Virginia Woolf: Life, Style and Major Works

Virginia Woolf: Life, Style and Major Works

Virginia Woolf was born in 1882 and committed suicide in March 1941, as a result of her fear of losing her mind and thus becoming a burden on her husband.

Early Style

She was comfortably off and had the leisure to cultivate her sensibility. She wrote because she wanted to. She had to fight against a patriarchal society where a woman's opinion was considered of second category, and Virginia wanted to resist that position. She was a skilled exponent of the stream of consciousness technique in her novels, exploring with great subtlety problems of personal identity and personal relationships as well as the significance of time, change, and memory for human personality. The delicate, lyrical prose of her finest novels was a remarkable technical achievement. She developed a subtle style, which handled the stream of consciousness with a carefully modulated poetic flow and brought into prose fiction something of the rhythms and imagery of lyric poetry. The sketches in which she explored the possibilities of moving between action and contemplation, between specific external events in time and delicate tracings of the flow of consciousness where the mind moves between retrospect and anticipation, were collected in Monday or Tuesday.

Evolution

She was a sensitive woman, alive to the little significant realities of passing moments, who got behind the skin to the most intimate processes of perception. The raw material of life, as she wanted it, could be presented without shape, without theme, and without the concentration and selection which are necessary for the work of art.

Main Works

A situation in which life is crystallized: a situation involving a number of persons, and a succession of moments in their involved lives as represented by the ideas or images which pass through their minds — image following image in correspondence with the remorseless beat of time. Each of these four books is composed like a piece of music, proceeding note by note, phrase by phrase, with crescendo and diminuendo, the passage of time being actually marked by the voice of Big Ben, an alarm clock, or the regular crash of the waves.