WOOLF, (ADELINE) VIRGINIA

ne Stephen born Jan. 25, 1882, London died March 28, 1941, near Rodmell, Sussex, Eng. British author who made an original contribution to the form of the novel and was one of the most distinguished critics of her time. She was educated at home by her father, Sir Leslie Stephen, and, after his death in 1904, lived in Gordon Square, London, which became the centre of the Bloomsbury group (q.v.). In 1912 she married Leonard Woolf, and in 1917 they founded the Hogarth Press, which published her books. After her novels The Voyage Out (1915) and Night and Day (1919) appeared, she began to experiment. She wanted to stress the continuous flow of experience, the indefinability of character and external circumstances as they impinge on consciousness. She was also interested in the way time is experienced both as a sequence of disparate moments and as the flow of years and of centuries. From Jacob's Room (1922) onward, she tried to convey the impression of time present and of time passing in individual experience and also of the characters' awareness of historic time. In Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927), she extended her technical mastery; above all, she gave to each of these novels a tightly organized form, partly by using poetic devices such as recurrent images and partly by restricting the time of the action. Orlando (1928) is a historical fantasy with evocations of England, and especially literary England, from Elizabeth I to 1928. In her long essay, A Room of One's Own (1929), she described the difficulties encountered by women writers in a man's world. Returning to the novel, in The Waves (1931) she confined herself to recording the stream of consciousness. The reader lives within the minds of one or the other of six characters from their childhood to their old age. Human experience of the seven ages of man, rather than character or event, is paramount. The Years (1937) is more expansive and traditional. In Between the Acts (1941), the action, as in Mrs. Dalloway, occurs on a single day, but extended time is suggested by the staging of a village pageant recording English history, while the reader is also kept aware of impending war. In a recurrence of mental illness, after finishing Between the Acts, she drowned herself near her Sussex home. Woolf wrote two biographies: one is fanciful, a fragment of the life of the Brownings through the imagined memories of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's dog (Flush; 1933); the other is a full-length biography of the art critic Roger Fry (1940). Her best critical studies are in The Common Reader (1925), The Common Reader: Second Series (1932), The Death of the Moth (1942), and Granite and Rainbow (1958).