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Virginia Woolf: Virginia Woolf Society
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Virginia Woolf elaborates on her views about the valuation of women's labor in a second "economics" book, Three Guineas (1938), a work that supposedly resulted from three separate requests for financial support made to her. The first was for a women's college building fund, the second for a society providing employment for professional women, and the third from a society to prevent war.
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The intensity of Virginia Woolf's poetic vision elevates the ordinary, sometimes banal settings of most of her novels (with the exception of Orlando and Between the Acts), even as they are often set in an environment of war. For example, Mrs. Dalloway (1925) centers on Clarissa Dalloway, a middle aged society woman's efforts to organize a party, even as her life is equated with Septimus Warren Smith, a soldier who has returned from the First World War bearing psychological scars.
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In addition to numerous essays2, Virginia Woolf authored two well-known book-length works that became known as sources for her socioeconomic thought. These are Three Guineas(1938) and A Room of One's Own (1929). The main themes elaborated on in these two work ... permeate the settings of several of her novels, in particular Jacob's Room (1922), Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and The Years (1937). As we begin to understand Woolf's concern with the valuation of paid and unpaid work done by women in a patriarchal society, we also gain understanding of the role of the soldier, paid a fairly low wage to fight other people's wars, in a patriarchal society.
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As a literary critic, Woolf undertook the appraisal of a wide range of authors. She reviewed and wrote extended critical commentary on her literary contemporaries, including Rupert Brooke, E. M. Forster, Henry James, Rudyard Kipling, and D. H. Lawrence; the great Victorian and Romantic poets and novelists; major figures of the eighteenth century and the Elizabethan age; and many lesser-known literary and historical personalities. Her literary criticism is largely appreciative and impressionistic, containing little that can be called objective or analytical. Woolf's commentary on works by authors of the past usually includes a full consideration of the society in which the work originated, and critics have found these essays among her most effective. One of the best and most famous of her literary essays is Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown (1924), in which Modernist fiction ó which Woolf's own works exemplify ó is contrasted with the Realist-Naturalist tradition represented by H. G. Wells, John Galsworthy, and Arnold Bennett. In addition to writing fiction and essays, Woolf was a prolific diarist and letter writer.
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Woolf's early novels—The Voyage Out (1915), Night and Day (1919), and Jacob's Room (1922)—offer increasing evidence of her determination to expand the scope of the novel beyond mere storytelling. Her fourth novel, Mrs. Dalloway, is considered by many to be her first great novel, revealing a mastery of the form and technique for which she would become known. The novel centers on the separate worlds and interior thought processes of two characters: Clarissa Dalloway, a gracious London hostess in her 50s whose husband is an uninspired politician, and Septimus Warren Smith, a young ex-soldier suffering a mental illness triggered by a friend’s death in battle during World War I (1914-1918). The two do not know each other and never meet, but their minds have curious parallels. Although Septimus is considered mentally ill by society and Clarissa is considered sane, both experience dizzying alternations in feeling: joy over the tiny leaves of spring, dread of onrushing time, terror over impending extinction, and guilt over the what they feel is the crime of being human. The story takes place on one June day in London after the war, and it explores the idea of time by including past memories and future hopes of the characters.
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[Editor introduction:] Virginia Woolf's life holds a fascination for admirers of English literature, not least because of her suicide in 1941. Daughter of the pre-eminent Victorian Leslie Stephen, the history of her mental health provides insights which go beyond her work, into the culture and society of which she was a product.
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Virginia Woolf Society