VIRGINIA WOOLF in en.lesbianas.tv

Path: Lesbians : Famous lesbians : Virginia Woolf

(This is a computer translation of the original article in Spanish. It should not be regarded as complete or accurate.)

Virginia Woolf    Writer Virginia Woolf, whose name of single was Adeline Virginia Stephen, was born on January 25, 1882 in London (United Kingdom). Her father, Sir Leslie Stephen, was a literary critic and founder of the National Dictionary of Biographies. Her mother, Julia Jackson Duckworth, was a member of a publishers' family. She had three brothers, Toby, Vanessa and Adrian. They called "the goat" affectionately Virginia. Suffering from rheumatic fever and of what nowadays it knows as bipolar disorder of the personality, she was educated by tutors in her house of Hyde Park Gate, always frequented by artists, writers and politicians. At the age of nine she already showed interest in the literary expression creating a familiar newspaper that titled News of Hyde Park Gate. At the age of thirteen she lost her mother, and her stepbrother George Duckworth took charge of the family. Virginia, in addition to the depression for the death of her mother, had to support the sexual obsession that her stepbrother George was feeling towards she and her sister Vanessa, reason for the one that developed an excessive suspicion in the men, a romantic tendency to the women and frequent nervous breakdowns. Virginia's father was enduring cancer and he died in 1904, year in which Virginia would try to commit suicide for the first time taking sleeping pills. The family moved to a house in Bloomsbury and there her life was better thanks to her brother Toby, who invited to the house his intellectual partners of Cambridge (an intellectual elite that would be known as "the group Bloomsbury"). In 1904 Virginia started writing for the newspaper The Guardian and later, in 1905, for the literary supplement of The Times. One year later, in 1906, died her brother Toby, newly graduated in Cambridge, because of the typhus, which provoked her a new mental shock.

    In 1912, in spite of her doubts about the marriage, she married the economist Leonard S. Woolf, of whom she became a friend during the intellectual chats of the group Bloomsbury and with the one that founded a printing and the small publishing house Hogarth Press that would receive writers of that time like Katherine Mansfield or T.S. Elliot. In 1915 Virginia wrote her first book, titled The Voyage Out. Four years later appeared her novel Night and Day, of realistic style and where she was confronting the solitude and lack of communication of two friends, Katherine and Mary. In 1922 she published Jacob's Room, using the skill of the interior monologue and based on the life of her brother Toby. The same year the critic of art Clive Bell, another member of the group Bloomsbury, presents her to writer Vita Sackville-West, with whom she had friendship and supported a lesbian relation for years, corresponding with assiduity up to her death. In 1925 she obtains her first big success with Mrs. Dalloway, a novel consisted of a plot of thoughts of several groups of persons during the only day. Other two works that elevated her as experimental writer of the modernism was The Waves (1931) and To the lighthouse (1927)  where she was narrating the experience of several women in her struggle for finding a vision different from the reality dominated by the masculine thing. In 1928 she published Orlando, a biography that narrates a lesbian history based on the life of her lover Vita Savckville-West, to which she dedicated the book and she even included in her photos and her poems. Nevertheless, the Victorian society where she was living obviated the lesbian component of this novel. The interest of Virginia in the feminism and the rights of the women moved to her to write A Room of One's Own (1929), where she treated the obstacles and prejudices that the women must overcome to become writers, and advances the possibility of a mind male  in a woman's body. After of  The waves the quality of her works diminished, perhaps due to her crisis of anxiety. In the period between wars, like in other epochs of her life, Virginia remained in houses of rest (the psychiatric ones of the epoch) to relieve her mental problems. In Three Guineas (1938) she expresses the need of the women to claim their own history and literature in a world knocked down by the virility of the war. In addition to her novels, Virginia Wolf was also a prolific essayist, publishing more than five hundred essays in newspapers and supplements. On March 28, 1941, in full depression, she filled her pockets with stones and was thrown to the river Ouse near to her country-house in Rodmell, perishing drowned. At present Woolf is considered to be one of the most important literary figures of the XXth century.

Bibliography of Virginia Woolf

Fiction

Non Fiction

Description: biography for virginia wolf, virginia wolff, lesbian writers, life of virginia woolf, lesbian novelist, lesbian authoresses, history of virginia wolf, virginia wolfe.

Access to: History of the lesbianism - Famous lesbians

The complete text of this page has been registered legally and www.lesbianas.tv is the owner.
The copy of any part of this text without intention of appointment will be informed the pertinent authorities.

© Latin Networks Ltd Corp., 2005.