In 1915 she published her first book, The Voyage Out. But, with To the Lighthouse, Woolf established herself as one of the leading writers of Modernism. In these works Woolf developed innovative literary techniques in order to reveal women’s experience and find an alternative to the male-dominated views of reality. As an essayist Woolf was prolific, publishing some 500 essays in periodicals and collections, beginning 1905. Characteristic for Woolf’s essays are dialogic nature of style and continual questioning of opinion – her reader is often directly addressed, in a conversational tone, and her rejection of an authoritative voice links her essays to the tradition of Montaigne.
From July 1940, the Woolfs became afraid of Nazi invasion, because Leonard was Jewish, and they decided to gas themselves with car fumes if the invasion came. They kept enough petrol for this purpose. By 1941, Leonard became increasingly concerned by the deterioration in Virginia’s health. Her depression grew as the fear of madness enveloped her. On 28 March 1941, she loaded her pockets with stones and walked into the River Ouse at Rodmell, Sussex and was drowned.
Virginia Woolf is regarded as a major figure in the Modernist movement, making significant contributions to the development of the novel. She is known as an experimenter and innovator in novel writing, particularly in her use of the techniques of interior monologue and stream of consciousness. Woolf’s “stream of consciousness” technique style allows readers into the minds and hearts of her characters. She also incorporates a level of psychological realism that Victorian novels were never able to achieve.[2] The everyday is seen in a new light: internal processes are opened up in her prose, memories compete for attention, thoughts arise unprompted, and the deeply significant and the utterly trivial are treated with equal importance. She has the very special ability to make the ordinary ebb and flow of the mind sing.
Her novels are noted for their poetic and symbolic quality. The emphasis is not on plot or action but rather on the psychological life of the characters. Her novels are also known for their delicacy and sensitivity of style, their evocation of place and mood, and their background of historical and literary reference. Her writing often explores the concepts of time (its passage and the difference between external and inner time), memory, and people’s inner consciousness, and is remarkable for its humanity and depth of perception. Before the early 1900s, fiction emphasized plot as well as detailed descriptions of characters. Events in the external world, such as a marriage, murder, or deception, were the most important aspects of a story. Characters’ interior, or mental, lives served mainly to prepare for or motivate such meaningful external occurrences. Woolf’s novels, however, emphasized patterns of consciousness rather than sequences of events in the external world. Influenced by the works of French writer Marcel Proust and Irish writer James Joyce, among others, Woolf strove to create a literary form that would convey inner life. In Woolf’s best fiction, plot is generated by the inner lives of the characters. Psychological effects are achieved through the use of imagery, symbol, and metaphor. Character unfolds by means of the ebb and flow of personal impressions, feelings, and thoughts. Thus, the inner lives of human beings and the ordinary events in their lives are made to seem extraordinary.[3] Woolf’s fiction was drawn largely from her own experience, and her characters are almost all members of her own affluent, intellectual, upper-middle class. Woolf was also interested in defining qualities specific to the female mind. She saw female sensibility as intuitive, close to the core of things, and thus able to liberate the masculine intellect from what she viewed as its enslavement to abstract concepts.
Virginia Woolf’s eccentric style is what causes her writings to be distinct from other authors of her time.[4] The unique characteristics of her works such as the structure, characterization, themes, etc are difficult to imitate and cause a strong impression in her literary pieces. Virginia Woolf’s works are strongly idiosyncratic, strange, a surprise to the new reader. Due to the level of peculiarity in Woolf’s works, many consider her writings to be difficult texts. This assumption is misleading; all literature must be approached with an open mind and careful deliberation. The uniqueness of Woolf’s writings can be seen when evaluating the characters in her literary pieces. We have found that Virginia Woolf is concerned with an unconscious level of experience in her characters. In other words, the characters in Woolf’s stories are not always traditional or logical in the way they behave. She uses an untraditional method of writing, in which the characters’ thoughts and speech often contradict their feelings.
Woolf looked for a better way of creating her characters’ inner experiences and wanted to bring their personal, mental and emotional experiences to the surface. However, one author, James Joyce, did influence Woolf’s unique style. After reading James Joyce’s Ulysses, in which Joyce pioneered the style of narrative that tries to represent an apparently irrational and disconnected flow of thoughts and perceptions in the mind. This style is commonly referred to as stream-of-conscious writing. Virginia Woolf found in Ulysses a style which in its restless scintillations, in its irrelevance, its flashes of deep significance succeeded by incoherent inanities, seems to be life itself. The reading of Ulysses helped Woolf form her innovative technique in writing. This technique makes her a notable author of the 20th century because of her unique style, incorporation of symbolism, and use of similes and metaphors in her literature.[5]
Woolf is considered one of the greatest innovators in the English language. In her works she experimented with stream-of-consciousness, the underlying psychological as well as emotional motives of characters, and the various possibilities of fractured narrative and chronology. In the words of E.M. Forster, she pushed the English language “a little further against the dark,” and her literary achievements and creativity are influential even today.
Woolf’s reputation declined sharply after World War II, but her eminence was re-established with the surge of Feminist criticism in the 1970s. After a few more ideologically based altercations, not least caused by claims that Woolf was anti-Semitic and a snob, it seems that a critical consensus has been reached regarding her stature as a novelist: Virginia Woolf is among the greatest of 20th century writers. Her work was criticized for epitomizing the narrow world of the upper-middle class English intelligentsia, peopled with delicate, but ultimately trivial, self-centered, and overly introspective individuals. Some critics judged it to be lacking in universality and depth, without the power to communicate anything of emotional or ethical relevance to the disillusioned common reader, weary of the 1920s aesthetes who seemed to belong to an era definitely closed and buried.
Virginia Woolf’s peculiarities as a fiction writer have tended to obscure her central strength: Woolf is arguably the major lyrical novelist in the English language. Her novels are highly experimental: a narrative, frequently uneventful and commonplace, is refracted—and sometimes almost dissolved—in the characters’ receptive consciousnesses. Intense lyricism and stylistic virtuosity fuse to create a world overabundant with auditory and visual impressions. The intensity of Virginia Woolf’s poetic vision elevates the ordinary, sometimes banal settings of most of her novels (with the exception of Orlando and Between the Acts), even as they are often set in an environment of war. For example, Mrs. Dalloway centers on Clarissa Dalloway, a middle aged society woman’s efforts to organize a party, even as her life is equated with Septimus Warren Smith, a soldier who has returned from the First World War bearing psychological scars.
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