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“A woman must have money and a room of her own
if she is to write fiction.”
Virginia Woolf spent her life at the center of the most
important artistic movements of her time. As a child
schooled at home, her father, a noted critic, introduced
her to Tennyson, Arnold, and other authors. As an adult,
she saw her family’s house in the Bloomsbury district
of London become the center of an intellectual and
artistic circle that included some of the greatest authors,
philosophers, intellectuals, and painters of the day,
including E.M. Forster, Lytton Strachey, and Aldous Huxley.
She wrote between bouts of depression and mental
breakdown that sometimes lasted years. During these, she
could not concentrate enough to read. She was plagued
by migraines and claimed to hear voices. But during her
periods of calm, she produced some of the most influential
novels and short stories of the modern movement. Her
fiction was based not on plot but on consciousness; it
went below the surfaces of action to explore the inner
monologues of her characters.
In the end, her illness won. Entering into another
depression from which she feared she would not recover,
and fearing a Nazi invasion of England, Woolf took her
own life in 1941. |
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Virginia Woolf
(1882–1941) |
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