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LZentilin - Virginia Woolf. Aspetti della vita della scrittrice. Virginia Woolf's Biography
by LZentilin - (2012-01-18)
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Virginia Woolf was born in London into an intellectually gifted family  (her father was a famous Victorian scholar and her sister a good painter), where she could learn and study from her parent’s library and eminent friends.
After her parents' deaths, Virginia and her siblings moved into a London neighborhood called Bloomsbury, where they enjoyed the intellectual stimulation of socialists, artists and students. Virginia’s brothers founded the “Bloomsbury Group”  where scholars and artists like Lytton Strachey Roger Fry, Clive Bell, Leonard Woolf, Duncan Grant, Desmond MacCarthy and John Maynard Keyes were used to make conversations which ranged from Art to philosophy to politics and to sexual topics: Virginia soon became a part of the Bloomsbury Group, where she could have an noticeable cultural education and where she could also experience some love affairs (she had relationships of the heart also with women, like Vita Sackville-West) included the love of her life and her future husband, Leonard Woolf. Together they founded the Hogarth Press in 1917 that published some of the most talented, but still unknown, writers of the time.
She likely suffered from manic-depression and this mental disorder probably caused her suicide in March 1941, despite her literary success and the support of her husband.
Her conception of literature was against tradition, that she called the “materialism”, and thought a writer should depict reality paying attention to aspects of consciousness. Thus her style is characterized by the use of technical experiments that return the characters’ stream of consciousness and by the moving between action and contemplation. Her modern interpretation of novel can be seen in her works: Monday or Tuesday (1921), Jacob’s Room (1922); Mrs Dalloway (1925), the first completely successful novel in her “new” style; To the Lighthouse (1927); The Waves (1931) and Between the Acts (1941). The main themes of her fiction production are: problems of personal identity and personal relationships, the significance of time, change, and memory for human personality. Virginia didn't only publish fiction; she was also an insightful and, at times, incisive social and literary critic: she wrote essays  about  the position of women in her society (Room of One’s Own (1929) and Three Guineas (1938) and critical essays collected in The Common Reader (1925) and The Second Common Reader (1932). Noticeable are also the six volumes of her Letters (1975-1980) and five volumes of her Diary (1977-1984).