves (1931) were her well-known stream of consciousness novels. Orlando, A Biography was an amazing story about Orlando’s Adventures, in which the hero exceeded the limits of time-space, and changed from a man to a woman.
    Her other novels were The Year (1937) and Between the Acts (1942). She also wrote short stories. Kew Gardens (1919), The Mark on the Wall (1919) were her important short stories. Woolf was regarded as forerunner of later feminism. A Room of One’s Own (1929) was the manifesto of women’s liberation movement. The book dealt with the obstacles and prejudices that have hindered women writers, and explored in the last chapter the possibility of finding an alternative to the male-dominated views of reality. Three Guineas (1938) examined the necessity for women to make a claim for their own history and literature.

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