SALE ON YALE! History • Biography & more... TELL ME MORE
Virginia Woolf was born in London in 1882. After her father's death in 1904 Virginia and her sister, the painter Vanessa Bell, moved to Bloomsbury and became the centre of `The Bloomsbury Group'. This informal collective of artists and writers exerted a powerful influence over early twentieth-century British culture. In 1912 Virginia married Leonard Woolf, a writer and social reformer. Three years later, her first novel The Voyage Out was published, followed by Night and Day (1919) and Jacob's Room (1922). Between 1925 and 1931 Virginia Woolf produced what are now regarded as her finest masterpieces, from Mrs Dalloway (1925) to The Waves (1931). She also maintained an astonishing output of literary criticism, short fiction, journalism and biography. On 28 March 1941, a few months before the publication of her final novel, Between the Acts, Virginia Woolf committed suicide.
Clarissa Dalloway spends a day in London reflecting on her life as she prepares for a party. Her reverie is set off by the imminence of her daughter's adulthood. This is a classic text on women and Virginia Woolf at her finest. Mrs Woolf's work was to an extent a conscious revolt against fiction based on over-precise chronicling of detailed events of which the Victorian novelists were such ardent exponents. She substituted the continuousness of experience and the imprecision of characters who take on different lights according to varying circumstances. Mrs Dalloway (1925), where everything wobbles under the changing light of a single day, is a satisfactory example of her technique. Her impressionism does not prevent the image of an early aeroplane pulling an advertising slogan across the London sky remaining one of the most vivid in the fiction of the 1920s. Review by Lord Jenkins of Hillhead, whose work includes 'The Chancellors' and 'A Life at the Centre' (Kirkus UK)
