As a novel, it broke narrative continuity into a tripartite structure. Ramsay, like Leslie Stephen, sees poetry as didacticism, conversation as winning points, and life as a tally of accomplishments. He uses logic to deflate hopes for a trip to the lighthouse, but he needs sympathy from his wife. She is more attuned to emotions than reason. Woolf describes the progress of weeds, mold, dust, and gusts of wind, but she merely announces such major events as the deaths of Mrs.
Ramsay and a son and daughter. Ramsay and the now-teenage children reach the lighthouse and achieve a moment of reconciliation, Lily completes her painting.
To the Lighthouse melds into its structure questions about creativity and the nature and function of art. Woolf solved biographical, historical, and personal dilemmas with the story of Orlando , who lives from Elizabethan times through the entire 18th century; he then becomes female, experiences debilitating gender constraints, and lives into the 20th century. Woolf herself writes in mock-heroic imitation of biographical styles that change over the same period of time.
A Biography exposes the artificiality of both gender and genre prescriptions. However fantastic, Orlando also argues for a novelistic approach to biography. Afterward she was increasingly angered by masculine condescension to female talent. In The Waves , poetic interludes describe the sea and sky from dawn to dusk. Between the interludes, the voices of six named characters appear in sections that move from their childhood to old age. This oneness with all creation was the primal experience Woolf had felt as a child in Cornwall. In this her most experimental novel, she achieved its poetic equivalent.
From her earliest days, Woolf had framed experience in terms of oppositions, even while she longed for a holistic state beyond binary divisions. Even before finishing The Waves , she began compiling a scrapbook of clippings illustrating the horrors of war, the threat of fascism , and the oppression of women. A Novel-Essay she would alternate between sections of fiction and of fact. For the fictional historical narrative, she relied upon experiences of friends and family from the Victorian Age to the s. For the essays, she researched that year span of history.
The task, however, of moving between fiction and fact was daunting. Woolf took a holiday from The Pargiters to write a mock biography of Flush, the dog of poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning. In Woolf completed Freshwater , an absurdist drama based on the life of her great-aunt Julia Margaret Cameron. Featuring such other eminences as the poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and the painter George Frederick Watts , this riotous play satirizes high-minded Victorian notions of art.
Meanwhile, Woolf feared she would never finish The Pargiters. Alternating between types of prose was proving cumbersome, and the book was becoming too long. She solved this dilemma by jettisoning the essay sections, keeping the family narrative, and renaming her book The Years. She narrated 50 years of family history through the decline of class and patriarchal systems, the rise of feminism, and the threat of another war. The novel illustrates the damage done to women and society over the years by sexual repression, ignorance, and discrimination.
When Fry died in , Virginia was distressed; Vanessa was devastated. Vanessa was so disconsolate that Virginia put aside her writing for a time to try to comfort her sister. Woolf connected masculine symbols of authority with militarism and misogyny , an argument buttressed by notes from her clippings about aggression, fascism, and war. Still distressed by the deaths of Roger Fry and Julian Bell, she determined to test her theories about experimental, novelistic biography in a life of Fry.
Here surfaced for the first time in writing a memory of the teenage Gerald Duckworth, her other half brother, touching her inappropriately when she was a girl of perhaps four or five. Through last-minute borrowing from the letters between Fry and Vanessa, Woolf finished her biography. During the bombing of London in and , she worked on her memoir and Between the Acts.
In her novel, war threatens art and humanity itself, and, in the interplay between the pageant—performed on a June day in —and the audience, Woolf raises questions about perception and response. Facing such horrors, a depressed Woolf found herself unable to write. The demons of self-doubt that she had kept at bay for so long returned to haunt her. Between the Acts was published posthumously later that year.
Furthermore, she avoids the self-absorption of many of her contemporaries and implies a brutal society without the explicit details some of her contemporaries felt obligatory. In either situation, she sees her eventual outcome to be like the old woman whose window is across from hers. Like Clarissa, the old lady is aware of the persuasive force of death, but she chooses life" King Even though Clarissa experiences minor pains such as headaches and anxiety questioning true purpose of her life, her true mental illness is not an innate part of herself.
Like Woolf, Clarissa is often seen resting or caught up in affairs that pertain to superficial situations such as parties and evening dresses. Clarissa experiences a brief mental breakdown when she learns of Septimus' death from Lady Bradshaw. Bradshaw disturbs her deeply. She goes into the little room adjoining the rooms where the party is being held. Here Clarissa experiences what for us, in the book, is her second moment of vision, of truth" Rachman.
