A Study Of Virginia Woolf

’s Life Reflection In Her Work Essay, Research Paper

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Josh Patton

Mrs. Theresa R. Coco

College Prep English 12

8 March, 2000

“Virginia Woolf – A Life of Struggle and Affliction”

The literary critic Queenie Leavis, who had been born into the British lower middle class

and reared three children while writing and editing and teaching, thought Virginia Woolf

a preposterous representative of real women’s lives: “There is no reason to suppose Mrs.

Woolf would know which end of the cradle to stir.” Yet no one was more aware of the

price of unworldliness than Virginia Woolf. Her imaginative voyages into the waveringly

lighted depths of “Mrs. Dalloway” and “To the Lighthouse” were partly owed to a

freedom from the literal daily need of voyaging out – to the shop or the office or even the

nursery. Her husband, Leonard Woolf, believed that without the aid of her inheritance his

wife would probably not have written a novel at all.

For money guaranteed not just time but intellectual liberty. “I’m the only woman in

England free to write what I like,” she exulted in her diary in 1925, after the publication of “Mrs.

Dalloway” by the Hogarth Press, which she and Leonard had set up to free her from the demands

of publishers and editors. What she liked to write turned out to be, of course, books that gave

voice to much that had gone unheard in the previous history of writing things down: the dartings

and weavings of the human mind in the fleet elaborations of thought itself (Malcomi, 4). “Mrs.

Dalloway” is a finespun tribute to the complexities of social interaction on a single day in

London in 1923, ending with a shallow society hostess’s glittering party; it is also one of the

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written about the effects of World War I. Virginia Woolf was not without politics or fierce

worldly concerns (4-5). The diaries and letters spanning both world wars are filled with bulletins

arguments, terrors of distant armies and next-door bombs and the precariousness of the entire

civilization of which she knew herself to be a late, probably too exquisite bloom. Her art is less

direct. In her novels the resonance of great events sounds from deep within individual lives.

More than any other writer, Woolf has shown us how the most far-off tragedies become a part

of the way we think about our daily expectations, our friends, the colors of a park, the weather,

the possibility of going on or the decision not to.

The old image of Virginia Woolf the snob has largely given way to various loftier

characterizations: Virginia Woolf the literary priestess, or the Queen of ever-titillating

Bloomsbury, or – most influentially – the vital feminist whose requisite “room of her own” came

to seem the very workshop in which such books as “The Second Sex” and “The Feminine

Mystique” were later produced (Reinhart, 27). Recently, however, Woolf has been granted a

too modern female pantheon: the victim. The discovered molestations of her childhood, the bouts

of madness that led to her suicide, seem now to commend rather than to qualify her right to

speak for women. But Woolf’s personal example is in the strength and the steady professionalism

that kept her constantly at work – the overambitious failures as sweated over as the lyric

triumphs. For all her fragility as a woman, she was a writer of gargantuan appetite, and she knew

full well how much she intended to enclose in her fine but prodigious, spreading, unbreakable

webs. “Happier today than I was yesterday,” she wrote in her diary in January 1920, “having this

afternoon arrived at some idea of new form for a new novel (Reinhart, 36). Suppose one thing

of another … only not for 10 pages but for 200 or so – doesn’t that give the looseness and

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lightness I want; doesn’t that get closer and yet keep form and speed, and enclose everything,

everything.” She not only said that she was depressed, but that she was going ‘mad’ again, and

beginning to hear voices.

She could not concentrate, and believed she could not read or write. She was hopeless

and self-critical, and to the end maintained that her suicide was justified and that she would not

recover. Her suicide was planned and determined, and despite a possible failed attempt a week

earlier cannot be seen as an impulsive gesture that went wrong. When she wrote at the end of her

life that she was going mad ‘again’, she spoke the truth and from lengthy experience. She had her

first breakdown at the age of thirteen, and others when she was twenty-two, twenty-eight, and

thirty. From 1913 to 1915, from the age of thirty-one to thirty-three, she was ill so often and for

so long that permanent insanity was feared (Malcomi, 12). These attacks were severe, requiring

medical treatment and bed rest. During the rest of her life she had wilder mood swings. All this,

especially the lengthy illnesses of 1913/14 and 1915, is well documented; in particular, typic

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