Virginia Woolf is a writer. Virginia Woolf - biography and best books
In the interwar period Wolfe was a significant figure in the London Literary Society and was a member of the Bloomsbury circle. Her most famous works include the novels: "" (1925), "" (1927), "Orlando" (1928) and the story "One's own room", containing the well-known aphorism: "Every woman, if she is going to write, must have the means and his own room. " Her novels are considered classics of the stream of consciousness.
She was born in London in the family of the famous literary critic Sir Leslie Stephen and Julia Duckworth (Burne-Jones wrote her in 1866, her photograph is known by Julia Margaret Cameron, 1867). Virginia was the third child of Leslie and Julia (the family had three children of Julia from her first marriage, daughter of Leslie from her marriage to Minnie Thackeray and four younger Stevens: Vanessa, Toby, Virginia and Adrian). When Virginia was 13 years old, she experienced the death of her mother, which was the cause of the first nervous breakdown of the writer. After Julia's death, Sir Leslie revels in self-pity. The death of Virginia's mother is the most worrisome.
The elder sister Stella has been acting as the mistress of the house for some time, but soon dies. Vanessa - the next in seniority - is forced to take care of the house, but unlike her older sister, she rebuffs her father, who is gradually turning into a despot. After the death of their father, the young Stevens move to Bloomsbury, where their home becomes the citadel of everything progressive, young minds gather to discuss, often condemn, modern society. Sisters Virginia and Vanessa were very close, as children they vowed never to get married and live together. The news that Vanessa was accepting Clive Bell's proposal in 1907 greatly offended Virginia. This happened a few days after the death of her beloved brother Toby - he contracted typhus while traveling together in Greece. She was left alone with her brother. In 1909, he unexpectedly accepts the offer of Lytton Strachey, who openly declared his unconventional orientation. But the marriage did not take place. At this time, Virginia began publishing her critical articles in magazines, continuing her father's work. Work on the first novel is in progress.
In 1912 she married Leonard Wolfe, a writer and journalist. The marriage became a union of people who respect each other. In 1917, the couple founded the Hogarth Press publishing house, from where all the writer's works were published. Virginia typed and edited the texts herself. The publishing house, which was initially unprofitable, became a reliable source of income for the family. Wolfe... Leonard created ideal conditions for both of them to work, he strongly supported Virginia.
Headaches, voices, visions did not leave Virginia, she tried to kill herself several times. The writer was very demanding of herself and her work, she rewrote her novels dozens of times. She stopped keeping a diary only during illness, the diaries were published as a separate edition in 4 volumes, and 5 volumes of letters from Virginia were also published, which she wrote to friends, sister, Leonard and, of course, Vita Sackville-West. They met in 1922, Vita at first did not like Virginia very much, it was Vita who was looking for a meeting with the writer. Subsequently, they are united by tender friendship, on the part of Virginia - love. This feeling, together with the resentment inflicted by Vita's betrayals, became the basis of the novel Orlando, in which the main character turns into a woman.
Virginia's novels were published not only in England, but also in America. With the outbreak of World War II, fear for her Jewish husband caused seizures and headaches to return. Their London home was destroyed in the bombing. After completing work on the manuscript of the last (posthumously published) novella Between the Acts, Wolfe fell into a deep depression. Considering that he could no longer torture Leonard and that without her it would be easier for him, Virginia wolfe, leaving a letter to her husband and sister, March 28, 1941 - put on a coat, filled her pockets with stones and drowned in the Ouse River, not far from their home in Sussex. The body was found by children two weeks after the tragedy of April 18, 1941. The writer's husband buried her cremated remains under an elm tree in the garden of a house in Sussex.
In a suicide note to her husband, Virginia wrote: “My dear, I’m sure I’m going crazy again. I feel like we cannot relive it. And this time I won’t get better. I’m starting to hear voices. I cannot concentrate. , I made the only right decision and do what seems to me best. With you I was absolutely happy. You were everything for me that I could only dream of. I do not think that two people could be happier than we were, until this terrible disease came. I am no longer able to fight. I know that I ruin your life, that without me you could work. And you can, I’m sure. See, I can’t even find the right words. I can’t I just want you to know - for all the happiness in my life I owe you. You were immensely patient with me and incredibly kind. Everyone knows that. If anyone could save me, it would be you. Everyone. Everything left me except the confidence in your kindness. I just can't ruin your life anymore. I don't think yu, that in this world someone would be happier than we were. "
Virginia wolfe- English writer, literary critic.