For Clarissa, death became "defiance. Death was an attempt to communicate; people feeling the impossibility of reaching the centre which, mystically, evaded them; closeness drew apart; rapture faded, one was alone" Woolf Here it is Septimus' mental illness that affects Clarissa in such a way that it can be made profound, but somehow, "it was her disaster--her disgrace" Woolf The ultimate realization Clarissa came to was a result of the young man who killed himself.
When Clarissa retires to imagine the ground flashing up to Septimus in moment of his death, the artistic and social elements of Woolf's character blends. All along Clarissa worried if she made the right choice or not when she married. In the end she realizes that her choice ultimately does not matter. She is alone in the world; she realized the vanity which she has created throughout her life through parties and appearances. After her realization she, "Fear no more the heat of the sun. She felt somehow very like him--the young man who had killed himself. She felt glad that he had done it; thrown it away.
He made her feel the beauty; made her feel the sun" Woolf In conclusion, by ending with defiance in the face of death, Woolf displays her own view of life, her meaning in it, and the role that death plays. Just as Clarissa's neighbor prepares for bed alone, Woolf realizes that ultimately she is alone in the world. Throughout her entire life she struggled with this concept.
By the end of her life, she has accepted it by making use of fictional scenarios and characters within her novels. Dalloway , Virginia Woolf relates her own manic-depressive life and chaotic marriage with the characters of Septimus Smith and Clarissa Dalloway. In it, Woolf suggests that misdiagnosis often caused harsher situations for those mentally ill. Marriage became a task the couples struggled with instead of being a road easily travelled.
Ultimately, though, Woolf's goal was to put meaning on her life and the struggle she endure throughout it. Woolf find's meaning and alludes to it in the end of Mrs. Dalloway with Clarissa Dalloway. It is finally accepting yourself in the midst of all else. It is accepting your life and the path that it has taken.
Through Woolf's fiction, life begins to take on a whole new meaning. University of California, Research and Education Association, A Social Commentary by Virginia Woolf. Sign in or sign up and post using a HubPages Network account. Comments are not for promoting your articles or other sites. Someone once told me to think of the mind and mental illness as a spectrum. They said we all lie somewhere along that spectrum, it's just that some are more radically inclined toward one disposition or the other.
Thanks for the read: The mind is so deep many people are wrongly diagnosed with mental illness or other diseases Virginia Wolf was an interesting read how the mind can collapse so many illnesses out there we need to have better cures. Thank you both for taking the time to read and review this article! Jay, I appreciate the resources. As always, I'll check them out. Flourish, thank you for your kind comment. This reminded me of my college lit classes as well. Ah, the good old days: This is a great and detailed article on Woolf and mental illness.
I would like to share two articles on mental illness. This was exceptionally well written and keen analysis of her work. It takes me back to my literature classes in college. Other product and company names shown may be trademarks of their respective owners. HubPages and Hubbers authors may earn revenue on this page based on affiliate relationships and advertisements with partners including Amazon, Google, and others. To provide a better website experience, owlcation. Please choose which areas of our service you consent to our doing so. For more information on managing or withdrawing consents and how we handle data, visit our Privacy Policy at: A Biographical Analysis of Virginia Woolf: Mental Illness and Woolf's Subsequent Breakdowns When understanding mental illness, it is important to have a correct diagnosis of what the problem is.
The couple rented second homes in Sussex and moved there permanently in Throughout her life, Woolf was troubled by bouts of mental illness, which included being institutionalised and attempting suicide. Her illness is considered to have been bipolar disorder , for which there was no effective intervention at the time. Eventually in she committed suicide by putting rocks in her pockets and drowning herself in a river, at the age of During the interwar period , Woolf was an important part of London's literary and artistic society. She published her first novel, The Voyage Out , in , through her half-brother's publishing house, Gerald Duckworth and Company.
She is also known for her essays, including A Room of One's Own , in which she wrote the much-quoted dictum , "A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction. Woolf became one of the central subjects of the s movement of feminist criticism , and her works have since garnered much attention and widespread commentary for "inspiring feminism ", an aspect of her writing that was unheralded earlier. Her works are widely read all over the world and have been translated into more than 50 languages. A large body of literature is dedicated to her life and work, and she has been the subject of many plays, novels, and films.
Some of her writing has been considered offensive and has been criticised for a number of complex and controversial views, including anti-semitism and elitism. Woolf is commemorated today by statues, societies dedicated to her work and a building at the University of London. While Dr Jackson was an almost invisible presence, the Pattle family see Pattle family tree were famous beauties, and moved in the upper circles of Bengali society.
