
Age, Height, Weight etc: ✎edit
Who is it?: British writer
Real Name: Adeline Virginia Stephen
Age / How old?: January 25, 1882
Birth Sign: Taurus
Place of Birth: London, England

🌠 Virginia Woolf Biography
In 1904, Virginia was left in the care of her brothers, and together they moved to the bohemian London district of Bloomsbury. Toby, a Cambridge graduate who missed his former circle, began organizing Thursday nights, which brought Virginia many interesting acquaintances and introduced the world to the Bloomsbury Group: an intellectual circle of artists, writers, and philosophers united mainly by their leftist views and rejection of Victorian society.
The Bloomsburyers announced themselves to their contemporaries not with a manifesto, as is customary for any self-respecting modernist movement (however, they certainly did not consider themselves a coherent movement), but with a military prank that made it into the newspapers and caused a major scandal. The incident was called the "Dreadnought Hoax".
The idea of the prank belonged to the aristocrat Horatio de Vere Cole, who sent a telegram to the British Admiralty, informing them of the upcoming visit of the Emperor of Abyssinia (Ethiopia).
Cole's friends, including Virginia Woolf, dressed up in oriental costumes, adorned themselves with false beards and theatrical makeup, and went to inspect the flagship of the British fleet, the Dreadnought.
The makeup and beards did not allow them to dine during the visit, and they cited religious restrictions, and instead of Swahili, the delegation communicated with each other in phrases from Virgil's Aeneid. The military orchestra did not know the anthem of Abyssinia, so they played the anthem of Zanzibar. The prank was a success, but when the newspapers reported on the incident a few days later, the scandal reached Parliament.
During this same period, Virginia began working on the novel Melimbrosia, which was eventually titled Away from the Sea.
After the death of her brother Toby from typhus, Virginia and Adrian moved to another house in 1911, and rented one of the rooms to Leonard Woolf, who had recently returned from government service in Ceylon.
A year later, he proposed to Virginia, which the writer did not accept right away. In her letters, she explained her doubts by saying that she did not want to be simply "quite happy" or to look at marriage as a profession.
Another obstacle for her was Leonard's Jewish origin: in her letters, she wrote about him as a "penniless Jew" (however, critics still argue whether her views can be considered anti-Semitism - after all, she married Leonard and took an obviously anti-fascist position in the 1930s).
Attempted suicide and the printing press
After the wedding, the couple planned to live on the money from their literary works (Leonard wrote mainly about politics, but also published a novel, “The Village in the Jungle,” based on his life in Sri Lanka). Virginia finished “Away from the Sea” in 1913, but her mental health was rapidly deteriorating.
According to biographers, throughout her life she experienced heightened anxiety before the publication of her novels. The outbreak of the First World War did not add to the calm either. In the summer, she was placed in a hospital, but when she was briefly released from there, the writer took an overdose of sleeping pills and was barely saved. Soon after, they settled in the quiet (and then almost rural) Richmond, in order, as Leonard said, to save Virginia from London and from the “destroying disorientation” of metropolitan life.
Leonard Woolf had long planned to install a printing press in the attic, partly to distract Virginia from her work. In 1917, they printed the first edition of Two Stories written by Virginia and Leonard.
The publishing house Hogarth Press (named after the Woolfs' house) founded by the couple had a pleasant feature: the writer did not have to change her works in any way to achieve publication, and she could experiment at her own pleasure. In addition, thanks to the printing press, the Woolf family made new interesting acquaintances: the home publishing house published, for example, a new collection of poems by T. S. Eliot, as well as translations of the works of Sigmund Freud.
One of the writer's many new acquaintances, the novelist Rosamund Lehman, wrote about what Virginia was like at that time: "Incredibly beautiful, with a strict intellectual beauty, with large melancholy eyes. […] She was tall and thin, with amazingly graceful hands.” According to Lehman, Woolf’s conversations were full of reminiscences, gossip, “extravagantly bizarre reflections,” and serious critical comments on books and paintings.
“A Room of One’s Own”
One of Virginia Woolf’s most famous feminist essays is called “A Room of One’s Own,” in which she put forward the now famous formula: “Every woman who is going to write must have means and a room of her own.”
In essence, the point was that women’s writing careers were hindered not by some lofty problems or lack of talent, but by quite mundane things — poor access to education, dependent status, and the constant need to act in defiance of society, family, and the state.
Virginia herself did not receive a university education. While her brothers graduated from prestigious schools, and her sister was engaged in art
om college, Virginia studied ancient Greek in an unsystematic manner and read a lot. Perhaps this is partly why her view of literature became so democratic - in her articles, she sought to attract as many people as possible to books, regardless of their preparation (one of the famous collections of her essays is called "The Common Reader").
"Reading systematically, to become a specialist or an authority, can kill ... the more human passion for pure and disinterested reading. The true reader is a person with great curiosity, with ideas, open and sociable, for whom reading is more like a vigorous exercise in the open air than a study in a closed room," she wrote in one of her articles.
But returning to "A Room of One's Own", it is worth noting that Woolf had an ideal example of such a room. After moving to a new house in 1919 (even further from London), a bedroom with a separate entrance was added to it: it was impossible to get to it without leaving the house.
The study in which Woolf wrote was a separate house altogether.
In this small extension to Monks House, the writer's home, Virginia Woolf wrote her most famous works
When Woolf was writing a novel, she always kept a pencil and paper by her bed. The cook who cooked for the Woolfs recalled that sometimes Virginia, lying in the bath, would loudly pronounce the sentences she had written at night, asking herself questions and answering them. When she sat down to work, she usually wrote not at a table, but in a low chair, with a wooden board on her knees. During the day, she would retype what she had written by hand in the morning.
Looking at the Woolfs' house in Sussex, it is hard to believe, but Virginia did not like the provinces. She felt she was missing out on all the action of the capital.
The longing for London is particularly evident in Woolf's most famous novel, Mrs. Dalloway, where the city is described in such detail that itineraries that follow the characters' paths are still very popular (similar to Bloomsday in Dublin, London has Dalloway Day, which is celebrated in June).
In 1924, despite Leonard's concerns, the Woolfs returned to London.
Vita Sackville-West and Suicide
In December 1922, Virginia met the writer Vita Sackville-West. Woolf's first diary entries about Vita do not foreshadow her falling in love; she wrote about her vulgarity, moustache, and overly bright clothes. However, a romantic relationship soon developed between the women.
As the novel was winding down, Woolf channeled her admiration for Vita into literature, writing a comic biography, Orlando, a centuries-long story of a young man who, on top of everything else, manages to change his sex sometime between the 16th and 20th centuries. The novel seems difficult to read now, but it was very popular with its contemporaries. For the first time in her writing career, Woolf received a significant income from publishing (for comparison, in 1927 she earned £545 from her books, and in 1929 already £2,306).
However, mental illness did not recede.
The outbreak of World War II moved her worries into a more practical area. Virginia and Leonard were not only worried about air raids, but also feared a possible Nazi occupation (Leonard was Jewish, and both were left-wing intellectuals). They openly discussed the possibility of suicide.
In late February 1941, Woolf finished Between the Acts, but was dissatisfied with the novel and even wanted to cancel its publication. She could no longer write, everything was drowned out by the "outer roar" of war.
She committed suicide on March 28, but her body was not discovered until three weeks later. In her suicide note, Virginia asked Leonard to destroy all her papers, but he did not. Instead, Woolf collected and published her articles, diaries, and letters for the rest of her life, demonstrating by living example that the saying about a faithful woman always standing behind a great man is not always true. Sometimes it is the other way around.
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