She was born in London to the family of the famous literary critic Sir Leslie Stephen and Julia Duckworth. Virginia was Leslie and Julia's third child together. When Virginia was 13 years old, she experienced the death of her mother, which was the cause of the first nervous breakdown of the writer.
Virginia's older sister Stella for some time served as the mistress of the house, but soon died. Vanessa - the next in seniority - was forced to take care of the house, but, unlike her older sister, she had a strong character and strong nerves, and could fight back her father, who was gradually turning into a despot.
Sir Leslie Stephen died of cancer on February 22, 1904. All his children, except Virginia, took this fact with great relief. Finally they were free! However, Virginia did not feel completely free even after the death of her father. Until the end of her life, she led incessant internal disputes with him, then accusing, then justifying him.
Immediately after the death of his father, the family moved from expensive respectable Kensington to the cheap bohemian district of Bloomsbury, which soon became famous throughout the world thanks to a circle of intellectuals, whose center soon became Virginia. Here, in disputes with representatives of a new, young British culture, she honed her skills, formed her aesthetic program.
In 1905 she began her writing career. Her first publications were articles and reviews for the literary supplement to The Times and other publications devoted to the works of classics and contemporary authors.
However, a series of misfortunes does not leave the Stephen family. In 1906, Vanessa, Virginia, Toby and Adrian set off on a trip to Greece, during which Toby, Virginia's beloved brother who had great promise in mathematics, contracted typhus and died on his return to London. He was only 26 years old.
Two days later, another blow followed: Vanessa accepted the offer of Clive Bell, one of the members of the Bloomsbury Circle, and Virginia was left alone with her brother Adrian. In 1907 she wrote "Memoirs", where she tells about family history and her attitude towards it. The book was officially written for the Bells' first child, but it was actually an attempt at psychological self-therapy.
In 1912 Virginia married journalist and writer Leonard Wolfe, a regular at the Bloomsbury gatherings. It was a marriage that required mutual tolerance. Virginia could not overcome the frigidity, which was the result of the harassment of her stepbrothers in childhood, and therefore the physical closeness of the spouses, according to Wolfe herself, brought both disappointment and lasted no more than a month. Marriage has become an intellectual union of people who respect each other.
Leonard created almost ideal conditions for his wife's writing. In 1915 her first novel, Away by the Sea, was published. It can be said without exaggeration that in this marriage Leonard played the role of a caring wife.
However, even in this happy marriage, thoughts of parents did not leave Virginia. In 1927 she published To the Lighthouse, in which she tried to recreate the characters of Julia and Leslie Stephen as Mrs and Mr Ramsay. And although the experience was successful, the work did not rid the writer of obsessive thoughts about her father. Until her death, Sir Leslie did not leave her consciousness.
It can be said without exaggeration that the anger caused by the family tyranny of the father, as well as the unequal conditions of material support and education established in the family in relation to boys and girls, formed the basis of Wolfe's feminist works.
The patriarchal order in one's own family gave rise to a rejection of the patriarchal order in society, which was reflected in two essays by Virginia, which became classics of feminist criticism: "One Room" (1929) and "Three Guineas" (1938). In the last essay, in particular, she assigns to the society, organized according to the laws of patriarchy, all responsibility for the now real threat of the Second World War.
Like EM Forster in her Notes on the English Character, Virginia sees the flaws of society in a rigid educational system based on merciless competition. It is this system that brings up men to be cruel, merciless and devoid of imagination. In the same education system, she saw the roots of all the terrible qualities of her father's character.
In the first months of the war, the image of her father again occupies her thoughts. In April 1940 she writes in her diary:
As a child, I condemn him, as a 58-year-old woman - I understand, that is, I want to say - I am tolerant. Perhaps both views are correct?
But even writing a memoir did not help Virginia get rid of the demons of the past. The nervous breakdowns became more and more frequent.
In addition, continental Europe was engulfed in war, and the threat of an invasion of Nazi troops into British territory was quite real. In London, during the bombing, the house of the Wolves was destroyed, a library full of rare books was destroyed - for Virginia this was not a sign of personal loss, but the collapse of culture and civilization as a whole. Leonard was a Jew, in the event of an invasion of German troops, his fate would be sad. Virginia and Leonard agreed that as soon as the invasion was announced, they would commit suicide together.
Throughout 1940-1941, Wolfe's mental state deteriorated. She suffered from headaches, heard voices, fell into incredible irritability. Leonard several times invited the then-famous psychiatrist Octavia Wilberforce, who noted the deterioration in Virginia's condition, but could not help.
