mdernism and Virginia Woolf
INTRODUCTION
The English writer Virginia Woolf (1882- 1941) has become one of the most important writers from modernism. She represents many of the characteristics that were drawn during this time. In word of Ruth Weeb, ‘Virginia Woolf attracts some of the most diverse responses of any twentieth-century writer’ (6). Ranging from the criticism to her feminist views to resentment to her social class and supposed snobbery.
Woolf was born into a privileged family; her father, Leslie Stephen, was an eminent scholar and her mother, Julia Jackson, came from a highly educated background. Even though, at her time, women were not send to school; she was homeschooled from young age, and had access to books at home.
Her personal life was no stranger to emotional issues; she had several nervous breakdowns during her life, and suffered from depression. Virginia Woolf’s life ended suddenly in 1941 when she drowned herself in the river Ouse. She believed she was losing her mind. The suicide note left for her husband, Leonard Woolf, will be used as a primary source in this paper.
She was best known at her time for her novels and literary criticism. Besides the novel, she explored other ways of writing – journals, letters, short stories, and drama are some among them. A common characteristic in her work is her character´s complexity; Woolf believed that we are but a multitude of selves that interact and sometimes conflict. Weeb observes that Woolf ‘recognized that she occasionally contradicted herself, and she consciously gave this tendency to characters in her novels’ (6).
As one of the major modernist writers in prose, she developed writing techniques such as the interior monologue and the stream of consciousness; techniques that helped her to express this multiplicity in her characters. And show their inner thought and states. The particular Woolf’s novel that concerns my analysis is To the Lighthouse. This novel was published in 1927, twelve years later than
The English writer Virginia Woolf (1882- 1941) has become one of the most important writers from modernism. She represents many of the characteristics that were drawn during this time. In word of Ruth Weeb, ‘Virginia Woolf attracts some of the most diverse responses of any twentieth-century writer’ (6). Ranging from the criticism to her feminist views to resentment to her social class and supposed snobbery.
Woolf was born into a privileged family; her father, Leslie Stephen, was an eminent scholar and her mother, Julia Jackson, came from a highly educated background. Even though, at her time, women were not send to school; she was homeschooled from young age, and had access to books at home.
Her personal life was no stranger to emotional issues; she had several nervous breakdowns during her life, and suffered from depression. Virginia Woolf’s life ended suddenly in 1941 when she drowned herself in the river Ouse. She believed she was losing her mind. The suicide note left for her husband, Leonard Woolf, will be used as a primary source in this paper.
She was best known at her time for her novels and literary criticism. Besides the novel, she explored other ways of writing – journals, letters, short stories, and drama are some among them. A common characteristic in her work is her character´s complexity; Woolf believed that we are but a multitude of selves that interact and sometimes conflict. Weeb observes that Woolf ‘recognized that she occasionally contradicted herself, and she consciously gave this tendency to characters in her novels’ (6).
As one of the major modernist writers in prose, she developed writing techniques such as the interior monologue and the stream of consciousness; techniques that helped her to express this multiplicity in her characters. And show their inner thought and states. The particular Woolf’s novel that concerns my analysis is To the Lighthouse. This novel was published in 1927, twelve years later than