Virginia Woolf: A Study of Her Works and Writing Advice

Virginia Woolf, originally born Adeline Virginia Woolf, is known for her evocative and innovative prose, her novels “To the Lighthouse,” “The Voyage Out,” and “Mrs. Dalloway,” and perhaps most unfortunately her troubled life. She was born in London, England in the winter of 1882 and died in 1941 by suicide. Several seasons of Woolf’s life can be categorized into juxtaposing periods, especially her childhood. It was often divided into opposites like city and country, winter and summer, repression and freedom, and fragmentation and wholeness.

Early Life

Born to Leslie Stephen and Julia Jackson, Woolf had many prominent artistic figures in her life. Her father, Leslie, was the first editor of the Dictionary of National Biography—a reference collection of notable figures in British history. Her aunt—or perhaps great-aunt or godmother, it’s unclear of their relation—Julia Margaret Cameron was a very famous portrait photographer in the 19th century.

As a child Virginia Woolf was taught English literature and the classics by a private tutor and was surrounded by her father’s intellectual literary friends, Thomas Hardy and Henry James, from a young age. Forming a close and competitive bond with her sister Vanessa, the girls decided that Vanessa would become a painter and Virginia a writer. At the age of 13, Woolf’s beloved mother died. This threw her into a depression that would come and go as her life went on and proved to be debilitating on multiple occasions. Several other deaths and tragic incidents in her life were also the cause of her mental health issues. Doctors of her time recommended lots of rest and prohibited mental exertions, like reading and writing, and prescribed barbiturates to help curb suicidal impulses. Today it is suspected that Woolf’s mental illness was a form of bipolar disorder.

In 1904 Virginia met British writer and future husband, Leonard Woolf, with whom she would eventually go on to start her own press with. Hogarth Press was created in 1917 where both of the Woolfs would publish their own work—free from censorship that often came along with the traditional editorial process. Later in her life Virginia revealed that as a young child her older half-brother, Gerald Duckworth, sexually abused her and as a teenager her other half-brother, George Duckworth, also sexually abused her. The Duckworth brothers went on to form their own press where Virginia published her earlier works. Her brothers pressured her to write and publish works they thought would sell instead of allowing her to experiment in her writing.

The Woolf couple created Hogarth Press in their own home with the intention to publish inspiring works from newer, smaller writers that “the commercial publisher would not look at.” With the formation of this new press Virginia Woolf published her next novel, Jacob’s Room, in 1922. At Hogarth Press, they would eventually publish very influential writers like Kate Mansfield, Roger Fry, Vita Sackville-West, and T.S. Elliot’s The Waste Land (1922)—the press also published Freud’s translated writings.

These authors were all a part of or associated at times within the same literary group called the Bloomsbury Group. This group was located near Bloomsbury, London and shared a collective recognition of the importance of the arts. Discussions would be held about feminism, equality, sexuality, and literature. The authors within the Bloomsbury Group often published works that deeply held these themes within their prose. The group received some criticism from those who saw the “club” as too elitist and cliquey. Some rejected their ideas and claimed that the Bloomsbury Group were snobbish, even with their mannerisms, and were disillusioned within the political and social climate of their time.

Woolf’s Most Notable Works

Among her most popular novels is To the Lighthouse which was published in 1927. This novel is revered for its elegiac prose filled with familial loss and the comings and goings of war. It follows the Ramsey family at their holiday house on the Isle of Skye. There are many allusions to Woolf’s own childhood in To the Lighthouse that mirror the family dynamics she grew up with and the holiday house her family owned in St. Ives, Cornwall. Much of the book is centered on how different individuals will see the world. The prose is written as a stream of consciousness from the characters. Each one is enveloped in their own world and their own thoughts—something that intrigued Woolf about people in reality.

Published in 1915 was Woolf’s debut novel titled The Voyage Out. The story follows a sheltered young woman named Rachel Vinrace who takes a trip to South America with her aunt and uncle. Rachel and Aunt Helen mingle with other English tourists at their hotel and Rachel meets a man named Terence Hewet. The Voyage Out is a love story where the main characters discover inner uniqueness amongst a foreign land backdrop. There are themes of exploration, loss, self-discovery, gender, and more.

Making a cameo in the beginning of The Voyage Out is Mrs. Dalloway. In 1925 Woolf would publish a novel by the same name. Many critics consider this novel to be the first where the reader is really able to Woolf’s full style become available. Mrs. Dalloway was the next novel Woolf published after Jacob’s Room and so perhaps she finally felt comfortable in her writing to experiment in this way. The entire contents of the novel take place on only one day in June—Woolf took direct inspiration from James Joyce’s Ulysses—and follows Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Warren Smith. Clarissa is part of the upper class in England and Septimus is shell-shocked, recovering from his time as a soldier in WWI. Their lives overlap in strange places but Woolf manages to bring them together despite their opposing classes, wealth, and life experiences. Clarissa Dalloway also makes an appearance in five of Woolf’s short stories—“The New Dress,” “The Introduction,” “Together and Apart,” “The Man Who Loved His Kind,” and “A Summing Up.”