Julia moved to England with her mother at the age of two and spent much of her early life with another of her mother's sister, Sarah Monckton Pattle. Sarah and her husband Henry Thoby Prinsep , conducted an artistic and literary salon at Little Holland House where she came into contact with a number of Pre-Raphaelite painters such as Edward Burne-Jones , for whom she modelled. Julia was the youngest of three sisters and Adeline Virginia Stephen was named after her mother's eldest sister Adeline Maria Jackson — [9] and her mother's aunt Virginia Pattle see Pattle family tree and Table of ancestors.
Because of the tragedy of her aunt Adeline's death the previous year, the family never used Virginia's first name. The Jacksons were a well educated, literary and artistic proconsular middle-class family. Julia and Herbert Duckworth had three children; [14]. The Venns were the centre of the evangelical Clapham sect. Sir James Stephen was the under secretary at the Colonial Office , and with another Clapham member, William Wilberforce , was responsible for the passage of the Slavery Abolition Bill in While his family were distinguished and intellectual, they were less colourful and aristocratic than Julia Jackson's.
A graduate and fellow of Cambridge University he renounced his faith and position to move to London where he became a notable man of letters. Laura turned out to be developmentally handicapped. The widowed Julia Duckworth knew Leslie Stephen through her friendship with Minny's elder sister Anne Anny Isabella Ritchie and had developed an interest in his agnostic writings. She was present the night Minny died [23] and added Lesley Stephen to her list of people needing care, and helped him move next door to her on Hyde Park Gate so Laura could have some companionship with her own children.
He and Laura then moved next door into Julia's house, where they lived till his death in Julia was 32 and Leslie was Their first child, Vanessa , was born on May 30, Julia, having presented her husband with a child, and now having five children to care for, had decided to limit her family to this. Virginia Woolf provides insight into her early life in her autobiographical essays, including Reminiscences , [35] 22 Hyde Park Gate [36] and A Sketch of the Past In To The Lighthouse [40] Her depiction of the life of the Ramsays in the Hebrides is an only thinly disguised account of the Stephens in Cornwall and the Godrevy Lighthouse they would visit there.
Initially this was mainly Vanessa's and Thoby's articles, but very soon Virginia became the main contributor, with Vanessa as editor. Their mother's response when it first appeared was "Rather clever I think". Virginia was, as she describes it, "born into a large connection, born not of rich parents, but of well—to—do parents, born into a very communicative, literate, letter writing, visiting, articulate, late nineteenth century world".
The following year, another brother Adrian followed. The handicapped Laura Stephen lived with the family until she was institutionalised in Virginia was born at 22 Hyde Park Gate and lived there till her father's death in Built in by Henry Payne of Hammersmith as one of a row of single family townhouses for the upper middle class, [55] it soon became too small for their expanding family. At the time of their marriage, it consisted of a basement , two stories and an attic. In July Leslie Stephen obtained the services of J. Penfold , architect, to add additional living space above and behind the existing structure.
The substantial renovations added a new top floor see image of red brick extension , with three bedrooms and a study for himself, converted the original attic into rooms, and added the first bathroom. Virginia would later describe it as "a very tall house on the left hand side near the bottom which begins by being stucco and ends by being red brick; which is so high and yet—as I can say now that we have sold it—so rickety that it seems as if a very high wind would topple it over". The servants worked "downstairs" in the basement. The ground floor had a drawing room, separated by a curtain from the servant's pantry and a library.
Above this on the first floor were Julia and Leslie's bedrooms. On the next floor were the Duckworth children's rooms, and above them the day and night nurseries of the Stephen children occupied two further floors. Downstairs there was pure convention: But there was no connection between them", the worlds typified by George Duckworth and Leslie Stephen. Life in London differed sharply from their summers in Cornwall, their outdoor activities consisting mainly of walks in nearby Kensington Gardens, where they would play Hide-and-Seek , and sail their boats on the Round Pond , [46] while indoors, it revolved around their lessons.
Leslie Stephen's eminence as an editor, critic, and biographer, and his connection to William Thackeray, meant that his children were raised in an environment filled with the influences of Victorian literary society. Julia Stephen was equally well connected.
Her aunt was a pioneering early photographer Julia Margaret Cameron who was also a visitor to the Stephen household. The two Stephen sisters, Vanessa and Virginia, were almost three years apart in age, and exhibited some sibling rivalry. Virginia christened her older sister "the saint" and was far more inclined to exhibit her cleverness than her more reserved sister. Virginia resented the domesticity Victorian tradition forced on them, far more than her sister.
