Virginia Woolf (1882–1941,) born Adeline Virginia Stephen, was an English novelist, essayist, and critic. She made her mark not only as a modernist writer, but also as one of the foremost feminist intellectuals of the twentieth century. Her nonlinear approaches to narrative exerted a major influence on the genre.
Born in London to the famous Victorian scholar Leslie Stephen, Woolf was educated at home and, in 1913, married Leonard Woolf, writer and publisher of The Hogarth Press. In spite of recurrent bouts of acute mental depression and failing health, Woolf persevered to write a large output of essays, reviews, and novels. She founded the Bloomsbury Group, a group of artists, critics, and writers that included economist John Maynard Keynes, biographer Lytton Strachey, novelist E. M. Forster, painter Duncan Grant, and critic Roger Fry.
Wolfe gained recognition with Jacob’s Room (1922,) Mrs Dalloway (1925,) To the Lighthouse (1927,) and Orlando (1928,) are written in her innovative narrative technique in which the conventional story line is replaced by an emphasis on the inner, psychological states of Woolf’s characters.
Wolfe’s A Room of One’s Own (1929,) a survey of the difficulties confronting women, became a landmark of feminist literature. Her critical essays, including Modern Novels (1919) and The Common Reader (1925,) are now considered indispensable to modernist literary theory.
Woolf drowned herself in the river Ouse in Sussex during a protracted bout of depression caused by the outbreak of war in 1941.
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By hook or by crook, I hope that you will possess yourselves of money enough to travel and to idle, to contemplate the future or the past of the world, to dream over books and loiter at street corners and let the line of thought dip deep into the stream.
—Virginia Woolf
When a subject is highly controversial… one cannot hope to tell the truth. One can only show how one came to hold whatever opinion one does hold. One can only give one’s audience the chance of drawing their own conclusions as they observe the limitations, the prejudices, the idiosyncrasies of the speaker.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Audiences
The man who is aware of himself is henceforward independent; and he is never bored, and life is only too short, and he is steeped through and through with a profound yet temperate happiness.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Happiness, Awareness, Life, Perception, Love
Never let anybody guess that you have a mind of your own. Above all be pure.
—Virginia Woolf
You cannot find peace by avoiding life.
—Virginia Woolf
Odd how the creative power at once brings the whole universe to order.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Order
The current flows fast and furious. It issues in a spate of words from the loudspeakers and the politicians. Every day they tell us that we are a free people fighting to defend freedom. That is the current that has whirled the young airman up into the sky and keeps him circulating there among the clouds. Down here, with a roof to cover us and a gas mask handy, it is our business to puncture gas bags and discover the seeds of truth.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Propaganda, Prosperity
To enjoy freedom we have to control ourselves.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Self-Control
The mind is the most capricious of insects – flitting, fluttering.
—Virginia Woolf
If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Truth, Honesty
Masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Thinking, Genius
Mental fight means thinking against the current, not with it. It is our business to puncture gas bags and discover the seeds of truth.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Thought, Thinking, Truth
The beauty of the world, which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Beauty, Adversity, Laughter
The interest in life does not lie in what people do, nor even in their relations to each other, but largely in the power to communicate with a third party, antagonistic, enigmatic, yet perhaps persuadable, which one may call life in general.
—Virginia Woolf
Topics: Life
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