Scarica Virginia Woolf and "Mrs. Dalloway" e più Appunti in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! VIRGINIA WOOLF EARLY LIFE ● 1882, London, daughter of the Victorian intellectual Leslie Stephen ● she grew up in a literary and intellectual atmosphere, took courses at King’s College, private Greek lessons, and had access to her father’s exceptional library. She started to write really early as a child and was obsessed ● she spent her summers at St. Ives, Cornwall, with her family and the sea remained a central symbol in her art. She didn’t have a very sad childhood ● 1895, her mother died, first nervous breakdown. She started to rebel against her tyrannic father and his idealization of the domesticated woman. ● her father married another woman and her stepbrother raped her. Second biggest trauma THE BLOOMSBURY GROUP ● 1904, her father died and she was free to live her life and moved to Bloomsbury (center of London) with her sister Vanessa Bell (a painter) and her brother ● she joined the Bloomsbury Group, the avant-garde of early 20th-century London. They were writers, artists, and thinkers characterized by a contempt for traditional morality, Victorian respectability, artistic conventions, and bourgeois sexual codes. They promoted unconventional sexual practices, anti-war sentiment, and socialism LITERARY CAREER ● 1912, she married Leonard Woolf ● she entered a nursing home for depression and attempted suicide twice by taking drugs and falling out of the window ● 1915, she published her first novel The Voyage Out ● 1925, she experienced new narrative techniques in Mrs. Dalloway ● 1927, To the Lighthouse ● 1928, Orlando, dedicated to Vita Sackville-West with whom she had a very intense and complicated relationship (Vita had a lot of lovers and was unstable) ● 1935, The Common Reader, a volume of literary essay. She was a talented literary critic and a brilliant essayist ● 1929, she delivered 2 lectures at Cambridge University which later became A Room of One’s Own, a work of great impact on the feminist movement of the ‘60and ‘70 (she discussed the inseparable link between economic and artistic independence) ● 1931, The Waves in which she seemed to recognize a link between her creative process and her mental illness She became haunted by the terror of losing her mind and drowned herself in the river Ouse in 1941 HER MENTAL ILLNESS There was a thin line in her soul between madness and rationality and this co-presence made her a very good writer. She was restless and unsettled. ● First nervous breakdown: her mother’s death ● Second nervous breakdown: her stepbrother raping her ● she entered a nursing home for depression and attempted suicide twice by taking drugs and falling out of the window ● WW2 increased her anxiety ● she became haunted by the terror of losing her mind and drowned herself in the river Ouse in 1941. It was not an impulsive act, but meditated and melancholic. She filled her pockets with rocks and slowly walked into the river. She even wrote a letter to Leonard: Dearest, I feel certain I am going mad again. I feel we can't go through another of those terrible times. And I shan't recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can't concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do. You have given me the greatest possible happiness. You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I don't think two people could have been happier till this terrible disease came. I can't fight any longer. I know that I am spoiling your life, that without me you could work. And you will I know. You see I can't even write this properly. I can't read. What I want to say is I owe all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good. I want to say that - everybody knows it. If anybody could have saved me it would have been you. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can't go on spoiling your life any longer. I don't think two people could have been happier than we have been. EMILY DICKENSON VIRGINIA WOOLF Trapped, frozen Broken A MODERNIST NOVELIST Virginia wanted to give voice to the complex inner world of feelings and memories and saw the human personality as a continuous shift of impressions and emotions. The events were less important than the impression they left on the characters who experienced them. The omniscient narrator disappeared, and the point of view shifted inside the different characters' minds through flashbacks, and associations of ideas as a continuous flux: ‘’Life is not a series of gig-lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.’’