Woolf is known for her stream-of-conscious style of writing. It is prevalent in much of her writing and emerged in Jacob’s Room. Several of her novels analyze the effects of war on very different characters looking at the short term and long term chain reactions

Several of her novels analyze the short term and long term chain reaction effects of war on an array of differing characters. A beloved angle for Woolf was interpersonal relationships and human connections, as seen in her later novels The Waves (1931), Flush (1933), and The Years (1937). Woolf had a knack for observing everyday life, turning any ordinary scene into an extraordinary sentence.

Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf met Vita Sackville-West at a dinner party in December of 1922. Sackville-West, a popular and influential writer of her own right, was from an aristocratic family in southern England. Sackville-West married Harold Nicholson, a British politician, in 1913. Both Vita and Harold were known to have same-sex affairs while married to each other. At their first meeting, Sackville-West became entranced with Woolf and the two started a very intimate love affair. They openly confessed their love to each other in the form of letters and maintained a relationship until Woolf died in 1941. During the first years of their relationship they were extremely close. Vita loved the eloquence and intellect Virginia possessed and Virginia adored Vita for her appreciation, understanding, and celebration of women.

During their time, Sackville-West’s published works were regarded with more critical acclaim than Woolf’s—although Vita determined that Virginia was the better writer and conceded that her own writing was “illiterate.” In today’s time Woolf’s writing is the more popular and commercially successful one.

In 1928 Hogarth Press published Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. Vita’s son, Nigel Nicholson, deemed the novel to be “the longest and most charming love letter in literature.” The novel is biography of the 300 year life of a man named Orlando—and in turn, Vita—and is famous for being one of the first English literature trans novels. At the age of 30, Orlando undergoes a sex change from man to woman. It’s an exploration of gender neutrality and shifting identities. Orlando has such an intimate inspirational driving force behind it that Woolf asked permission from Sackville-West if she could publish it. Sackville-West was enthralled and honored to be the indirect subject of Orlando. The book went on to sell twice as many copies in six months as To the Lighthouse achieved in one year.

Woolf’s Writing Advice

Virginia Woolf is less outwardly expressive when it comes to writing advice than other authors. Much of what she says on the topic of writing comes from essays and letters she’s written. The points I have compiled come from the 1924 “Mr. Bennet and Mrs. Brown” essay, the 1932 “A Letter to a Young Poet,” the 1937 “Craftsmanship” lecture for BBC, and the 1925 “Modern Fiction” essay.

Woolf’s writing advice consists of writing for the characters’ sakes, experimenting with language, and forgoing tradition when it feels right. Many of Virginia Woolf’s works are character centric. They open doors for the reader to step inside characters’ minds, take a look around, get there hands dirty in all the colorful ideas and ridiculous thoughts they might have. After all, Woolf writes about the human experience—so of course there’s bound to be tangents and lyrical prose.

Woolf believed that novels serve a specific purpose. They need to express character when necessary, which according to her is always. This means that a writer should not be focusing on any type of preaching or lessons learned. Novels are living things that breathe through their creator, so by writing you characters, you are also, in a way, writing yourself. Many of Woolf’s works allude to her own childhood and life experiences—there have even been analytical essays that correlate her symptoms, which stemmed from mental illness and sexual abuse as a child, to some of her characters.

From the beginning of her writing career Woolf always had the desire to experiment with her writing. She didn’t care much for what others felt would commercially sell the most and made it a point in her writing to develop her own style, which she was eventually known and praised for. Woolf understood that using the same set of English words that everyone else does can be challenging when trying to produce an original work. These words have meanings that are so engraved and attached to them, but it is worth the effort to try to breathe new life into old words.

Woolf also believed that there are no right and wrongs in writing. When a writer is able to get there message across to the reader clearly then that is the only thing that should be deemed “right.” Woolf was not concerned with the precedence and pretenses of what writing should be when writing Jacob’s Room or Orlando. Your writing should have intentions for the reader, but there is no limit to what direction you can go as a writer. Every thought and feeling you have as a writer is valid and those alone give you permission to write.

Nearing the end

During the Blitz—a German bombing campaign against the UK in 1940 and 1941—the Woolf’s lost their London home. This was a factor that drove Virginia into a very deep depression. The onset of WWII only increased her obsession with writing about death in her diary around this time.

After an exhaustive effort in editing what would be her final novel, Between the Acts, loosing several of her close friends, and the looming and explosive threat of WWII, Virginia Woolf lined her coat pockets with stones and waded into the Ouse river in March 28th, 1941. Before she died Virginia addressed a suicide note to her husband, Leonard, and vanished. It wasn’t until 21 days later on April 18th that her body was found.

Virginia Woolf’s legacy continues to live on in the celebrated works that she published and is remembered for her fresh and unique prose which has inspired many. She is studied in classroom and academic spaces for her feminist values and her exploration of human connections.

Discussion Questions

Below you can find discussion questions which you can answer in a comment below or in a journal on your own. Remember these are supposed to be and there are right or wrong answers. Have fun!

·       Have you read any of Virginia Woolf’s works? Which is your favorite and why? If you haven’t, which one mentioned above seems the most intriguing?

·       What pieces of advice from Woolf sound the most helpful and why?

·       Find a couple of writing prompts you like and apply some of her advice to your writing. How did you do?

·       Do you agree with Woolf that there are no right or wrong methods in writing? Why or why not?