They also competed for Thoby's affections. Virginia showed an early affinity for writing. Although both parents disapproved of formal education for females, writing was considered a respectable profession for women, and her father encouraged her in this respect. Later she would describe this as "ever since I was a little creature, scribbling a story in the manner of Hawthorne on the green plush sofa in the drawing room at St.
Ives while the grown-ups dined". By the age of five she was writing letters and could tell her father a story every night. Later she, Vanessa and Adrian would develop the tradition of inventing a serial about their next-door neighbours, every night in the nursery, or in the case of St.
Ives, of spirits that resided in the garden. It was her fascination with books that formed the strongest bond between her and her father. Leslie Stephen was in the habit of hiking in Cornwall, and in the spring of he came across a large white house [64] in St Ives, Cornwall , and took out a lease on it that September. Leslie Stephen, who referred to it thus: There we bought the lease of Talland House: In both London and Cornwall, Julia was perpetually entertaining, and was notorious for her manipulation of her guests' lives, constantly matchmaking in the belief everyone should be married, the domestic equivalence of her philanthropy.
Rupert and his group of Cambridge Neo-pagans would come to play an important role in their lives in the years prior to the First World War. For the children it was the highlight of the year, and Virginia's most vivid childhood memories were not of London but of Cornwall. In a diary entry of 22 March , [73] she described why she felt so connected to Talland House, looking back to a summer day in August One's past, I suppose; I see children running in the garden … The sound of the sea at night … almost forty years of life, all built on that, permeated by that: Julia Stephen fell ill with influenza in February , and never properly recovered, dying on 5 May, [78] when Virginia was only This was a pivotal moment in her life and the beginning of her struggles with mental illness.
That summer, rather than return to the memories of St Ives, the Stephens went to Freshwater, Isle of Wight , where a number of their mother's family lived. It was there that Virginia had the first of her many nervous breakdowns , and Vanessa was forced to assume some of her mother's role in caring for Virginia's mental state. George Duckworth also assumed some of their mother's role, taking upon himself the task of bringing them out into society.
A girl had no chance against its fangs. No other desires — say to paint, or to write — could be taken seriously".
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The death of Stella Duckworth, her pregnant surrogate mother, on 19 July , after a long illness, [82] was a further blow to Virginia's sense of self, and the family dynamics. In the late nineteenth century, education was sharply divided along gender lines, a tradition that Virginia would note and condemn in her writing. Boys were sent to school, and in upper-middle-class families such as the Stephens, this involved private boys schools, often boarding schools , and university. There was a small classroom off the back of the drawing room, with its many windows, which they found perfect for quiet writing and painting.
Julia taught the children Latin, French and History, while Leslie taught them mathematics. They also received piano lessons. Even today there may be parents who would doubt the wisdom of allowing a girl of fifteen the free run of a large and quite unexpurgated library. But my father allowed it. There were certain facts - very briefly, very shyly he referred to them. Yet 'Read what you like', he said, and all his books. After Public School , the boys in the family all attended Cambridge University. The girls derived some indirect benefit from this, as the boys introduced them to their friends.
Leslie Stephen described his circle as "most of the literary people of mark Later, between the ages of 15 and 19 she was able to pursue higher education. She took courses of study, some at degree level, in beginning and advanced Ancient Greek, intermediate Latin and German, together with continental and English history at the Ladies' Department of King's College London at nearby 13 Kensington Square between and One of her Greek tutors was Clara Pater — , who taught at King's. Her experiences there led to her essay On Not Knowing Greek.
Although the Stephen girls could not attend Cambridge, they were to be profoundly influenced by their brothers' experiences there. Although Virginia expressed the opinion that her father was her favourite parent, and although she had only just turned thirteen when her mother died, she was profoundly influenced by her mother throughout her life.
It was Virginia who famously stated that "for we think back through our mothers if we are women", [] and invoked the image of her mother repeatedly throughout her life in her diaries, [] her letters [] and a number of her autobiographical essays, including Reminiscences , [35] 22 Hyde Park Gate [36] and A Sketch of the Past , [37] frequently evoking her memories with the words "I see her In To The Lighthouse [40] the artist, Lily Briscoe, attempts to paint Mrs Ramsay, a complex character based on Julia Stephen, and repeatedly comments on the fact that she was "astonishingly beautiful".
While her father painted Julia Stephen's work in terms of reverence, Woolf drew a sharp distinction between her mother's work and "the mischievous philanthropy which other women practise so complacently and often with such disastrous results". She describes her degree of sympathy, engagement, judgement and decisiveness, and her sense of both irony and the absurd. She recalls trying to recapture "the clear round voice, or the sight of the beautiful figure, so upright and distinct, in its long shabby cloak, with the head held at a certain angle, so that the eye looked straight out at you".