According to modern psychiatrists and psychologists, who carefully studied the history of Wolfe's illness from surviving documents and the memoirs of contemporaries, the writer suffered from a serious form of manic-depressive psychosis, in which the stages of mania (i.e., mental elation, a surge of physical and creative strength) alternate with stages depression (complete apathy, physical and emotional depression, often accompanied by suicidal syndrome).
Perhaps the cause of the disease was a brain tumor, but the level of medicine and especially diagnostics at that time was not as high as it is today, therefore, Wolfe's treatment was reduced mainly to increased nutrition and complete rest - that is, just to the fact that what she hated the most.
On March 28, 1941, leaving a farewell letter to Leonard, Virginia drowned herself in the Ouse River near their country home in Sussex. Many acquaintances of the Wolfe couple believed that this death was a deliverance for Leonard. Virginia herself believed so, which she wrote about in her suicide note.
Interestingly, until the 1960s, in the annotations on the covers of the books of Virginia Wolfe, the writer was recommended as "the daughter of Sir Leslie Stephen and the wife of Leonard Wolfe", that is, it was believed that these men made a more significant contribution to the culture of Great Britain than Virginia herself. However, the situation soon changed, and today no one doubts the fact that it was Wolfe's work that largely determined the vectors of development of world prose in the twentieth century and became a turning point in the formation of such a phenomenon as women's prose.
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Virginia wolfe
Virginia Wolfe
English writer and literary critic. Author of the novels "Mrs. Dalloway" (1925), "Towards the Lighthouse" (1927), "Waves" (1931), etc.
In the fate and work of Virginia Wolfe, two centuries seemed to have crossed, creating a discharge of unusual destructive force, disastrous for the soul, carrying the contradictions of two opposite eras, disastrous for a person who paradoxically accommodated the Victorian customs of "good old England" and the refinement of the vices of decadence in his character. With bewilderment, one can read about the twists and turns of the biography of Virginia Woolf - how could this woman not explode earlier, as she could endure six decades, being consumed by such a sharp mental split. And for what, for what sins it was she who fell the dubious "honor" of breeding a "specimen" of the 20th century.
Lady Wolfe, née Stephen, came from an elite, aristocratic family in Great Britain. Her father is a prominent figure in the social and literary life of England: radical, free-thinker, atheist, philosopher, historian, literary critic. Leslie's first marriage to Stephen was Thackeray's youngest daughter, Harriet Miriam. She died young in 1878, and Leslie married a second time - his chosen one was Harriet's close friend, Julia Duckworth. Virginia became the third child of Leslie Stephen and Julia.
Art for Virginia Stephen was as everyday as it was for any child - pranks and games.
Virginia Wolfe
She grew up amid constant conversations and disputes about literature, painting, music. In her father's house, aspiring writers were blessed and established authorities were overthrown. And although Virginia, according to the unshakable Victorian principles of her father, received a purely home education, the opportunities to have such teachers, which our heroine instructed, can envy even Oxford students. However, if the intellectual upbringing in the Stephen's house was striving for the highest level, then the situation with mental well-being was very alarming.
In her most significant novel, To the Lighthouse, Virginia to some extent reveals the atmosphere of her own childhood - a nervous, harsh Mr. Ramsay, similar to Leslie Stephen, carries a constant tension, constantly looking for something to find fault with, spends time in scholarly conversations. This cold world of abstractions, logical constructions, intolerance and self-affirmation, on the one hand, stimulated the intellectual development of children in the family, on the other hand, it killed a living soul, suppressed sensuality. The impressionable, talented Virginia's fatherly rationalism was worth such internal stress that she paid for it with mental health and constant nervous breakdowns.
Behind the façade of outward aristocratic decency hid, apparently, even more complex problems faced by little Virginia.
Virginia Wolfe
According to one version, from the age of six, she was sexually harassed by her adult uncles. These childhood impressions brought into the world of our heroine a painful fear of physical love. In any case, when Lytton Strachey, one of Virginia's close friends in the literary fraternity, proposed to her, she did not look at the fact that he was reputed to be a notorious homosexual, and agreed. True, the next day, the newly-minted groom with horror refused to marry, but the very opportunity to marry a man whom she liked only for wit and intelligence betrayed Virginia's true attitude towards sex with men.
And if not a single romance between Wolfe and representatives of the opposite sex is known, many stories and memories of our heroine have been replenished with rumors of love for women. Already at the age of sixteen, Virginia was carried away by her friend, who was close to her in literary tastes. And at twenty, a passionate epistolary novel connected the girl with a thirty-seven-year-old lady from an aristocratic house. "When you wake up at night, you still feel, I hope, as I hug you," - Virginia confided in her friend a very intimate fantasies. But still, this novel was only platonic, although it lasted for ten whole years.
