Virginia Woolf
3 books analyzed
Biography
Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) delivered the two lectures that became A Room of One's Own at Newnham and Girton Colleges, Cambridge, in October 1928. She was forty-six, already the author of Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927), and at the height of her intellectual powers. She had been denied the Cambridge education her brothers received — a fact the essay addresses directly. She had inherited money from her aunt Caroline Emelia Stephen, which gave her the financial independence she argues is essential to creative work. She and Leonard Woolf ran the Hogarth Press, which published the essay in 1929, giving her complete control over its production and distribution. She was in the midst of her relationship with Vita Sackville-West, which informed the essay's coded discussions of women's desire for each other. The essay was written in the same period as Orlando (1928), her fictional biography of Sackville-West, which also explored gender fluidity and androgyny. Woolf had managed recurring mental illness throughout her adult life and would die by suicide in 1941, walking into the River Ouse with stones in her pockets.
Virginia Woolf at a glance
Works
A Room of One's Own
1929 · 172 pages · ★★★★☆ Advanced
A woman needs money and a room of her own to write fiction — but the sentence is only the beginning. Behind it lies four centuries of locked doors, burned manuscripts, invented sisters, and the long material history of why genius requires a bank account.
Mrs. Dalloway
1925 · 194 pages · ★★★★☆ Advanced
One day in London, 1923 — a party-giving society woman and a shell-shocked veteran who will never meet spiral toward the same moment of recognition: that life is everything, and it is ending.
To the Lighthouse
1927 · 209 pages · ★★★★☆ Advanced
A family, a lighthouse, a painting — and the decade of war and death that falls between the wanting and the doing.
Diction Across Works
conversational-essayistic
lyrical-interior
lyrical-interior