Childhood experiences of death and sexual abuse lead to depression

The Hogarth Press

A feminist—lesbianism, androgyny, women and writing

Last years

Woolf was born in London in 1882 to a distinguished family that encouraged the study and appreciation of literature and arts. Her father, Leslie Stephen, was a noted scholar and biographer. Leading literary and political figures frequented Woolf's home at Hyde Park Gate. Although she was often ill as a child and was thus unable to attend school regularly, she benefited from the ongoing intellectual exchange occurring in her rich cultural milieu. The other interpretation of Woolf's not being able to attend school has something to do with her father, who was said to be tyrannical, dark, and brooding, believing that women should not be sent for school, and when his wife Julia died, he was prone to irrational, emotional outbursts. Reflecting on the anniversary of Stephen's death, Woolf wrote that had he lived there would be "no writing, no books—inconceivable." In short, Woolf's mother for her represented the typical Victorian "angel in the house," who dedicated her life to Stephen, their children, and charities outside the home. Woolf believed that her mother died prematurely from exhaustion. Woolf's characters, Mrs. Ramsay (To the Lighthouse) and Clarissa Dalloway (Mrs. Dalloway), are said to be modeled on Julia, while Leslie Stephen shares qualities with the character Mr. Ramsay. However, to a certain extent Woolf's cultivation of literature and arts were attributed to Stephen's guidance and instruction. He facilitated Woolf's quest for knowledge by opening his private library to her. He also counseled her in the art of effective reading: his advice, as recounted by Woolf in A Writer's Diary, was "to read what one liked because one liked it [and] never to pretend to admire what one did not."

Woolf's biographers trace her bouts with depression to a variety of psychological issues predominantly related to death and sexuality: inappropriate sexual advances made by her stepbrothers, the death of her mother, the death of stepsister Stella in childbirth, the long-term mental illness of elder half-sister Laura, the sorrowful yet liberating death of her father, and brother Thoby's death from typhoid fever. Quentin Bell alleged that Woolf's endurance of sexual abuse as a young girl by her older half brother permanently altered her attitude toward sex. In addition to the psychological strain caused by the abuse, the siblings' perverted relationship may have contributed to Woolf's frigidity as a married woman. Critics have indicated that the combined effect of these childhood experiences drained Woolf of her delicate emotional reserves, heightened her sensitivity to the harsh realities of life, and seriously impaired her ability to cope.

Woolf and her older sister, the painter Vanessa Bell, moved to a house in Bloomsbury after their father's death in 1904. Their new home later became central to activities of the intellectual Bloomsbury group, which included Woolf's brothers, Thoby and Adrian Stephen, painters Clive Bell and Duncan Grant, critics Roger Fry and Desmond MacCarthy, biographer Lytton Strachey, economist Maynard Keynes, and political theorist Leonard Woolf. Roger Fry's theory of art may have influenced Virginia's technique as a novelist. In general, the Bloomsbury group were intellectuals with philosophic interests (all had been educated at Cambridge) and viewed the values of love and beauty as preeminent in life. In 1912, Virginia married Leonard Woolf, one of the Bloomsbury intellectuals, with whom she established the Hogarth Press in 1917.

The Woolfs led an unconventional marriage—neither was interested in a sexual relationship though they were deeply engaged in an intellectual one. As a hardworking man, Leonard Woolf devoted himself to nurture his beloved wife and the management of the Hogarth Press. In many ways, Leonard was Woolf's caretaker. He worked to create an environment where she could pursue her writing. He took care of the practicalities of their lives as well as reading and commenting on Woolf's manuscripts. He also nursed Woolf through several mental breakdowns caused by the death of her family members. It was Leonard Woolf's support of her writing and the publishing house itself that combined in the symbiotic relationship that allowed Virginia Woolf to exult in her diary in 1925: "I am the only woman in England free to write what I like."