Her frequent absences and the demands of her husband instilled a sense of insecurity in her children that had a lasting effect on her daughters. In To the Lighthouse she describes it as "boasting of her capacity to surround and protect, there was scarcely a shell of herself left for her to know herself by; all was so lavished and spent". Given Julia's frequent absences and commitments, the young Stephen children became increasingly dependent on Stella Duckworth, who emulated her mother's selflessness, as Woolf wrote "Stella was always the beautiful attendant handmaid Julia Stephen greatly admired her husband's intellect, and although she knew her own mind, thought little of her own.
As Woolf observed "she never belittled her own works, thinking them, if properly discharged, of equal, though other, importance with her husband's". She believed with certainty in her role as the centre of her activities, and the person who held everything together, [10] with a firm sense of what was important and valuing devotion. Of the two parents, Julia's "nervous energy dominated the family".
Other issues the children had to deal with was Leslie Stephen's temper, Woolf describing him as "the tyrant father". He had given her his ring on her eighteenth birthday and she had a deep emotional attachment as his literary heir, writing about her "great devotion for him". Yet, like Vanessa, she also saw him as victimiser and tyrant. Her adolescent image was of an "Eminent Victorian" and tyrant but as she grew older she began to realise how much of him was in her "I have been dipping into old letters and father's memoirs She was in turn both fascinated and condemnatory of Leslie Stephen " She [her mother] has haunted me: I was more like him than her, I think; and therefore more critical: Much has been made of Virginia's statements that she was continually sexually abused during the whole time that she lived at 22 Hyde Park Gate, as a possible cause of her mental health issues, [] [] though there are likely to be a number of contributing factors see Mental health.
She states that she first remembers being molested by Gerald Duckworth when she was six. It has been suggested that this led to a lifetime of sexual fear and resistance to masculine authority. These include evidence of sexual abuse of the Stephen girls by their older Duckworth stepbrothers, and by their cousin, James Kenneth Stephen — , at least of Stella Duckworth.
On their father's death, the Stephens first instinct was to escape from the dark house of yet more mourning, and this they did immediately, accompanied by George, travelling to Manorbier , on the coast of Pembrokeshire on 27 February. There they spent a month, and it was there that Virginia first came to realise her destiny was as a writer, as she recalls in her diary of 3 September Before their father died, the Stephens had discussed the need to leave South Kensington in the West End , with its tragic memories and their parents' relations.
The Stephen children were now between 24 and Bohemian Bloomsbury, with its characteristic leafy squares seemed sufficiently far away, geographically and socially, and was a much cheaper neighbourhood to rent in see Map. They had not inherited much and they were unsure about their finances. While Gerald was quite happy to move on and find himself a bachelor establishment, George who had always assumed the role of quasi-parent decided to accompany them, much to their dismay.
Vanessa found a house at 46 Gordon Square in Bloomsbury , and they moved in November, to be joined by Virginia now sufficiently recovered. It was at Gordon Square that the Stephens began to regularly entertain Thoby's intellectual friends in March In Virginia and Adrian visited Portugal and Spain, Clive Bell proposed to Vanessa, but was declined, while Virginia began teaching evening classes at Morley College and Vanessa added another event to their calendar with the Friday Club , dedicated to the discussion of and later exhibition of the fine arts.
Ka and others brought the Bloomsbury Group into contact with another, slightly younger, group of Cambridge intellectuals to whom the Stephen sisters gave the name "Neo-pagans". The Friday Club continued till The following year, , Virginia suffered two further losses.
Her cherished brother Thoby, who was only 26, died of typhoid , following a trip they had all taken to Greece, and immediately after Vanessa accepted Clive's third proposal. Virginia moved into 29 Fitzroy Square in April , a house on the west side of the street, formerly occupied by George Bernard Shaw. It was in Fitzrovia , immediately to the west of Bloomsbury but still relatively close to her sister at Gordon Square. The two sisters continued to travel together, visiting Paris in March.
Adrian was now to play a much larger part in Virginia's life, and they resumed the Thursday Club in October at their new home, while Gordon Square became the venue for the Play Reading Society in December. During this period the group began to increasingly explore progressive ideas, first in speech, and then in conduct, Vanessa proclaiming in a libertarian society with sexual freedom for all. Meanwhile, Virginia began work on her first novel, Melymbrosia that eventually became The Voyage Out It was while she was at Fitzroy Square that the question arose of Virginia needing a quiet country retreat, and she required a six-week rest cure and sought the countryside away from London as much as possible.
