Virginia Woolf biography

VIRGINIA WOOLF BIOGRAPHY

Virginia Woolf.

Life and works - Virginia Woolf was born in 1882 and his father was a Victorian literary man, so she received a good instruction at home. When her mother died, when she was only a child, the father grew her up with the idealisation of the domesticated woman, forgetting her literary education. Only when her father died, she could meet other intellectual and she take part in the “Bloomsbury Group”.
For her, water represented two things:
1.    what is harmonious, feminine;
2.    it stood for the possibility of the resolution of intolerable conflicts in death.
She wrote her first novel in 1915, two years later her marriage with Leonard Woolf

The Bloomsbury Group. It's a group of writers, artists and thinkers of Bloomsbury that included the avant-garde of the 20th century and that have in common a contempt for traditional morality, a rejection for convention and a disdain for bourgeois sexual codes.
A Modernist novelist. Virginia is interested in giving voice to feeling and memory and she represent the human personality as the mix of impressions and emotions; for her, what matter really is the impression that the events made on the characters who experienced them.
In the novels, she used the point of view shifted inside the characters’ minds through flashback or impressions or association of ideas. So we can say that she gave a big contribution to the Modernism, in particular with her essay “Modern Fiction” of 1919.

To the lighthouse: riassunto

VIRGINIA WOOLF IN INLGESE - TO THE LIGHTHOUSE

To the Lighthouse. Plot. The novel hasn’t got a traditional plot, because it is the narration of different experiences, memories and emotions that are link together with symbols. It’s divided into three parts:
1.    “The Window”, during a summer afternoon and evening;
2.    “Time Passes”, during ten years;
3.    “The Lighthouse”, during a day.

Mrs Ramsay. She is a beautiful woman and loving wife; she is a key character because she is the one who have to give support to the other characters in the novel. She is an important support for men because they are vulnerable because of their tasks of ruling countries and managing economies.
Her task is to demonstrate to the husband their unity and her love for him by facts and not by words.

Transience, loss and art. The idea that nothing lasts runs through the novel with the theme of loss. An other important theme is the ambition to stop the flux of time, in art for Lily, stopping her emotions. Mrs Ramsay also believes that love can create durable memories making moments permanent.

VIRGINIA WOOLF STYLE

Gender(genere) issues. The novel is autobiographical: the Ramsays are similar to Woolf’s parents and the house near the sea represent her house in Cornwall. Virginia make a comparison between male and female, husband and wife; in particular, Mr Ramsay is the rational and the intelligent one, Mrs Ramsay is the beautiful and the emotional one. The male is compared with the rigidity of the lighthouse, with the division and the sterility, and the female with the fluidity of the sea, with the light and the fertility.
Symbolism. The sound of the sea represent the fullness of life and the imminence of death, the contrast with the shelter and stability represent by the land.
Two recurring symbols are:
·    the window, that is the connecting point between the self and the society;
·    the lighthouse, that represent something different for every character, and it represent light, hope, enthusiasm, a reference point, but at the same time also the inaccessible destination leading to frustration and threatening danger.
There s also the message that women have to know and to understand the experiences of women came  before their.