Woolf is best known as one of the great experimental novelists during the modernist period. After the use of traditional, linear narratives in her earliest novels, The Voyage Out (1915) and Night and Day (1917), Woolf began her narrative experimentation with the novel Jacob's Room (1922). However, the new narrative form that Woolf developed, the "stream-of-consciousness technique," found a more complete expression in Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927). Mrs. Dalloway is told through the consciousness of Clarissa Dalloway and relies heavily on memory and psychology for its structure. The novel investigates many significant Modernist issues: the impact of technology on daily life, the impact of World War I on the collective psyche, the value of institutions such as marriage, the intricacies of emotional commitments, and the anxiety produced by alienation of people from one another. At the same time, the use of the "stream of consciousness technique" allows her to portray the exterior of a character and then to move inside the character's mind and emotions. This narrative force brings psychological depth to each character.

To the Lighthouse picks up the themes of Mrs. Dalloway. It develops the stream-of-consciousness technique through its layering of subjective perceptions. The novel takes place at the summer home of the Ramsay family, who represent upper-class British society. Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay are modelled on Woolf's parents, and she saw the writing of the novel as a kind of catharsis that allowed her to put the memory of her parents to rest. The Ramsay's family friend, Lily Briscoe, is an artist, and her conflicts are reflection of Woolf's concern with form in the novel. Discussions of Lily and Mrs. Ramsay have focused on issues of women's sexuality, creativity, and subjectivity, and how the world is perceived by women.

Mrs. Dalloway also houses one of Woolf's earliest homoerotically suggestive scenarios. The description of Clarissa Dalloway and Sally Seton's relationship with each other as young women clearly alludes to a lesbian attraction. It anticipates the sexuality of Orlando and the relationship between Chloe and Olivia in A Room of One's Own. Both Orlando (1928) and A Room of One's Own (1929) show Woolf's concern to the questions of women's subjugation and of the relation between women and writing.

Orlando was dedicated to Woolf's lover, Vita Sackville-West, and developed based on her lover's aristocratic family history. Subtitled Biography, the novel is a historical fantasy that parodies a number of literary texts as well as satirizing academic historical writing. It analyzes the way gender determines the individual's relationship to property and art at different moments in history. Its tone is humorous and also introduces the concept of androgyny as a way to understand gender.

A Room of One's Own also investigates the issue of androgyny and is considered a classic in Anglo-feminist literary theory. Woolf discusses the androgynous mind, a mind that transcends gender and that is necessary for any writer, male or female, to be great. Written in the form of a lecture, the premise of A Room of One's Own is to discuss "women and fiction." She offers the opinion that a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction. The essay becomes an analysis of women's relationship to economic, social, and educational structures.

Three Guineas (1938) is the second of Woolf's major non-fiction works, conceived as a sequel to A Room. It has established Woolf as significant voice in the cause of pacifism and feminism. Three Guineas looks at the enforced development of a "society of outsiders," emphasizes the importance of economic independence for the daughters of educated men, and questions the nature of women's education. She assesses here the notion of woman as scapegoat of history and argues the necessity for women and other marginalized groups, particularly the working classes, to make a claim for their own history and literature.

Woolf fought with depression for most of her life. Not only her childhood experiences but also many other threat fed Woolf's depression and ultimately killed her. External factors such as the burden of the Hogarth Press, a profound political disagreement between Virginia and Leonard over her book Three Guineas, the threat of Hitler, the beginning of World War II in 1939, the bombing of their London house in 1940, the constant noise of the German planes flying over head, the sour receipt of her latest biography Roger Fry , and Leonard's planning of a double suicide for them should the Germans finally invade Britain. By March 1941, Woolf's felt another recurrence and her depression became insurmountable. She was not eating and she was hearing voices. Her diary tells us that she believed she would not recover from this one and felt she could not sentence Leonard to taking care of her for the rest of his life. After rewriting drafts of her suicide note, she put rocks in her pockets and drowned herself in the River Ouse.

References

"Virginia Woolf." Contemporary Authors Online , Gale, 2005. Reproduced in Biography Resource Center . Farmington Hills, Mich.: Thomson Gale. 2005.

"Virginia Woolf." Concise Dictionary of British Literary Biography, Volume 6: Modern Writers, 1914-1945 . Gale Research, 1991.

"Virginia Stephen Woolf." Encyclopedia of World Biography , 2nd ed. 17 Vols. Gale Research, 1998.

"(Adeline) Virginia Woolf." Feminist Writers . St. James Press, 1996.