Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf

Born into a family in which literary concerns and artistic pursuits were enthusiastically encouraged, Virginia Woolf was predisposed as a child for a writing career (Abel, 2008). Virginia Woolf matured in an intellectual and artistic milieu stimulating to the spirit. Although she envied her brothers' going away to school and resented the exclusion of women from the then-male province of education to the end of her life, she received instruction hardly to be bettered, studying mathematics, literature, history, and foreign languages (both Latin and Greek) privately with her parents or with selected tutors. By age fifteen she enjoyed free access to her father's library and directed her own reading program with a voracious appetite, discussing many works she read with her father.

Her writing career began at the age of nine when she created almost single-handedly a weekly family newspaper, which she continued to produce for more than four years, publishing in this way her own earliest stories (Baldwin, 2007). At fifteen she began keeping a diary. Her first professional publication was an unsigned review in The Guardian in 1904. The Voyage Out, her first novel, begun in 1907 but not completed until 1913 because of illness, was published in 1915. After that, books flowed regularly from her pen in a constant stream, interrupted only by periods of poor health or mental instability. She wrote novels, stories, literary criticism, biographies, and occasional pieces for various periodicals (Beja, 2005).

Though her aesthetic roots are firmly established in the European literary tradition, her genius lies in exploring the inner world of her characters, leading her to elaborate a psychological complexity without parallel in the literature of the past. She invents new methods that permit her to explore this inner world of her characters by allowing them to express their abstract thoughts ...