Virginia Woolf
(1882 - 1941)
STUDY QUESTIONS MILLENNIUM 2 P. 202
STUDY QUESTIONS
1.What was Virginia Woolf’s cultural background?
• She grew up in a highly intellectual atmosphere. Her father was a
literary critic and a philosopher. Her parents encouraged her to
read, study and to express her ideas; She was educated at home
and read widely from her father’s rich library. She also learnt
Greek.
2.How did her mother’s death mark her life?
• Her mother’s death caused her a long period of depression that
marked her life with regular mental breakdowns which in the end
led to her suicide by drowning herself in the river Ouse.
3.What was the Bloomsbury group and who belonged to it?
• It was a group of intellectuals who met her house in Bloomsbury
in London to discuss art, philosophy and literature. Among theme
were: Virginia’s sister, Vanessa, a painter and her husband Clive
Bell, an art philosopher; Virginia’s future husband Leonard Woolf,
with whom she founded the “Hogarth Press”; the novelist Edward
Morgan Forster ; the economist John Maynard Keynes and the art
critic and painter Roger Fry.
4. What are Virginia Woolf’s main novels?
• “The Voyage Out”, her first novel, fairly conventional in plot and
style;
• “Jacob’s Room” , her first experimental work in which she uses
the stream-of-consciousness technique;
• “Mrs Dalloway”, describing the chaotic but vital and fascinating
flux of thoughts in the mind of the main character during one
day in the Bond Street area in London;
• “To the Lighthouse”, an extremely complex work in which male
and female consciousness are contrasted;
• “Orlando”, a very unusual novel which spans three centuries and
develops though the single consciousness of a woman.
5. Define Virginia Woolf’s use of time?
• Her use of time in her novels reflects her modernist ideas of plot,
character and language. In her critical essay “Modern Fiction” she
said that perception depends not on measurable time (the “time
of the clock”) but on the way the mind is affected by it (the “time
of the mind”), Consequently, she made an extensive use of the
stream-of-consciousness” technique and in her novels the space
of few hours - a day in “Mrs Dalloway” – can contain a whole life.
6. Besides novels, what other works did she write?
• Besides novels, Virginia Woolf wrote feminist writings (“A
Room of one’s own”, “Three Guineas”), critical essays (“The
Common Reader”), biographies and diaries.