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Contribution of Virginia Woolf to 20th Century Novel: C.U. English Honours Notes

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Critically evaluate the contribution of Virginia Woolf or James Joyce to the twentieth century novel. (Calcutta University, 2013)

In order to write this answer give more focus on the Virginia Woolf's life works. Start with a short intro of 5-8 lines, then focus on life's work in next four paragraphs of about ten lines each. Carefully list out all the 9 novels written by her in 'bold' along with the year of publication. Write few lines about each and every novels written by the author. In the conclusion part use the information stated in this sample note take from the internet.

Woolf contributed significantly to prose fiction through her experiments with stream of consciousness and characterization; she also influenced critical thought through her analytical essays and reviews.

Early Life

Virginia Woolf was born on January 25, 1882, into a Victorian world and family. The third child and second daughter of Leslie and Julia Stephen, she was reared in an environment of many people and many privileges. Both her parents had been married before and widowed; therefore, the household consisted not only of Virginia and her two full brothers and sister but also of Leslie’s daughter, Laura, who was retarded, and Julia’s children, George, Stella, and Gerald Duckworth.

Leslie and Julia Stephen, though not rich, were nevertheless financially comfortable and well connected. Leslie, who had been a don at Cambridge, moved to London in his mid-thirties and became editor of a significant literary journal and eventually wrote an important work on the history of English thought. Additionally, he edited and contributed to the Dictionary of National Biography, a project that established him as one of the leading intellectuals of England. Julia was known for her remarkable physical beauty as well as her attractive and nurturing character. Together, Leslie and Julia created what Virginia later described as a happy childhood for their large family. When Julia died, however, that existence ended for Virginia, and her father’s domineering personality shaped the household and molded Virginia’s character, in a mostly painful fashion.

Following Julia’s death, Virginia suffered her first bout with mental illness. Approximately ten years later, following her father’s death and sexual attention from her half brother George, she suffered her second nervous breakdown and also attempted to kill herself by jumping from a window. Her pattern of mental imbalance was thus established by the time she and her full brothers and sister moved to a house in the Bloomsbury section of London.

Photographs of Virginia Woolf during this time and later reveal an elegant woman, graceful, tall, and fragile, a reflection of her mother’s intense physical beauty. Despite this attractiveness, which included deep-set eyes and an ethereal presence, Woolf never saw herself in that light, believing instead that she was unattractive. Uncomfortable with herself in that respect, she was nevertheless unself-conscious about her ability to converse with people, and she became one of the most famous conversationalists of London, entertaining people with her wit, provocative questions, and fantastic stories.

Because of these qualities, Woolf was an integral part of what came to be known as the Bloomsbury Group, which included Lytton Strachey, the biographer; John Maynard Keynes, the economist; Roger Fry, the art critic; and novelist E. M. Forster, who once called Woolf the Invalid Lady of Bloomsbury. Both admired and condemned by their contemporaries, this group of gifted individuals earned the reputation for being bohemian intellectuals who, in the words of their friend Stephen Spender, nourished themselves “on a diet of the arts, learning, amusement, travel, and good living.” Their relationships with one another and with Woolf became a significant part of her life and her literature.

Life’s Work

The year 1917 was an important one for Woolf, ushering in her time of literary activity. After several painful years, during which Woolf suffered from extreme depression and found herself unable to write in the way she was coming to expect from herself, she resumed contributing reviews to the Times Literary Supplement and began to write a diary which is now considered one of her major works. In 1917, Woolf and her husband, Leonard, whom she had married in 1912, also founded The Hogarth Press, which published Virginia Woolf’s novels and the works of other significant contemporaries, including T. S. Eliot. The Woolfs and Virginia herself were assuming a leadership role in the London literary world.

The first novel published by The Hogarth Press was Woolf’s Jacob’s Room, in 1922. While that book suggested some of the technical virtuosity that was to be her hallmark and contribution to modern literature, it was her subsequent work, particularly that written in the second half of the 1920’s, that most critics consider to be her greatest. The novels Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927) reveal Woolf’s concern with literary experimentation and characterization, and her critical essays collected in the first series of The Common Reader(1925) demonstrate her interest in not only writing literature but also writing about it. Still another dimension of her remarkable literary output during this time was A Room of One’s Own (1929), a series of lectures Woolf had delivered during which she made the famous comment that, to be a writer, a woman must have five hundred pounds and a room of her own.

During the 1930’s, Woolf was extremely well-known, enjoyed great prestige, and was offered many honors for her contributions to the world of letters. She continued to write novels, despite her persistent bouts with mental illness, publishing The Waves (1931), Flush: A Biography (1933), and The Years (1937), and she also produced an important feminist long essay, Three Guineas (1938). Following each publication, she was besieged by severe depression, and after writing her last book, Between the Acts (1941), she committed suicide, on March 28, by drowning herself in the River Ouse.

Summary

Virginia Woolf’s relationship to the Victorian and modern eras is dramatized by her chronology: She was born in 1882, and she died in 1941. Her literary life was spent in reacting against the nineteenth century, into which she was born, and in ushering in the twentieth century, during which she lived most of her life. In one of her most famous statements, she said that on or about December, 1910, human nature had changed, and she spent her literary career exploring and depicting that change.

In her essays she attacked what she called the “materialism” of novelists such as Arnold Bennett, H. G. Wells, and John Galsworthy, who, in her view, adhered to the traditional form of the novel and emphasized externals instead of the inner life of the self. She called for a new kind of literature that explored the consciousness through new techniques which recognized the complexities and aberrations of the psyche.