After the death of his father, the family moved to Bloomsbury - an area in central London, where artists, musicians and writers traditionally settled.
Virginia Wolfe
This place was destined to play a significant role in the history of English culture in the 20th century. Leslie Stephen's children retained the spirit of aesthetic conversation and intellectual competition that reigned during their father's life. Sons, Toby and Andrian, daughters, Vanessa and Virginia, formed the nucleus of the circle, or salon, which was called Bloomsbury. Young people gathered in the Stephens' house, who sat up hoarsely after midnight, arguing about art. The mere listing of the names of the salon's regulars indicates the level of these meetings: the poet Thomas Eliot, the philosopher Bertrand Russell, the literary critic Roger Fry, the novelist Edward Forster ...
When a newcomer came here for the first time, it was uncomfortable. It seemed to young David Lawrence, later a classic of 20th century English literature, that he was going crazy with endless conversations, which were not so easy to fit into. In this salon, Freud was revered as a prophet and Carl Jung's theory of archetypes was studied. According to these new teachings, it turned out that the region of the subconscious is no less important than the sphere of the conscious - impulses, unfulfilled desires, sexual problems are hidden here, there are certain unchanging models of behavior and thinking that make modern man akin to his ancient ancestors. All these ideas were taken into account by young writers, melted into artistic discoveries.
Virginia Wolfe
The creative credo of young Virginia matured in the Bloomsbury salon.
Her first published stories caused an explosion of criticism, bewilderment of the reader and uncertainty of the author. "Haunted House", "Monday, Tuesday ...", "Spot on the Wall", "String Quartet" could hardly even be called stories due to the complete lack of plot, temporal and geographical certainty. The heroes, like shadows, glided on the periphery of the verbal construction. It was like prose poems, blanks for future works, lyric essays, and rather described the psychological state of the author, revealed the anatomy of thinking, than represented a story in the classical sense of the word. Virginia Woolf was at the forefront of the prose of the 20th century, which today has received the pretentious name: "stream of consciousness."
She wrote stories all the time. If any event or impression attracted her attention, she immediately wrote them down. Then she returned to the sketches more than once, and it turned out to be a finished work, but due to her extreme notoriousness and fear of criticism, she did not send her things to print for a long time, constantly redoing something, improving it.
A biased attitude towards her own work explains the fact that Virginia published her first novel quite late, after writing which she fell into a severe depression for many months with auditory hallucinations and was forced to undergo treatment in a psychiatric clinic.
Virginia Wolfe
By then she was already married to Leonard Wolfe, a Bloomsbury man.
Probably, it will be difficult for an average person to believe that, despite the lack of sexual attraction to each other, this family has lived in harmony for almost thirty years. Leonard, like no one else, understood his "difficult" wife. When, after the first wedding night, her husband felt that Virginia felt a painful disgust for physical intimacy with him, he stopped intimate communication with her forever, and the writer was grateful to him for this all her life. No wonder she wrote in her suicide message: "It seems to me that two people could not have lived a happier life than we lived with you."
And yet, sometimes Virginia envied those who, with their talent, were not obliged, unlike herself, to pay for the simplest female well-being. She looked longingly after her own sister Vanessa - a gorgeous woman with a bunch of children. About herself Virginia once said: "I am neither one nor the other. I am not a man, and not a woman." At first, she dreamed of motherhood, love, passion, of which the blooming appearance of Vanessa constantly reminded her, but Virginia could not get rid of her aversion to sex. "This hazy world of literary images, like a dream, without love, without a heart, without passion, without sex - this is the world I like, this is the world that interests me."
And yet Virginia had an affair.
Virginia Wolfe
Thirty-year-old Vita Sackville West fell in love with 40-year-old Virginia. This feeling became mutual. Vita wrote well and came from an aristocratic family. Their love affair lasted 5 years. In Wolfe's life, this heartfelt affection was perhaps the only one in which there was an element of sex. Leonard had no objection to this, since the relationship between the two women posed no threat to marriage. In a letter to Vita, Virginia wrote: "It's still good to be a eunuch like me." It was during the years of association with Vita that Virginia wrote her best books.
The novel "Mrs. Dalloway" brought Wolfe fame in literary circles. Like all her works, the book was written with incredible effort, with many sketches and studies, which later grew into stories. Virginia was terrified of being just a formalist who might be accused of playing with words. She perceived her existence in the world too tragically to play flirtatiously with literary images. “I set to work on this book, hoping that I could express my attitude to creativity in it ... We must write from the very depths of feeling - this is how Dostoevsky teaches. And me? Maybe I, so loving words, just play with them? No, I don’t think. In this book I have too many tasks - I want to describe life and death, health and madness, I want to critically portray the existing social system, to show it in action ...
