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Virginia Woolf Biography

" (Bell p. 144) However, what sets her apart from other writers of the modernist or feminist genre is her denial of her namesake, Woolf shed it and believed that a feminist label bastardized the ideal of struggling for equality, not only for women, but for men as well. "The polematic grinder of the feminist movement has greedily devoured Virginia Woolf, spewing her for as the appropriately committed feminist whose cause is somehow connected to her fiction. Such a view of Woolf is not particularly useful." (Rosenthal, Virginia Woolf pp.36) Despite her rejection of the feminist label, her abstination is superficial. Woolf's goals in writing To The Lighthouse and Mrs. Dalloway are uniquely feminine. Only females are protagonists while males, although not replete antagonists, are the cause of many of the women's problems. Woolf was not writing for universal equality when she conjured these plots. Her rejection of the feminist label is irrelevant; her behavior labels her a feminist.
             In To The Lighthouse she returns imaginatively to St. Ives, resurrecting her parents, explaining her involvement with them and questioning at last the myth of sexual duality developed partly through her experience with her father and mother, partly in reaction to the masculinity of the Bloomsbury Group. The outspoken feminism of her later years is not a change of direction.
             2.
             but an intensification and a clarification of attitudes developed .
             early in her life and in response to early experiences .
             (Rose, Woman of Letters: A Life of Virginia Woolf pp. 49-50).
             Instead of becoming more moderate in the later years of her life, as is the stereotype of age, Woolf became more fervent and outspoken about her feminist views. Her increasingly feminist tone was Woolf's attempt to hold on to life as mental illness took her life away. There is a direct relationship between mental illness and the feminism in Woolf's works.


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1. Orlando by Virginia Woolf

This essay will examine how Virginia Woolf manipulates and attaches symbolic value to time in her novel, Orlando. This essay will begin with explaining Woolf's writing style in Orlando and move on to explaining how Woolf used time with regard to the past, present, and future. Furthermore ... helmets, memorial wreaths, trousers, whiskers, wedding cakes, cannon, Christmas trees, telescopes, extinct monsters, globes, maps, elephants, and mathematical instruments" (Woolf, 2000, p.160). Orlando suffered an electric shock treatment as her left hand trembled impulsively. Orlando realised that it was...

  • Word Count: 1518
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2. Woolf

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3. E. M. Forster Biography

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  • Word Count: 825
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4. The Photograph "Women Seeing the World Through a Different Le

... values,"" (Three Guineas 24), and women were being deprived of it. By being educated, they had a chance of building a better world and preventing war. In The Years, also written by Virginia Woolf, most of the women felt that they had to cater to men. In 1880, Eleanor was sitting with her brother. He was asking Eleanor about their sick mother, whom Eleanor ... with living people,"" (The Years 387). Eleanor created a new world, but in the world she already lived in. More specifically, Woolf gave women four ways in which they could maintain their difference: poverty, intellectual chastity,...

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5. Life of the Author

... discussing how women authors such as Sherley Anne Williams, Charlotte Bronte, Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf, and Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote women, comparing and contrasting their writing to their actual lives. In Virginia Woolf's essay A Room of One's Own, Woolf, who was an early twentieth century writer, looks back at the history of women ... herself, or ended her days. . ."(Shakespeare's Sister-NAWL 1343). It is interesting that she puts this in her writing because Woolf herself went crazy and had several mental breakdowns in her life when things were rough. What was even more interesti...

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