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VIRGINIA WOOLF
Virginia Woolf was a British
author, a distinguished feminist essayist, and a critic in The
Times Literary Supplement. Woolf's books were published by Hogart Press,
which she founded with her husband, the critic and writer Leonard Woolf.
Born in
London
, Woolf was
educated at home by her father, a literary critic. Woolf's youth was shadowed by
series of emotional shocks - her half-brother sexually abused her and her mother
died when she was in her early teens. Her older half sister, took her mother's
place, but died a scant two years later. Her father suffered a slow death from
cancer, and when her brother Toby died in 1906, she had a prolonged mental
breakdown. Starting in 1905, Woolf began to write for the Times
Literary Supplement. In 1912 she married the political theorist Leonard
Woolf and three years later published her first book, The
Voyage Out. In 1919 she
published Night and Day, and following that was Jacob’s Room (1922) based upon the life and death of her brother
Toby. With To the Lighthouse (1927) and The
Waves (1931) Woolf established herself as one of the leading writers of
modernism. During
the inter-war period Woolf was at the center of literary society both in
London
and at her home in Rodmell, near
Lewes
,
Sussex
. After
a final attack of mental illness Woolf loaded her pockets with stones and
drowned herself in the River Ouse near her
Sussex
home on
March 28, 1941
. Her suicide has colored interpretations of her
works, which have been read perhaps too straightly as explorations of her own
traumas. Woolf's concern with
feminist thematics are dominant in A Room
of One’s Own (1929), which deals with the obstacles and prejudices that
have hindered women writers. Three
Guineas
(1938) examined the necessity for women to make
a claim for their own history and literature.
Orlando
(1928), a fantasy novel, traced the career of
the androgynous protagonist from a masculine identity within the Elisabethan
court to a feminine identity in 1928, and was recently made into a movie. As an
essayist Woolf was prolific, publishing some 500 essays in periodicals and
collections, beginning 1905.
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