Virginia Wolfe
And yet, am I writing from the depths of my feelings? .. Will I be able to convey reality? Thinking about the writers of the eighteenth century. They were open, not buttoned like we are now. "
What is the novel about? Yes, in general, about one single June day in 1923. The socialite, Clarissa Dalloway, spends the whole day busy with the upcoming evening reception. Her husband, Richard, an MP, has breakfast with the influential Lady Bruti and discusses important political news. Their daughter, Elizabeth, is having tea in a cafe with a very unsympathetic history teacher who has long been a friend of hers.
The literary tradition did not include Virginia Wolfe among the authors who painted a dramatic portrait of the "lost generation" in their works. But the feeling of the meaninglessness of life, the madness that swept the world on the eve of World War II, find in the person of the writer their faithful confessor. The suicide of the crazy hero of the novel "Mrs. Dalloway" - Septimus - is a metaphor for the tragedy of her generation, crushed by the gigantic upheavals of two eras. For her, as for an Englishwoman brought up in a traditional Victorian spirit, the loss of a fortress home is especially acute. The meaning of the house is widely understood by Virginia. The house as the material carrier of the dwelling, and the house as the guardian of the soul of its inhabitants.
Wolfe's books are a prediction of today's women's destinies, and therefore partly a warning.
We will not find an answer to the question "What to do?" Yes, Virginia at the beginning of the 20th century did not even imagine the scope of the feminist movement and its possible losses. But the writer was endowed with the gift of hearing the inner voices of her heroines, and therefore it is worth listening to her precepts. She, by her mental anguish, was burned in a fire intended for a woman who, due to circumstances, was excommunicated from a man, from a family, and ultimately from home, knew what she was talking about. Wolfe said that a woman needs to be courageous, remember that marriage is an everyday spiritual feat, that the relationship of spouses is very fragile, and therefore mutual tolerance must be learned. And one more thing: although the 20th century is the century of intelligence, Virginia warned against perceiving reason as a panacea. More often beauty can be more effective. Wolfe was an artist who always strived, both in life and in work, to find a harmony that she never felt.
But you shouldn't conclude that Virginia was a gloomy, melancholic woman. On the contrary, she became the center of attention in any company. Witty, lively, always aware of all literary and political events, finally, just a beautiful woman, she gave the impression of a strong, whole person. Few people knew how she suffered from depression and hallucinations, how her fears tormented her, and how she terrorized her family.
All those who knew Virginia from literary salons were shocked by her departure. Suicide did not fit so well with her appearance as a woman who insatiably loved life.
Like Shakespeare's Ophelia, she threw herself into the river, and even ordered her way back, put stones in the pockets of her dress.
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Years of life: from 01/25/1882 to 03/28/1941
English writer, literary critic. A leading figure in modernist literature in the first half of the 20th century.
She was born in London to the family of the famous literary critic Sir Leslie Stephen and Julia Duckworth. Virginia was Leslie and Julia's third child together. When Virginia was 13 years old, she experienced the death of her mother, which was the cause of the first nervous breakdown of the writer.
Virginia's older sister Stella for some time served as the mistress of the house, but soon died. Vanessa - the next in seniority - was forced to take care of the house, but, unlike her older sister, she had a strong character and strong nerves, and could fight back her father, who was gradually turning into a despot.
In her most significant novel, To the Lighthouse, Virginia to some extent reveals the setting of her own childhood - a nervous, harsh Mr. Ramsay, similar to Leslie Stephen, carries a constant tension, constantly searches for something to find fault with, spends time in scholarly conversations. This cold world of abstractions, logical constructions, intolerance and self-affirmation, on the one hand, stimulated the intellectual development of children in the family, on the other hand, it killed a living soul, suppressed sensuality. The impressionable, talented Virginia's fatherly rationalism was worth such internal stress that she paid for it with mental health and constant nervous breakdowns.
Behind the façade of outward aristocratic decency lurked the seemingly more complex problems that little Virginia faced. According to one version, from the age of six, she was sexually harassed by her adult uncles. These childhood experiences brought a morbid fear of physical love into Wolfe's world.
Sir Leslie Stephen died of cancer on February 22, 1904. All his children, except Virginia, took this fact with great relief. However, Virginia did not feel completely free even after the death of her father. Until the end of her life, she led incessant internal disputes with him, then accusing, then justifying him.
