Virginia Woolf

With D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce, and Aldous Huxley, Virginia Woolf repudiated the positivistic realism that she felt to have characterized certain members of the preceding generation of English novelists. Like her contemporaries, she sought and found a new way of looking at life - an original perspective, a vision of experience. Expression of this philosophical perspective in art required a new formal perspective as well, but it was at first the thought that necessitated the form, and not so much the form that determined the thought. Although much attention has been given to the thought of Lawrence, of Joyce, of Huxley, Virginia Woolf has been noticed and valued mainly as a superb stylist and writer of English prose. Yet she, profoundly as any of her contemporaries, was concerned with the philosophical as well as the purely formal problems of her art. That art - although this is arguable - may be not so great as Lawrence's or Joyce's or even Huxley's: it may be that Virginia Woolf succeeded so well because the goal she set herself was easier to reach.

What is important is that she was not simply an impressionist, a person with nothing to say who said it beautifully, but a serious artist whose main purpose in her novels was to convey a unified vision of life and experience. It seems to have been her misfortune, however, as perhaps it was Sterne's, to express herself so well - to convey this vision in so interesting a way - that many of her readers have often paid too much attention to how she writes, and too little to what she means. Again like Sterne, it was her misfortune to command a philosophical perspective that the novel proper is perhaps not suited to formalize; therefore, rather than sacrifice vision to alien form, she managed to achieve a formal perspective that could, and in her best work did, express that vision perfectly. The content - and that alone - can be used to justify its form; but the content must first be understood through an examination of its form.

To such an understanding of her thought and art, the external facts of Virginia Woolf 's life - and they alone, unfortunately, are available at the present time - are not particularly important. If and when her diaries are published in their entirety and her definitive biography is written, the student of her novels will have a great deal more with which to work; at present he can only gather together some of the relatively few known facts and speculate about their relationship to her work.

Virginia Woolf was born Adeline Virginia Stephen on January 25, 1882, the third child of Leslie Stephen and his second wife Julia Prinsep Jackson Duckworth. She was educated at home: choosing as she pleased from among the books in her father's large library; meeting such famous friends of his as George Meredith, Thomas Hardy, Henry James; learning the Greek alphabet from Walter Pater's sister. Her mother died in 1895, her father in 1904; both of them, but especially her father, influenced her work as well as her character in no small degree.

Although she had lived elsewhere, and had indeed traveled throughout Europe, Bloomsbury became Virginia Woolf 's real home. She herself became, most strangely, the center of the famous, perhaps the notorious, "Bloomsbury Group." Strangely, because - although this has not been realized -- she had intellectually very little of real importance in common with most of the other "members," who included Roger Fry, Lytton Strachey, Clive and Vanessa Bell, Raymond Mortimer, and possibly David Garnett. Stephen Spender, having named these persons as the core of the group, calls it "the most constructive and creative influence on English taste between the two wars." Virginia Woolf was, it would seem, simply a gracious hostess to this interesting and variegated group of persons. In 1907, as a matter of fact, she was not even that: the group met on Thursday evenings in her large workroom, but she herself was usually very silent, torn between extreme shyness and silence and "sudden outbursts of scathing criticism." This, then, is one version of the "Bloomsbury Group."