Essay about Virginia Woolf

1. Virginia Woolf
Introduction
Virginia Woolf was one of the foremost modernists of the twentieth century. During the interwar period, Woolf was
a significant figure in London literary society. She was also a central figure in the influential Bloomsbury Group of
intellectuals. Her best-known works include the novels Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927)
and Orlando (1928), and the book-length essay A Room of One's Own (1929).
Bloomsbury Group
Woolf came to know Lytton Strachey, Rupert Brooke, Leonard Woolf, Roger Fry and various other modernists.
They together formed the nucleus of the intellectual circle of writers and artists known as the Bloomsbury Group. The
members of the group were mostly from upper middle-class professional families.
The Novelist
What drove Woolf was the need to redefine the depiction of life in literature. The early novelists strove very less in
projecting the inner realities and subjectivism that the modernists celebrated. Her novels, along with those of other
modernist novelists, followed “the stream of consciousness” narrative mode. The following are some of the significant
novels of Virginia Woolf.
1. Mrs. Dalloway
Mrs. Dalloway centres on the efforts of Clarissa Dalloway, a middle-aged society woman, to organise a party. Her
life is paralleled with that of Septimus Warren Smith. Smith is a working-class veteran who has returned from the First
World War bearing deep psychological scars.
2. To the Lighthouse
To the Lighthouse centres on the Ramsay family's anticipation of and reflection upon a visit to a lighthouse. One of
the primary themes of the novel is the struggles of the painter Lily Briscoe. The novel is also a meditation upon the
lives of a nation's inhabitants in the midst of war, and of the people left behind. It also explores the passage of time,
and how women are forced by society to allow men to take emotional strength from them.
3. The Waves
The Waves presents a group of six friends whose reflections, which are closer to recitatives than to interior
monologues proper, create a wave-like atmosphere that is more akin to a prose poem than to a plot-centred novel.
4. Between the Acts
Between the Acts sums up Woolf's chief preoccupations: the transformation of life through art, sexual ambivalence
and meditation on the themes of flux of time and life. This book is the most lyrical of all her works, not only in feeling
but in style, being chiefly written in verse. Woolf's work can be understood as consistently in dialogue with
Bloomsbury, particularly its tendency towards doctrinaire rationalism.
The Critic
Woolf condemned the realist writers as “materialists” in her essay Modern Fiction. She even questioned if realism
was real. Conversely, she celebrated the modernist writers as “spiritualists”.
In 1929, Woolf published A Room of One's Own, a feminist essay based on lectures she had given at women's
colleges. In the essay, she examines women's role in literature. Virginia Woolf sets forth the idea that “A woman must
have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.”
Her other critical essays were Three Guineas and On Being Ill. Most of Woolf’s essays were published
posthumously. Today, she stands as one of the most important feminist critics.
Conclusion
Virginia Woolf’s significance lies in her poetic language and the experiments that she carried out in all her novels.
Her essays have become very famous in the recent years. She is still remembered as one of the pillars of the modernist
literature which ruptured with the two-millennium-year old traditional Western literature.