Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group

(25 January 1882 – 28 March 1941)

*Capriquarius Gemini Aries with a loaded 12th house*

Virginia Woolf was an Aquarian British writer, a novelist and essayist and one of the foremost modernists of the twentieth century.

She used the English language superbly.

Her parents were Sir Leslie Stephen (28 November, 1832) and 
Julia Prinsep Duckworth Stephen (July, 1846). Leslie Stephen was a notable historian, and author, a critic and a mountaineer.

Virginia Woolf with her father Leslie Stephen, 1902

Julia Stephen was a renowned beauty, born in British India.

 She was also the niece of the photographer

 Julia Margaret Cameron (11 June, 1815).

Julia Stephen

Sir Leslie Stephen's eminence as an editor, 

critic, and biographer, meant that his children were raised in an environment filled with the influences

 of Victorian literary society. 

Virginia's mother Julia, portrayed by Edward Burne-Jones, 1866.

Julia Stephen was equally well connected.

 She came from a family of beauties who left their mark on Victorian society as models for Pre-Raphaelite artists

 and early photographers, including her aunt

  Julia Margaret Cameron.

Virginia's mother, by Julia Margaret Cameron, her aunt

 Supplementing these influences 

was the immense library at the Stephens' house, from which Virginia and her sister Vanessa (30 May, 1879) were taught the classics.

Vanessa Bell

 

Although before Woolf was even 7 years old, her mother

was teaching her Latin, French, History

 and English literature, she read and wrote compulsively to compensate for the fact that she lacked what she called

 “a real education,” meaning a university degree.

Virginia Woolf

The sudden death of her mother in 1895, 
when Virginia was 13, and that of her half-sister Stella
 two years later, led to the first of Virginia's several 
nervous breakdowns. 
As a teenager, Woolf became so terrified of people 
that she blushed when someone spoke to her and was incapable of looking strangers in the eye.
One of the things Woolf disliked most in life was being peered at or having someone take her photograph.
For a summer, she went mad believing that the birds were chirping in Greek and King Edward VII was uttering curses from behind nearby shrubbery.

 She was, however, able to take courses of study
 (some at degree level) in Greek, Latin, German and history at the Ladies' Department of King's College London
 between 1897 and 1901. 
Woolf struggled with anorexia, believing that her body was monstrous, and that her mouth and stomach were sordid in their demand for food.

For a time, Woolf wrote while standing at a desk 3’6″ tall because she wanted to be like a painter who could instantly step away from her canvas to get a better view.
Woolf delighted in the physical act of writing words on paper. From the age of 11, she was continually experimenting with different kinds of pens in hope of finding one that would provide the perfect sensation.

^{The death of her father in 1904 provoked her most alarming collapse and she was briefly institutionalised.}

 Woolf first tried to kill herself at the age of 22 by jumping out of a window. The window she jumped from, however, was not high enough to cause serious harm.

^{Throughout her life, Woolf was plagued by periodic mood swings and associated illnesses.  Though this instability often affected her social life, her literary productivity continued with few breaks throughout her life.} 

After the death of their father and Virginia's second nervous breakdown, Vanessa and Adrian sold 22 Hyde Park Gate and bought a house in Bloomsbury.
Woolf came to know Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell, Rupert Brooke, Saxon Sydney-Turner, Duncan Grant, Leonard Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, David Garnett, and Roger Fry, who together formed the nucleus of the intellectual circle of writers and artists known as the Bloomsbury Group. 
  In 1907 her sister Vanessa married Clive Bell, 
and the couple's interest in avant garde art would have an important influence on Woolf's development as an author.





  

Leonard and Virginia Woolf

 

Virginia married writer Leonard Woolf (25 November, 1880)  in 1912.
Despite his low material status the couple shared a close bond.   The two also collaborated professionally, in 1917 founding the Hogarth Press, which subsequently published Virginia's novels.  With a small, kitchen-table model printing press, 
they taught themselves to set type and print. Virginia and Leonard were budding novelists, reviewers and essayists. Their first publication, a 32-page pamphlet, sold 134 copies of the 150 printed. Within several years, they developed a commercially successful publishing company that produced 25 to 35 books per year. Virginia and Leonard were prolific writers and managed the publishing company as a part time enterprise. 

 The authors they published included C. Day Lewis, T. S. Eliot, Anna and Sigmund Freud, Maxim Gorky, Rainer Maria Rilke, Gertrude Stein, H. G. Wells, and many other notable writers. In the 1930s, they began using their influence in the literary community to address their social concerns.

T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf

They published books on disarmament, feminism, peace, 
the League of Nations, problems of race and slavery,
 economics, education, economics and psychology.
 One biographer stated the Woolfs considered Hogarth Press
 the child their marriage 
never produced. 