In December, she and Adrian stayed at Lewes and started exploring the area of Sussex around the town. She started to want a place of her own, like St Ives, but closer to London. She soon found a property in nearby Firle see below , maintaining a relationship with that area for the rest of her life. Several members of the group attained notoriety in with the Dreadnought hoax , which Virginia participated in disguised as a male Abyssinian royal. Her complete talk on the hoax was discovered and is published in the memoirs collected in the expanded edition of The Platform of Time In October the lease on Fitzroy Square was running out and Virginia and Adrian decided to give up their home on Fitzroy Square in favour of a different living arrangement, moving to a four-storied house at 38 Brunswick Square in Bloomsbury proper [y] in November.
Virginia saw it as a new opportunity, "we are going to try all kinds of experiments", she told Ottoline Morrell. The house was adjacent to the Foundling Hospital , much to Virginia's amusement as an unchaperoned single woman. He recalls them in "white dresses and large hats, with parasols in their hands, their beauty literally took one's breath away". To him they were silent, "formidable and alarming". Woolf did not meet Virginia formally till November 17, when he dined with the Stephens at Gordon Square, to say goodbye before leaving to take up a position with the civil service in Ceylon , although she was aware of him through Thoby's stories.
At that visit he noted that she was perfectly silent throughout the meal, and looked ill. He did so, but received no answer. In June he returned to London on a one-year leave, [] but did not go back to Ceylon. In England again, Leonard renewed his contacts with family and friends. Three weeks after arriving he dined with Vanessa and Clive Bell at Gordon Square on July 3, where they were later joined by Virginia and other members of what would later be called "Bloomsbury", and Leonard dates the group's formation to that night. After that weekend they began seeing each other more frequently.
Indeed, in , Woolf wrote in her diary: And our marriage so complete. Despite the introduction of conscription in , Leonard was exempted on medical grounds. Between and the Woolfs returned to Bloomsbury, taking out a ten-year lease at 52 Tavistock Square , [] from where they ran the Hogarth Press from the basement, where Virginia also had her writing room, and is commemorated with a bust of her in the square see illustration.
Her two Cambridge lectures then became the basis for her major essay A Room of One's Own [] in The Woolf's final residence in London was at 37 Mecklenburgh Square — , destroyed during the Blitz in September , a month later their previous home on Tavistock Square was also destroyed.
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After that they made Sussex their permanent home. A Biography of Place pub. Virginia had taken up book-binding as a pastime in October , at the age of 19, [] [] and the Woolfs had been discussing setting up a publishing house for some time, and at the end of started making plans. Having discovered that they were not eligible to enroll in the St Bride School of Printing, they started purchasing supplies after seeking advice from the Excelsior Printing Supply Company on Farringdon Road in March , and soon they had a printing press set up on their dining room table at Hogarth House, and the Hogarth Press was born.
The work consisted of 32 pages, hand bound and sewn, and illustrated by woodcuts designed by Dora Carrington. The illustrations were a success, leading Virginia to remark that the press was "specially good at printing pictures, and we see that we must make a practice of always having pictures" July 13, The process took two and a half months with a production run of copies. The press subsequently published Virginia's novels along with works by T.
Eliot , Laurens van der Post , and others. Woolf believed that to break free of a patriarchal society that women writers needed a "room of their own" to develop and often fantasised about an "Outsider's Society" where women writers would create a virtual private space for themselves via their writings to develop a feminist critique of society. Until , Woolf often helped her husband print the Hogarth books as the money for employees was not there. After it was bombed in September , the press was moved to Letchworth for the remainder of the war.
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The Group, which had been scattered by the war, was reconvened by Mary 'Molly' MacCarthy who called them "Bloomsberries", and operated under rules derived from the Cambridge Apostles , an elite university debating society that a number of them had been members of. These rules emphasised candour and openness. Among the memoirs presented, Virginia contributed three that were published posthumously in , in the autobiographical anthology Moments of Being.
The ethos of the Bloomsbury group encouraged a liberal approach to sexuality, and on December 14, [] she met the writer and gardener Vita Sackville-West , [] wife of Harold Nicolson , while dining with Clive Bell. Writing in her diary the next day, she referred to meeting "the lovely gifted aristocratic Sackville West". Brown [] and A Letter to a Young Poet Sackville-West worked tirelessly to lift up Woolf's self-esteem, encouraging her not to view herself as a quasi-reclusive inclined to sickness who should hide herself away from the world, but rather offered praise for her liveliness and sense of wit, her health, her intelligence and achievements as a writer.
