Preview

The Widow and the Parrot

Powerful Essays
Open Document
Open Document
433 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
The Widow and the Parrot
The Widow and the Parrot
Virginia Woolf

Author’s Background
(1882-1941) British writer. Virginia Woolf became one of the most prominent literary figures of the early 20th century, with novels like Mrs. Dalloway (1925), Jacob's Room (1922), To the Lighthouse (1927), and The Waves (1931).
Woolf learned early on that it was her fate to be "the daughter of educated men." In a journal entry shortly after her father's death in 1904, she wrote: "His life would have ended mine... No writing, no books: "inconceivable." Luckily, for the literary world, Woolf's conviction would be overcome by her itch to write.
Virginia Woolf was born Adeline Virginia Stephen on January 25, 1882, in London. Woolf was educated at home by her father, Sir Leslie Stephen, the author of the Dictionary of English Biography, and she read extensively. Her mother, Julia Duckworth Stephen, was a nurse, who published a book on nursing. Her mother died in 1895, which was the catalyst for Virginia's first mental breakdown. Virginia's sister, Stella, died in 1897; and her father dies in 1904.
Virginia Woolf died on March 28, 1941 near Rodmell, Sussex, England. She left a note for her husband, Leonard, and for her sister, Vanessa. Then, Virginia walked to the River Ouse, put a large stone in her pocket, and drowned herself. Children found her body 18 days later.
Virginia married Leonard Wolf in 1912. Leonard was a journalist. In 1917 the she and her husband founded Hogarth Press, which became a successful publishing house, printing the early works of authors such as Forster, Katherine Mansfield, and T. S. Eliot, and introducing the works of Sigmund Freud. Except for the first printing of Woolf's first novel, The Voyage Out (1915), Hogarth Press also published all of her works.
Virginia Woolf's works are often closely linked to the development of feminist criticism, but she was also an important writer in the modernist movement. She revolutionized the novel with stream of consciousness, which

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Good Essays

    Zora Neale Hurston was an influential author, which impacted and influenced the Harlem Renaissance. The wonderful composer was born on January 7, 1891, in Notasulga, Alabama, and died on January 28, 1960. She was the daughter of two former slaves John Hurston, who was a pastor, and Lucy Ann Hurston. At an early age, the magnificent writer and her family moved to Eatonville, Florida and soon after her mother died. Most of her compositions takes place in Eatonville, Florida, since it was the place where she grew up and experienced most of her childhood. After the death of Zora Neale Hurston, her father remarried and sent Zora Neale Hurston to a boarding school in Jacksonville, Florida. However, her family could not afford to pay her tuition…

    • 237 Words
    • 1 Page
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Throughout Parrot in the Oven mi vida by Victor Martinez there are stories of a young chicano male living in poverty with a dysfunctional family unable to provide examples that every child needs growing up. The child is faced with dealing with the death of his grandmother, his sister's miscarriage, and initiation into a local gang. Many of the experiences that Manuel lives through were also experienced by Victor Martinez growing up. In a sense, Victor Martinez is using this group of stories to tell the reader the lessons he has learned growing up from such a poverty stricken childhood.…

    • 303 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    This also allows her to become conscious of women roles in society and teaches her on how to express herself in these problems. And in today’s literature, she is known for being a stand out and…

    • 499 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Born on June 7, 1909, in Westfield, New Jersey, Virginia wasn’t the science type from the start. Since she was a kid, she learned to play music from her family. She even played in the orchestra all throughout high school. When she graduated high school in 1925, she realized she wanted to be a doctor so she headed off to Mount Holyoke College and graduated in 1929.…

    • 575 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Virginia Woolf is a British writer born in 1882 and she died a horrific death in 1941. She jumped unto River Ouse wearing an overcoat filled with rocks. She committed suicide as she was depressed and has a pessimistic feeling towards life due to a mental illness she has been cursed with. She wrote ‘The Death of the Moth’ in 1942. This essay contains a wide variety of rhetorical devices that makes it intriguing. Although the essay is short, she wrote a detailed story with an underlying metaphor.…

    • 505 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    In comparing the three authors and the literary works of women authors, Kate Chopin (1850 -1904), "The Awakening", Charlotte Perkins Gilman 's (1860-1935), "The Yellow Wallpaper", and Edith Wharton 's (1862-1937) "Souls Belated", many common social issues related to women are brought to light, and though subtly pointed out are an outcry against the conventions of the time. In these three stories, which were written between 1899 and 1913, the era was a time in which it seems, women had finally awaken to realize their social oppression and were becoming rebellious in their pursuit of freedom from the male-dominated societal convention in which they existed. They commenced viewing their social stature as unjustly inferior, and they realized that these conventions placed deterrents on their intellectual and personal growth, and on their freedom to function as an independent person. All three of these women authors have by their literary works, voiced their strong unfavorable feelings about the patriarchal society in which they lived.…

