Modernity and modernism (1900-1945) Virginia Woolf

Virginia 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. "Virginia
Woolf's peculiarities as a fiction writer have tended to obscure her central strength: she is arguably the major
lyrical novelist in the English language. Her novels are highly experimental: a narrative, frequently
uneventful and commonplace, is refracted—and sometimes almost dissolved—in the characters' receptive
consciousness. Intense lyricism and stylistic virtuosity fuse to create a world overabundant with auditory and
visual impressions”. “The intensity of Virginia Woolf's poetic vision elevates the ordinary, sometimes banal
settings"—often wartime environments—"of most of her novels" (McTaggart, Ursula).

Generalizing on the technique used by Virginia Woolf in her novels, J.K. Johnstone (p. 17) has written, that
she “had always an ambivalent desire because of her vivid awareness of two worlds, one flowing in wide
sweeps overhead, the other tip-tapping circumscribed upon the pavement.” She, in other words, was aware of
the realms of ‘reality’- one that was outside in the shape of the various phenomena in Nature and Society,
and the other inside the consciousness with its vast store of impressions, gathered at numerous significant
moments of existence. The two realms have their meeting or converging points. Her main technique was to
capture a converging point in time and from thee work along the two realms, the mental and the material.
The ‘pattern’ she attempted to build for her novels like Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, and much
more so in The Waves, was this idea of starting from convergence, and then trace the lines of divergence
along spatial and along temporal planes.

2. Virginia Woolf and Feminism Virginia Woolf became one of the central subjects of the 1970s 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. Woolf is known for her contributions to
twentieth century literature and her essays, as well as the influence she has had on literary, particularly
feminist criticism.

3. Stream of consciousness technique The Stream of Consciousness mirrors an enlargement of technical

procedures. As a type of narrative it is a new and radical development from subjectivism. Its most important
feature is exploitation of the element of incoherence in our conscious process. The Stream of Consciousness
novel is not a story told in chronological sequence. “It is like a view of the earth’s strata exposed by a
geologic experiment. Or rather, it is like a movie picture which makes plentiful use of cut-back, symbolic
themes and dissolving vies” (W.R. Goodman, p. 546). The phrase ‘stream of consciousness’ as a literary
technique was first used by William James and became widely adopted as a term of art in literary criticism
during the twentieth century, especially in the novels of Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Richardson, or James
Joyce, among others. In these works of art, the inner life of the characters is illustrated by the writer as a

combination of their sensations, memories, thoughts, feelings and emotional conditions. This double quality
of life is detailed by Woolf in her critical essay, Modern Fiction, where she argues that the task of a modern
writer is to capture the “essential thing” which she describes as an “unknown and uncircumscribed spirit.”
Woolf’s use of the phenomenon “spirit” is broad in her essay: “life”, “reality” and even “truth” are made
synonymous with the “spirit” that fiction ought to embrace and convey. She sees reality as chaotic
impressions perceived by the senses, taking place in the triviality and ordinariness of an everyday
surrounding. On the other hand, there lies the inner life, the ‘whatness’ of life which is complex and fluid by
nature. This inner reality exists along with the outer reality, the material surrounding of a person. She argues
that in writing one has to imply mental impressions and represent the external, material reality in its detail at
the same time. Only by presenting both sides can a writer capture the true nature of reality, the essence of our
existence:

Virginia Woolf (January 25, 1882 – March 28, 1941) was a British writer born and raised in London,
England. She was one of the most famous writers of the modernist era and wrote many best-selling books
such as Mrs. Dalloway, A Room of One’s Own and To The Lighthouse.
Virginia Woolf wrote many books including 10 novels and a number of nonfiction books. Many of these
books became and remain best-sellers and have cemented Woolf’s reputation as one of the great writers of
the 20th century. Woolf’s novels were written with the stream-of-consciousness literary technique which
focuses more on the character’s inner thoughts than on the plot.
Woolf’s first novel, The Voyage Out, was published in 1915 and her last novel, Between the Acts, was
published posthumously a few months after her death in 1941.

Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group The Bloomsbury Group was a group of artists and writers
from the Bloomsbury District in London during the early 20th century. Virginia Woolf was one of the most
notable members of this group. The other members included Leonard Woolf, Vanessa Bell, E.M. Forster,
Lytton Strachey, Roger Fry, Clive Bell, John Maynard Keynes, Duncan Grant and Desmond McCarthy.

The group was famous for being one of the first literary groups that openly supported women in the arts,
pacifism, and many other social and political issues.

Virginia Woolf’s Death

Virginia Woolf is believed to have suffered from bipolar disorder and attempted suicide a number of times
throughout her life. She underwent many different types of treatments and managed her condition well
enough to live a very productive life. In the spring of 1941, while suffering from another bought of
depression she drowned herself in the river near her house.

A Room of One's Own

Published in 1929, Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One's Own is a key work of feminist literary criticism.
Written after she delivered two lectures on the topic of ‘women and fiction’ at Cambridge University in
1928, Woolf’s essay examines the educational, social and financial disadvantages women have faced
throughout history. It contains Woolf’s famous argument that, ‘A woman must have money and a room of
her own if she is to write fiction’ – although Woolf describes this as ‘an opinion upon one minor point’, and
the essay explores the ‘unsolved problems’ of women and fiction ‘to show you how I arrived at this opinion
about the room and the money’.

Through the fictionalised character of ‘Mary’ – who visits the British Museum to find out about everything
that has ever been written about women – Woolf builds the argument that literature and history is a male
construct that has traditionally marginalised women. Woolf refutes the widely held assumption that women
are inferior writers, or inferior subjects, instead locating their silence in their material and social
circumstances. Women have been barred from attending school and university, for instance, or excluded by
law for inheritance, or expected to marry during which their time is spent housekeeping and childrearing.
Woolf imagines what kind of life ‘Judith Shakespeare’ – a brilliant, talented sister of Shakespeare – might
have lived, concluding that she, ‘would have been so thwarted and hindered by other people, so tortured and
pulled asunder by her own contrary instincts, that she must have lost her health and sanity to a certainty’.

It is also an issue of gendered values, Woolf insists. Writing in the 1920s, Woolf observes that it is, ‘the
masculine values that prevail... This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This
is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room’.

Woolf ends with an appeal to the audience ‘to write all kinds of books, hesitating at no subject however
trivial or however vast’: Judith ‘would come again if we worked for her, and that so to work, even in poverty
and obscurity, is worthwhile’.