This led Woolf to spend much time obsessively engaging in such physical labour. Seducers in Ecuador , the first of the novels by Sackville-West published by Hogarth, was not a success, selling only copies in its first year, but the next Sackville-West novel they published, The Edwardians , was a bestseller that sold 30, copies in its first six months. In , Woolf presented Sackville-West with Orlando , [] a fantastical biography in which the eponymous hero's life spans three centuries and both sexes.
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It was published in October, shortly after the two women spent a week travelling together in France, that September. Virginia Woolf also remained close to her surviving siblings, Adrian and Vanessa; Thoby had died of typhoid fever at the age of Virginia was needing a country retreat to escape to, and on 24 December Virginia found a house for rent in Firle , Sussex, near Lewes see Map. She obtained a lease and took possession of the house the following month, and named it Little Talland House , after their childhood home in Cornwall, although it was actually a new red gabled villa on the main street opposite the village hall.
At Asham , she recorded the events of the weekends and holidays they spent there in her Asham Diary , part of which was later published as A Writer's Diary in It was a most melodious time. Everything went so freely; - but I can't analyse all the sources of my joy". While at Asham Leonard and Virginia found a farmhouse in , that was to let, about four miles away, which they thought would be ideal for her sister.
Eventually Vanessa came down to inspect it, and moved in in October of that year, taking it as a summer home for her family. The Charleston Farmhouse was to become the summer gathering place for the literary and artistic circle of the Bloomsbury Group. After the end of the war, in , the Woolfs were given a year's notice by the landlord, who needed the house. Leonard Woolf describes this view and the amenities [] as being unchanged since the days of Chaucer.
Meanwhile, Vanessa had also made Charleston her permanent home in During her time in Firle, Virginia became better acquainted with Rupert Brooke and his group of Neo-Pagans , pursuing socialism , vegetarianism , exercising outdoors and alternative life styles, including social nudity. They were influenced by the ethos of Bedales , Fabianism and Shelley. The women wore sandals, socks, open neck shirts and head-scarves, as Virginia does here. Although she had some reservations, Woolf was involved with their activities for a while, fascinated by their bucolic innocence in contrast to the sceptical intellectualism of Bloomsbury, which earned her the nickname "The Goat" from her brother Adrian.
They also shared a psychiatrist in the name of Maurice Craig. Virginia nicknamed her "Bruin". At the same time she found herself dragged into a triangular relationship involving Ka, Jacques Raverat and Gwen Darwin. She became resentful of the other couple, Jacques and Gwen, who married later in , not the outcome Virginia had predicted or desired. They would later be referenced to in both To the Lighthouse and The Years. The exclusion she felt evoked memories of both Stella Duckworth's marriage and her triangular involvement with Vanessa and Clive.
The two groups eventually fell out. Later she would write sardonically about Brooke, whose premature death resulted in his idealisation, and express regret about "the Neo-Paganism at that stage of my life". Virginia was deeply disappointed when Ka married William Edward Arnold-Forster in , and became increasingly critical of her. Much examination has been made of Woolf's mental health e. From the age of 13, following the death of her mother, Woolf suffered periodic mood swings from severe depression to manic excitement , including psychotic episodes, which the family referred to as her " madness ".
She then stopped keeping a diary for some time. This was a scenario she would later recreate in Time Passes To the Lighthouse The death of her father in provoked her most alarming collapse, on May 10, when she threw herself out of a window and she was briefly institutionalised [53] under the care of her father's friend, the eminent psychiatrist George Savage. Savage blamed her education, frowned on by many at the time as unsuitable for women, [] for her illness. She characterised this as a "romantic friendship" Letter to Violet May 4, From then on her life was punctuated by urgent voices from the grave that at times seemed more real than her visual reality.
On Dr Savage's recommendation Virginia spent three short periods in , and at Burley House at 15 Cambridge Park, Twickenham see image , described as "a private nursing home for women with nervous disorder" run by Miss Jean Thomas. This involved partial isolation, deprivation of literature and force-feeding , and after six weeks she was able to convalesce in Cornwall and Dorset during the autumn. She loathed the experience, writing to her sister on July 28 [] she described how she found the phony religious atmosphere stifling, the institution ugly and informed Vanessa that to escape "I shall soon have to jump out of a window".
On emerging from Burley House in September , she sought further opinions from two other physicians on the 13th, Maurice Wright, and Henry Head , who had been Henry James ' physician. Both recommended she return to Burley House. Distraught, she returned home and attempted suicide by taking an overdose of grains of veronal a barbiturate , nearly dying, [] had she not been found by Ka Cox who summoned help. She remained unstable over the next two years, with another incident involving veronal that she claimed was an "accident" and consulted another psychiatrist in April , Maurice Craig , who explained that she was not sufficiently psychotic to be certified or committed to an institution.