    • 968 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Virginia Woolf’s - “Shakespeare’s Sister” Virginia Woolf, an extremely gifted writer contemplates…

    • 693 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Virginia Woolf spent many of her childhood summers in a seaside village in Cornwall, England. In an excerpt from her memoirs from her childhood summers, Woolf reminisces on fishing trips with her father and her brother. Woolf utilizes language in order to convey the lasting significance by using punctuation, diction, and choppy phrases…

    • 535 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    English 103 Essay

    • 306 Words
    • 2 Pages

    married to 13 year old cousin, Virginia Clemm on May 16, 1836. Virginia died in 1847…

    • 306 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was born on December 10, 1830 and died on May 15, 1886, she was born and died in the same house and it was called the Homestead. The Homestead was located in Amherst, Massachusetts. Dickinson was a well-known, great American poet during her time. Growing up Dickinson had very good education she studied at Amherst Academy for seven years of her youth and then proceeded on to attend Mount Holyoke College. Over a time period of 30 years she wrote and revised almost all the 1800s poems that have been passed down to us today, she did this all at a small desk in her bedroom. She would go to her room and write in the afternoon after she finished her household chores which were cooking, baking, gardening, and cleaning. She would started writing in the afternoon…

    • 361 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Meal and Virginia Woolf

    • 1614 Words
    • 7 Pages

    Women have had a long and arduous struggle for rights and equality throughout history. Within literary works, writers express their view on women’s proper place in society. Virginia Woolf uses contrasting tones and narrative styles to present her view on how society regards the place of women.…

    • 1614 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Mary Shelley was born on August 30, 1797, in London, England. She was born to a philosopher, journalist, and novelist, William Godwin, and a famous feminist philosopher and writer, Mary Wollstonecraft. Sadly, Shelley did not have a chance to know her mother because of her death shortly after giving birth. Therefore, she was being taken care of by her father and half-sister, Fanny Imlay. Later on, Godwin married Mary Jane Clairmont, who had two children, Charles and Claire. Shelley did not get along with her stepmother and eventually caused Clairmont to only send her children to school, not Shelley. In June 1812, she was sent to stay with the dissenting family of William Baxter in Dundee, Scotland, where she enjoyed…

    • 2191 Words
    • 9 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    She was the youngest of eight children, born in 1944 in Eatonton, Georgia, in the Deep South of the United States. When she eight, she was wounded in the eye by a shot from a BB gun fired by one of her brothers. This accident blinded her in one eye. As a result, she became more shy, thoughtful and studious; this is when she began to write stories.…

    • 471 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    Ella Fitzgerald's Legacy

    • 1553 Words
    • 7 Pages

    On April 25, 1917 in Newsport News, Virginia, Ella Fitzgerald was born in Newsport News, Virginia. She was born to William and Temperance Fitzgerald, who divorced shortly after her birth. It was not before long that Ella Fitzgerald and her mother moved to Yonkers, New York. There, they lived with her mother’s boyfriend, Joseph Da Silva. In 1923, her half-sister Frances was born. The family was not as well off as they’d hope, but to…

    • 1553 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    Old Mrs Grey

    • 510 Words
    • 3 Pages

    Born in 1882, Virginia Woolf was an author, feminist, critic, essayist, pacifist and one of the founders of the Modernist Movement in Literature. Like many of her contemporaries in the Movement, she employed a vivid and descriptive stream-of-consciousness writing style that was rooted in the popular Freudian psychoanalytic theories of the day; and in fact, both of her brothers became psychoanalysts. Woolf regarded herself as “mad”, having bouts of debilitating depression brought on by her bi-polar disorder. Within her body of work, especially in her essay “Old Mrs. Grey”, you can see the melancholic/suicidal ideation of her own psyche deployed in the character of Mrs. Grey. She did not hold with the traditional views that suicide was sinful or cowardice. In 1941, she put rocks in her coat pockets and committed suicide by drowning herself in a river near her home in Sussex. The letter she left reasoned that she was “going mad again and shan’t recover this time”. This is the background on how and possibly why Mrs. Woolf uses the imagery of hopelessness so effectively in this story as a surrogate for her own misery.…

    • 510 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays

Related Topics