Immediately after the death of his father, the family moved from expensive respectable Kensington to the cheap bohemian district of Bloomsbury, which soon became famous throughout the world thanks to a circle of intellectuals, whose center soon became Virginia. Here, in disputes with representatives of a new, young British culture, she honed her skills, formed her aesthetic program.
In 1905 she began her writing career. Her first publications were articles and reviews for the literary supplement to The Times and other publications devoted to the works of classics and contemporary authors.
However, a series of misfortunes does not leave the Stephen family. In 1906, Vanessa, Virginia, Toby and Adrian set off on a trip to Greece, during which Toby, Virginia's beloved brother who had great promise in mathematics, contracted typhus and died on his return to London. He was only 26 years old.
In 1912 Virginia married journalist and writer Leonard Wolfe, a regular at the Bloomsbury gatherings. It was a marriage that required mutual tolerance. The physical closeness of the spouses, according to Wolfe herself, brought both disappointment and lasted no more than a month. Marriage has become an intellectual union of people who respect each other.
In 1917, the couple founded the Hogarth Press publishing house, from where all the writer's works were published. Virginia typed and edited the texts herself. The publishing house, which was initially unprofitable, became a reliable source of income for the Wolfe family. Leonard created ideal conditions for both of them to work, he strongly supported Virginia.
Virginia published her first novel, Journey Outward, in 1915. The most famous works of her pen are the novels "Night and Day", "Mrs. Dalloway", "To the Lighthouse". During the years of her work, two biographies, collections of stories and other works have also been published.
In the novels of Virginia Wolfe, much attention was paid not to specific events, but to the depiction of mental states. The reader of her novels is immersed in the thoughts of different characters, and these internal monologues help to see different points of view on the same events.
In the biography of Wolfe, one love affair is notable: thirty-year-old Vita Sackville-West fell in love with 40-year-old Wolfe. This feeling became mutual. Vita wrote well and came from an aristocratic family. Their love affair lasted 5 years. Leonard had no objection to this, since the relationship between the two women posed no threat to marriage. It was during the years of association with Vita that Virginia Woolf wrote her best books; in particular, the relationship with Vita and resentment against her became the basis of the novel Orlando, in which the main character turns into a woman.
The novel "Mrs. Dalloway" brought Wolfe fame in literary circles. Like all her works, the book was written with incredible effort, with many sketches and studies, which later grew into stories. Virginia was terrified of being just a formalist who might be accused of playing with words. She perceived her existence in the world too tragically to play flirtatiously with literary images. “I set to work on this book, hoping that I could express my attitude to creativity in it ... We must write from the very depths of feelings - this is how Dostoevsky teaches. And I? Maybe I, so loving words, just play with them? No I do not think so. In this book I have too many tasks - I want to describe life and death, health and madness, I want to critically depict the existing social system, show it in action ... And yet, am I writing from the depths of my feelings? .. Will I be able to convey reality? Thinking about the writers of the eighteenth century. They were open, not buttoned, as we are now. "
Virginia Wolfe was very demanding of herself and her work, she rewrote novels dozens of times. She stopped keeping a diary only during illness - the diaries were published as a separate edition in 4 volumes, and her correspondence also constitutes a significant part of the writer's legacy.
Virginia's novels were published not only in England, but also in America. With the outbreak of World War II, fear for her Jewish husband caused seizures and headaches to return. Their London home was destroyed in the bombing. Wolfe's mental state worsened. She suffered from headaches, heard voices, fell into incredible irritability, tried to kill herself several times.
According to modern psychiatrists, the writer suffered from a serious form of manic-depressive psychosis, in which the stages of mania (that is, mental recovery, a surge of physical and creative strength) alternate with stages of depression (complete apathy, physical and emotional depression, often accompanied by suicidal syndrome).
After completing the manuscript for the last (posthumously published) novella Between the Acts, Wolfe fell into a deep depression. Believing that she could no longer torment Leonard and that without her it would be easier for him, Virginia Wolfe, leaving a letter to her husband and sister, put on a coat on March 28, 1941, filled her pockets with stones and drowned in the Ouse River, not far from their home in Sussex. The bodies were found by the children two weeks after the tragedy. On April 18, 1941, the writer's husband buried her cremated remains under an elm tree in the garden of a house in Sussex.