The rest of the summer of went better for her and they moved to Richmond, but in February , just as The Voyage Out was due to be published, she relapsed once more and remained in poor health for most of that year, [] then despite Miss Thomas's gloomy prognosis, she began to recover following 20 years of ill health.
Over the rest of her life she suffered recurrent bouts of depression. In a number of factors appeared to overwhelm her. Her biography of Roger Fry [] had been published in July and she had been disappointed in its reception. The horrors of war depressed her and their London homes had been destroyed in the Blitz in September and October. She had completed Between the Acts posthumously [] in November, and completing a novel was frequently accompanied by exhaustion. Though this instability would frequently affect her social life, she was able to continue her literary productivity with few interruptions throughout her life.
Woolf herself provides not only a vivid picture of her symptoms in her diaries and letters, but also her response to the demons that haunted her and at times made her long for death [] "But it is always a question whether I wish to avoid these glooms These 9 weeks give one a plunge into deep waters Directly I stop working I feel that I am sinking down, down.
And as usual, I feel that if I sink further I shall reach the truth". Leonard Woolf relates how during the 30 years they were married they consulted many doctors in the Harley Street area, and although they were given a diagnosis of neurasthenia , he felt they had little understanding of the causes or nature. The solution was simple, as long as she lived a quiet life without any physical or mental exertion, she was well.
On the other hand, any mental, emotional or physical strain resulted in a reappearance of her symptoms. These began with a headache, followed by insomnia and thoughts that started to race. Her remedy was simple, to retire to bed in a darkened room, eat, and drink plenty of milk, following which the symptoms slowly subsided. Modern scholars, including her nephew and biographer, Quentin Bell , [] have suggested her breakdowns and subsequent recurring depressive periods were also influenced by the sexual abuse to which she and her sister Vanessa were subjected by their half-brothers George and Gerald Duckworth which Woolf recalls in her autobiographical essays A Sketch of the Past and 22 Hyde Park Gate see Sexual abuse.
Biographers point out that when Stella died in , there was no counterbalance to control George's predation, and his night time prowling. Virginia describes him as her first lover "The old ladies of Kensington and Belgravia never knew that George Duckworth was not only father and mother, brother and sister to those poor Stephen girls; he was their lover also".
It is likely that other factors also played a part. It has been suggested that these include genetic predisposition , for both trauma and family history have been implicated in bipolar disorder. Many of Virginia's symptoms, including persistent headache , insomnia , irritability , and anxiety resemble those of her father. These inspirations emerged from what Woolf referred to as her lava of madness, describing her time at Burley [4] [] [] in a letter to Ethel Smythe:.
As an experience, madness is terrific I can assure you, and not to be sniffed at; and in its lava I still find most of the things I write about. It shoots out of one everything shaped, final, not in mere driblets, as sanity does. And the six months—not three—that I lay in bed taught me a good deal about what is called oneself. Thomas Caramagno [] and others, [] in discussing her illness, warn against the "neurotic-genius" way of looking at mental illness, which rationalises the theory that creativity is somehow born of mental illness.
After completing the manuscript of her last novel posthumously published , Between the Acts , [] Woolf fell into a depression similar to that which she had earlier experienced. The onset of World War II , the destruction of her London home during the Blitz , and the cool reception given to her biography [] of her late friend Roger Fry all worsened her condition until she was unable to work. She held fast to her pacifism and criticized her husband for wearing what she considered to be the silly uniform of the Home Guard.
After World War II began, Woolf's diary indicates that she was obsessed with death, which figured more and more as her mood darkened. In her suicide note , addressed to her husband, she wrote:. I feel certain that I am going mad again. I feel we can't go through another of those terrible times. And I shan't recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can't concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do. You have given me the greatest possible happiness.
You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I don't think two people could have been happier till this terrible disease came. I can't fight it any longer. I know that I am spoiling your life, that without me you could work. And you will I know. You see I can't even write this properly. What I want to say is I owe all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good. I want to say that—everybody knows it. If anybody could have saved me it would have been you.
Virginia Woolf
Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can't go on spoiling your life any longer. I don't think two people could have been happier than we have been. Woolf is considered to be one of the greatest twentieth century novelists and short story writers and one of the pioneers, among modernist writers [] [] using stream of consciousness as a narrative device , alongside contemporaries such as Marcel Proust , [] [] Dorothy Richardson and James Joyce. The growth of feminist criticism in the s helped re-establish her reputation. Virginia submitted her first article in , to a competition in Tit-Bits.