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Virginia Woolf: Bloomsbury Group
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Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) was a prolific novelist and essayist, publishing more than 500 essays. Woolf was part of the Bloomsbury group. In "A Room of One's Own" (1929), she wrote, "A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction." Woolf committed suicide in 1941. Read more about Virginia Woolf.
Virginia Woolf spent her life at the center of the most important artistic movements of her time. As a child schooled at home, her father, a noted critic, introduced her to Tennyson, Arnold, and other authors. As an adult, she saw her family’s house in the Bloomsbury district of London become the center of an intellectual and artistic circle that included some of the greatest authors, philosophers, intellectuals, and painters of the day, including E.M. Forster, Lytton Strachey, and Aldous Huxley.
Regarded by many as Virginia Woolf's masterpiece, THE WAVES, partially written in order to exorcise her private ghosts, traces the lives of a group of six people. The characters are almost imperceptibly revealed through the kaleidoscopic accumulation of their reflections on themselves and each other. The seventh character in the novel, the central yet absent Percival, represents Virginia Woolf's brother Thoby, who died in 1906.
Born in 1882, Virginia was educated at home in London by her father, Sir Leslie Stephen who gave his daughter unlimited access to his extensive library, and various tutors. It is estimated that Virginia's early losses contributed to her unstable mental health, such as her mother's death in 1895; Virginia suffered her first breakdown soon thereafter. Her half-sister, Stella, who had taken over the household following her mother's death, died two years later in 1897, followed by her father in 1904. Soon after her father's death, which prompted another breakdown, Virginia and her sister Vanessa moved to Bloomsbury, where Woolf wrote for the Times Literary Supplement. This experience helped her produce hundreds of essays and book reviews. In Bloomsbury, Virginia and Vanessa (a painter) became essential members of the Bloomsbury group, an influential gathering of intellectuals that included author E.M.
Virginia Woolf's home in Tavistock Square, Bloomsbury, became a literary and art center, attracting such diverse intellectuals as Lytton Strachey (1880–1932), Arthur Waley (1889–1966), Victoria Sackville-West (1892–1962), John Maynard Keynes (1883–1943), and Roger Fry (1866–1934). These artists, critics, and writers became known as the Bloomsbury group. Roger Fry's theory of art may have influenced Virginia's technique as a novelist. Broadly speaking, the Bloomsbury group drew from the philosophic interests of its members (who had been educated at Cambridge) the values of love and beauty as essential to life.
Woolf is fascinating, even when describing the most mundane details of daily life. Her writing style is as beautiful here as in her fiction, and so the diary is well worth reading for that alone. Plus, nearly every page contains a reference to Lytton Strachey, Dora Carrington, or some other Bloomsbury luminary. She isn't always completely truthful or straightforward, but she is always supremely entertaining. However, despite a number of very helpful footnotes, the editor cannot provide explanations and clarifications for every entry, so it helps to be somewhat familiar with Woolf's life before reading her diaries.
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