   

Leonard and Virginia Woolf in Hyde Park, 1925

 

The ethos of the Bloomsbury group encouraged 

a liberal approach to sexuality, 

and in 1922 she met the writer and gardener  

Vita Sackville-West (9 March, 1892), wife of Harold Nicolson. 

After a tentative start, they began a sexual relationship, 

which, according to Sackville-West, 

was only twice consummated. 

Virginia and Vita 1932

In 1928, Woolf presented Sackville-West with Orlando, a fantastical biography in which the hero's life 

spans three centuries and both sexes.

  It was meant to console Vita for the loss 

of her ancestral home, Knole.

Nigel Nicolson, Vita Sackville-West's son, wrote 

"The effect of Vita on Virginia is all contained in Orlando,

 the longest and most charming love letter

 in literature,

 in which she explores Vita,

 weaves her in and out of the centuries, 

tosses her from one sex to the other, plays with her, 

dresses her in furs, lace and emeralds, 

teases her, flirts with her, 

drops a veil of mist around her".

After their affair ended, 

the two women remained friends

  until Woolf's death in 1941. 

Woolf suffered from a mental breakdown during WW I,
  followed by subsequent periods of physical, mental and emotional breakdowns which doctors treated with psychiatric drugs. 
 Her early childhood experience of sexual abuse
 by her half brothers was thought to be the cause.
Her writing expressed the themes that troubled her the most; 
life, death, suicide, madness and past memories.
  She was hypersensitive to criticism.

Woolf often walked up to eight miles
 in the afternoon, 
sometimes jumping over ditches, climbing up hills, 
or maneuvering through barbed-wire fences if necessary.
 Virginia was a noted biographer and critic and used writing as a distraction from realty. When she realized she could not write any longer, she chose not to live. 
Woolf once said that her death would be the 
“one experience I shall never describe.”

Virginia Woolf by Man Ray 1935

After completing the manuscript of her last novel,
 Woolf fell into a depression similar to that 
which she had earlier experienced. 
The onset of World War II, the destruction of her London home during the Blitz, and the cool reception given to her 
biography of her late friend Roger Fry all worsened her condition until she was unable to work.
During the height of World War II, when it looked as if the Nazis would win, Woolf and her husband, Leonard, considered committing suicide via poisoning themselves with car exhaust. 
The couple kept a sufficient amount of petrol in their garage 
just in case.
Close to the time of Woolf’s death, a bomb was dropped on the bank of the River Ouse, causing a miniature lake to form 
that reached the edge of her garden and attracted multitudes of waterfowl.

On 28 March 1941, Woolf put on her overcoat,
 filled its pockets with stones, walked into the River Ouse 
near her home, 
and drowned herself.

Woolf's body was not found until 18 April 1941.
Her husband buried her cremated remains under an elm in the garden of Monk's House, their home in Sussex.


In her last note to her husband she wrote:

Dearest, I feel certain that I am going mad again. I feel we can't go through another of those terrible times. And I shan't recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can't concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do. You have given me the greatest possible happiness. You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I don't think two people could have been happier 'til this terrible disease came. I can't fight any longer. I know that I am spoiling your life, that without me you could work. And you will I know. You see I can't even write this properly. I can't read. What I want to say is I owe all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good. I want to say that—everybody knows it. If anybody could have saved me it would have been you. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can't go on spoiling your life any longer. I don't think two people could have been happier than we have been.

V.

This is Florence + the Machine's song What the Water Gave Me,
it is based on the story of Virginia Woolf's life and death. 
It is fantastic. 
 


Woolf is considered a major innovator
 in the English language.
 In her works she experimented with stream-of-consciousness
 and the underlying psychological as well as 
emotional motives of characters.

Woolf is arguably the major lyrical novelist 
in the English language. Woolf's best-known nonfiction works,  
A Room of One's Own and Three Guineas,
 examine the difficulties that female writers 
and intellectuals face because men hold disproportionate legal and economic power and the future of women 
in education and society. 

This is the only surviving recording of Virginia Woolf's voice. 
BBC recording 1937.



 

  Her novels are highly experimental:
 a narrative, frequently uneventful and commonplace,
 is refracted—and sometimes almost dissolved—in the characters' receptive consciousness. 
Intense lyricism and stylistic virtuosity 
fuse to create a world overabundant with auditory
 and visual impressions. 
 Her fiction is also studied for its insight into 
shell shock, war, class 
and modern British society.

Woolf's works have been translated into over 50 languages, by writers such as Jorge Luis Borges.

-wiki & astro.com/astrodatabank & flavorwire.com