In a suicide note to her husband, Virginia wrote: “My dear, I'm sure I'm going crazy again. I feel that we will not be able to relive this. And this time I won't get better. I'm starting to hear voices. I can not concentrate. Therefore, I made the only correct decision and do what seems best to me. With you I was absolutely happy. You were everything to me that I could only dream of. I don’t think that two people could have been happier than we were until this terrible disease came. I can't fight anymore. I know that I ruin your life, that without me you could work. And you can, I'm sure. See, I can't even find the right words. I can not read. I just want you to know that I owe you all the happiness in my life. You have been immensely patient with me and incredibly kind. Everyone knows this. If anyone could save me, it would be you. Everything is gone. Everything has left me except the confidence in your kindness. I just can't ruin your life anymore. I don't think that anyone in this world would be happier than we were. "
(née Virginia Adeline Stephens) (1882-1941) - English writer, critic, literary critic, translator, one of the founders of the Hogarth Press. She was the first in the world literature of the 20th century to dare to draw attention to the uniqueness of the social experience of women, helping them to become "visible" in society and to realize the possibility of psychological frankness, hitherto forbidden for them.
She was born on January 25, 1882 in London, in the fashionable area of the English aristocrats - Kensington. Father, Leslie Stephens, was a popular, successful writer and critic, philosopher and literary historian, and his mother, Lady Julia Duckworth, was a socialite, friend of Maryam Harriett, daughter William Thackeray... House Steffens was the most famous literary and art salon of artistic London. It talked about the Impressionists, about the theory of the American psychologist William Joyce, with whose light hand the concept of "stream of consciousness" came into use; were read by works Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, it was visited by writers David Herbert Lawrence, Henry James. The Stephens' four children were brought up in an environment where everyone "had free access to a large library, where no books were hidden from anyone."
All this prosperity collapsed when Virginia was 13 years old. She first experienced an attempted rape by her cousins who were visiting the house. This marked the beginning of a persistent dislike for men and for the physical side of relationships with them throughout Virginia's life. Shortly thereafter, her mother died suddenly of pneumonia. A nervous, impressionable girl out of despair tried to commit suicide. She was saved, but deep, lingering depressions have since become a part of her life. She suffered from a feeling of insecurity: the brothers with whom she spent her childhood entered the University of Cambridge, but she stayed at home with her sister.
When her father died in 1904, Virginia with her sister Vanessa and brothers decided to sell the house and move from Kensington to the block where London's bohemian Bloomsbury lived. She wanted to make the new house the beginning of a new life - following the example of her mother, Virginia founded something like a literary salon. Since 1905, she regularly wrote for the Literary Supplement to the Times, and her essays were popular. The new death - of her brother Tobias in 1906 - was another terrible blow and plunged her into yet another disappointment.
After Virginia's sister married in 1907 and left home in Bloomsbury, Virginia with her second brother, Adrienne changed apartment again. In a new location, Fitzroy Square, she became the soul of the so-called "Bloomsbury group." Formed as a collective of freely united poets ( Thomas Eliot), literary scholars (Roger Fry), writers (Edward M. Forster), philosophers ( Bertrand Russell), as well as like-minded economists and art critics (most of them were homosexuals), this group arose from the circle of acquaintances that the Virginia brothers acquired while studying at Cambridge. Influenced by the ideas of the philosopher G.E. Moore, they proceeded from the fact that the ideals of friendship, love and mutual attraction are dominant and that they can flourish only when sincerity and freedom prevail over pretense and pretense. The attention of people to each other was extolled by the group as the highest goal, the motto was the words of the writer E. Forster "Nothing can replace communication".
In 1912, the Cambridge graduate critic Leonard Wolfe appeared among the members of the Bloomberg Group. In the same year - honestly declaring that she was disgusted with physical intimacy with a man - Virginia married him. The marriage bond that united Virginia and Leonard for 29 years became a model of mutual respect and emotional support.
Leonard actively supported his wife's desire for literary creativity. Thanks to him, she took place as a writer. Together with her husband, Virginia founded the Hogarth Press publishing house, was engaged in translations, publishing in England and Russian classics: Ivan Sergeevich Aksakov , Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy , Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev .
While working on her first novel, The Journey, Wolfe suffered another serious nervous breakdown, which in 1915 brought her to another suicide attempt. However, she recovered, and in 1919 she published what she had written. The success of The Voyage became the basis for the continuation of literary activity: in the same year W. Wolfe's novel Night and Day was published, followed by Jacob's Room (1922) and Mrs. Deloway (1925). For "ordinary" women, love affairs and the birth of children became milestones in life at this time, with Virginia her books turned into such milestones. She wrote a lot, tirelessly, in addition to novels, in 1925-1940, she released several works on literary criticism, including literary criticism: the essays "The Ordinary Reader", "The Ordinary Reader: Part Two" and "The Death of a Moth" (published after her death , in 1942). The literary heritage of Virginia also includes dozens of essays, thousands of letters, five thousand pages of diary entries and, of course, stories ... W. Wolfe became the creator of a new style of writing - where the plot can end in mid-sentence, where instead of the usual world of action there is a "secret script of the soul" where the author's writing is driven by more feelings and is similar to watercolor sketches. Innovative in the ways of presenting the passing worldly vanity, displaying the inner world of heroes, describing the many ways of refraction of consciousness, the works of Virginia Woolf entered the golden fund of literary modernism and were enthusiastically received by many contemporaries. Recognition and fame, however, did not please Virginia, and only the support of her husband and sister forced her to continue to pursue the writing craft.
She was always more emotionally attached to women: to her sister Vanessa (her beloved "almost to the point of mental incest"), her friends (M. Wang, V. Dickinson, E. Smith). After falling in love with Victoria (Wita) Sackville West in 1922, Virginia became involved in a relationship that lasted almost 20 years. In 1928, Wolfe portrayed her friend in the novel Orlando, a phantasmagoric biography in which the life of an ephemeral protagonist, who becomes a man or a woman, continues for three centuries. Victoria's son called this work "the most charming love letter in literary history." Emotionally frank letters and works of Virginia Woolf give grounds for the conclusion about the non-traditional sexual orientation of the writer - a consequence of the tragedy experienced in childhood, the fear that she experienced in front of men and their society. She fell in love with women - but at the same time she abhorred all forms of intimacy, including with them, could not stand hugs, did not even allow handshakes. Wolfe experienced romance with women in her imagination, so the inclusion of Woolf in the circle of "the most famous lesbians in world history" (and her name is often mentioned in reference books in this context) seems incorrect.
The innovative works of Virginia Woolf showed the writer's contemporaries ways of protesting against patriarchal foundations. Virginia's famous essay "A Room of the Own" (1929), as well as the novel "Three Guineas" (1938), are still considered the founding works of feminist literature to this day. Giving an answer to the question "What would, say, be if Shakespeare was no less gifted than him, sister? "- Wolfe came up with a mini-novel (" A Room of Own ") - a story about what would have happened if Shakespeare were a woman, how this woman would have lived and tragically ended her life - not having the opportunity to be appreciated, remaining insulted and oppressed by men.From the pages of the novel, Wolfe urged her contemporaries not to be content with "their corner in the common room" (like millions of women in the past), but "to settle down in their rooms, developing the habit of freely and openly expressing thoughts, finally recognizing the fact that the supports are not, we are walking alone ... "
Suffering from the fact that she did not take place as a mother, Virginia was passionately attached to children - especially to her numerous nephews. Favorite of them was Julian - a promising poet. Both she and her husband Leonard treated him like a son. Julian's death in Spain in 1938 plunged the Wulf family into a new sea of despair. The writer again tried to go headlong into work, again and again substantiating the intrinsic value of women's life as such.
In the plans of Virginia Woolf was a new, large-scale novel "Between the Acts", which she began to write in a state of severe depression, tormented by hallucinations, night visions, nightmares. Doctors insisted on treatment in a psychiatric clinic: the night bombardment of London in early 1941, during which the writer's house was destroyed, the library burned down, her beloved husband almost died, and finally upset her nervous system. Virginia and Leonard Woolf moved to the town of Rodmall in Sussex. Deeply depressed from everything connected with the war and being mentally exhausted, Virginia began to complain to her family that all the time she "hears the voices of birds singing on the olives of Ancient Greece." Not wanting that her husband spent the rest of her life in the worries associated with her insanity, on March 28, 1941, she performed what she had repeatedly described in her works and that she had tried to put into practice more than once - she committed suicide by drowning in the Ous River.
The name of Virginia Woolf became known in Russia along with the interest in modernism in literature that was revealed during the political "thaw" of the early 1960s. Interest in her work was especially revived after the creation of a play by the American playwright Edward Albee entitled "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" (1966), based on which the film of the same name was filmed. The exalted and deeply unhappy heroine - the film analogue Wolfe - was played in it by the young E. Taylor. Both the play and the film had a very distant relationship to the real biography of the writer, but they were filled with the sharpest drama and psychologism, reaching the level of emotional exhibitionism, so characteristic of the works of the novelist and essayist Virginia Woolf, who committed suicide a quarter of a century before the creation of the play. In 2002, a new film was released on the world screen, telling about the strange and tragic life of Woolf - "The Clock", in which the role of the writer was played by N.