Woolf’s best novels demonstrate the ways in which she translated this theory into practice through her use of the “stream of consciousness” technique. Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and Between the Acts rely upon interior monologues and a prose style that re-creates the mental processes of the characters, usually with rhythms and images of lyric poetry. The books thus emphasize the disjointed, illogical quality of the mental-emotional life, and replicate, rather than describe, that quality.

Concerned with questions of identity, relationships, time, change, and human personality, Virginia Woolf helped shape literary history by writing about, for, and of the modern mind in the modern world.

Here are all the 9 novels written by Virginia Woolf.

Virginia Woolf wrote just nine novels, but she also left a number of volumes of non-fiction, an important volume of short stories, and an unusual work of biography, among countless essays and reviews. But what are Woolf’s best books? We’ve compiled our favourite top-ten list of Virginia Woolf’s books, with some interesting facts about each of them. What’s your personal recommendation for the best Virginia Woolf book?

10. The Years (1937). Woolf’s most popular novel during her lifetime, The Years spans over half a century from 1880 to the 1930s, chronicling the lives of one family, the Pargiters. The novel adapts an idea she had explored in several of her previous novels, notably Mrs Dalloway and the first section ofTo the Lighthouse (see below) – namely, the depiction of one day in the lives of the characters. Here, each section (which focuses on a particular year during the novel’s 50-year span) centres on just one day in that year.

9. Flush: A Biography (1933). Not strictly a novel, this ‘biography’ is – like Woolf’s other great ‘biography’, Orlando (see below) – not really non-fiction either. However, its subject is, or was, real: Victorian poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s pet dog. The cocker spaniel, Flush, is acquired by Barrett Browning and taken from the countryside to London, where he lives among the London literati before travelling out with the Brownings to Italy.

8. Between the Acts (1941). Woolf’s ninth and final novel, Between the Actswas published shortly after her suicide in 1941. Like Orlando it engages with centuries of English history (particularly literary history), in this instance in the form of a pageant play which is being put on in a small English village. Like the more famous MrsDalloway, the action of the novel takes place on a single day.

7. A Room of One’s Own(1929). Based on several lectures Woolf delivered at the University of Cambridge, A Room of One’s Own is seen as a feminist literary tract. Woolf argues that great writers are ‘androgynous’ in the sense that they contain both masculine and feminine impulses and sympathies. She also discusses how, if Shakespeare had had a sister of equal talents, ‘Judith’ Shakespeare (as Woolf chooses to call this fictional sibling) would never have made it as a poet and playwright during the Elizabethan era, because she would not have had the opportunities in terms of schooling and stage-acting that her brother enjoyed. Woolf later published a sequel to this work, Three Guineas (1938) – the idea for which supposedly came to her while she was lying musing in the bath.

6. Monday or Tuesday (1921). Woolf’s landmark collection of short stories which marked a watershed in her creative development. After two rather conventional novels, The Voyage Out (1915) and Night and Day (1919), Woolf began to experiment with short ‘stories’ or sketches as a way of trying out her new impressionistic mode of writing. The result was a handful of classic vignettes – some of them little more than a page long – such as ‘The Mark on the Wall’, ‘Kew Gardens’, and ‘A Haunted House’ (a two-page take on the ghost story).

5. Jacob’s Room (1922). After the critical success of her short stories in Monday or Tuesday, Woolf wrote her third novel, Jacob’s Room, to see if she could translate such an impressionistic style to the big canvas. Although a summary of the plot of Jacob’s Room makes the novel sound quite conventional – it follows the early life of a young man, Jacob Flanders, from childhood to maturity – the way that she goes about telling Jacob’s life is pure Woolf. We never gain a great insight into Jacob’s character, instead having to make do with glimpses of the man caught by other people, fleeting impressions of him in the train or at the next table in the restaurant. We won’t give away the ending here.

4. The Waves (1931). Perhaps the most lyrical and poetic of all Woolf’s novels, The Waves was originally titled ‘The Moths’ and comprises six monologues or ‘voices’, which are loosely linked together by a more conventional narrator-figure who describes the course of the day (yes, one day again) from sunrise to sunset. In a letter of November 1928, Woolf referred to the book as ‘an abstract mystical eyeless book: a playpoem’, rather than a novel.

3. Orlando (1928). Subtitled ‘A Biography’, this novel is a sort of fantasy version of several centuries of British history, through which the titular Orlando – a gender-switching bohemian figure – joyously moves. In part a tongue-in-cheek fantasy ‘biography’ of Woolf’s friend Vita Sackville-West, in part a response to English literary history, it’s one of Woolf’s most inventive novels.

2. To the Lighthouse (1927). Divided into three sections – perhaps in ironic homage to the classic Victorian ‘triple-decker’ novel – this, Woolf’s fifth novel, focuses on the Ramsay family and their holiday on the Isle of Skye in the early twentieth century. However, Woolf is drawing on memories of her own childhood holidays in the 1890s; the patriarch of the novel, Mr Ramsay, is reminiscent of Woolf’s own father, the Victorian man of letters Sir Leslie Stephen. Staying with the Ramsays are various other characters including the female artist Lily Briscoe, who in many ways is Woolf’s artistic stand-in in the novel.

1. Mrs Dalloway (1925). As we reveal in our post on this novel, the character of Clarissa Dalloway made her debut in print in Woolf’s first novel, The Voyage Out (1915). But ten years later Woolf would return to the character for this, her fourth – and, for our money, greatest – novel. Set over the course of one day in June 1923, the novel cleverly and poetically interfuses a number of different consciousnesses, including the title character, her old flame Peter Walsh, and the WWI veteran and shell-shock sufferer Septimus Smith.
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