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Virginia Woolf
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Virginia Woolf (January 25, 1882 - March 28, 1941) was a English author and feminist. Born Adeline Virginia Stephens in London she was brought up and educated at home. In 1895 following the death of her mother she had the first of numerous nervous breakdowns. Following the death of her father (Sir Leslie Stephen, a literary critic) in 1904, she moved with her sister and two brothers to a house in Bloomsbury. She began writing professionally in 1905, initially for the Times Literary Supplement. In 1912 she married Leonard Woolf, a civil servant and political theorist.
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.
As well as first editions of all the novels of Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) published in Britain, including well-known works such as Mrs Dalloway, To the lighthouse and The Waves, the British Library has many other related books and periodicals. These include later editions, other prose works, such as A Room of One's Own, published letters, translations of her work into other languages, literary journals, and many studies and biographies of this celebrated English modernist. This comprises the greatest collection of Virginia Woolf publications in the world. Each has an entry on the British Library Integrated Catalogue.
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Virginia Woolf has attained legendary status as one of the most influential writers of the 20th century. The feminist author's modernist writings are considered essential to understanding the history of the novel. Woolf's experiments with fiction and stream-of-consciousness narrative rank among the most innovative of her time and continue to hold their weight in the current age.
With D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce, and Aldous Huxley, Virginia Woolf repudiated the positivistic realism that she felt to have characterized certain members of the preceding generation of English novelists. Like her contemporaries, she sought and found a new way of looking at life - an original perspective, a vision of experience. Expression of this philosophical perspective in art required a new formal perspective as well, but it was at first the thought that necessitated the form, and not so much the form that determined the thought. Although much attention has been given to the thought of Lawrence, of Joyce, of Huxley, Virginia Woolf has been noticed and valued mainly as a superb stylist and writer of English prose. Yet she, profoundly as any of her contemporaries, was concerned with the philosophical as well as the purely formal problems of her art. That art - although this is arguable - may be not so great as Lawrence's or Joyce's or even Huxley's: it may be that Virginia Woolf succeeded so well because the goal she set herself was easier to reach.
Virginia Woolf wrote novels picturing soldiers long before she addressed the issue of war in Three Guineas. There are strong parallels between the characters of the soldiers depicted in Jacob's Room (1922) and Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and the women of Three Guineas. In Three Guineas, as well as in The Years (1937), these parallels ... appear in the subtext. Soldiers and women are similar when it comes to their lack of choice, their being forced to work for the benefit of others than themselves, and their inability to control the events of history, despite obvious "contributions" or "work" performed. Like soldiers, women suffer physically as they work for the benefit of others10. In Three Guineas, Woolf reflects on the characteristic weight loss of low-wage female workers, which can be likened to the soldier's emaciation after a lengthy stay in the trenches.
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