Husband Leonard Woolf
Queer Places:
Talland House, Albert Rd, Saint Ives TR26, UK
9 St Aubyns, Hove BN3 2TG, UK
Burley House, 15 Cambridge Park, Twickenham TW1 2JE, UK
22 Hyde Park Gate, Kensington, London SW7 5DH, UK
29 Fitzroy Square, Fitzrovia, London W1T, UK
46 Gordon Square, Kings Cross, London WC1H 0PD, UK
52 Tavistock Square, Kings Cross, London WC1H, UK
38 Brunswick Square, Bloomsbury, London WC1N 1AE, UK
37 Mecklenburgh Square, London WC1N, UK
King's College London, Strand, London WC2R 2LS, UK
Asham House, Beddingham, Lewes BN8, UK
17 Portland Terrace, The Green, Richmond TW9 1QQ, UK
Hogarth House, 34 Paradise Rd, Richmond TW9 1SE, UK
The Round House, Pipe Passage, Lewes BN7 1YQ, UK
Monk’s House, Rodmell, Lewes BN7 3HF, UK
Adeline
Virginia Woolf (née Stephen; 25 January 1882 – 28 March 1941) was an English
writer who is considered one of the most important modernist twentieth century
authors and a pioneer in the use of stream of consciousness as a narrative
device. Identified with the Lost
Generation. Virginia Woolf dedicated Orlando (1928), "To
V.
Sackville-West". Sackville-West's travels in France were many, and
made quite frequently with her women lovers and companions - notable, of
course, with Violet Trefusis, but also with
Evelyn Irons, with
Gwen St Aubyn,
and most famously, with Virginia Woolf.
Woolf was acquainted with May
Sarton. Virginia Woolf was a close friend of
Rose Macaulay,
Margaret Rhondda,
Winifred Holtby
and Stella Benson.
The 1920s were boom years for lesbian literature, seeing the publication of a
large range of texts from virulently anti-lesbian works, such as
Compton MacKenzie's
Extraordinary Women (1928), through relatively traditional celebrations
of romantic friendship, such as
Elizabeth Bowen's The Hotel (1927), to radical modernist texts
with encoded lesbian themes, such as Virginia
Woolf's Orlando (1928). The highbrow novelist Virginia Woolf was
able to present same-sex desire in her modernist novel Orlando. Her
social postion, as an established novelist and critic, a married woman, and a
member of London society, placed Woolf in a potentially more vulnerable
situation than her expatriate contemporaries. Despite this, Virginia Woolf's
Orlando, published only months after The Well of Loneliness
by Radclyffe Hall and treating
the subject of lesbianism in a much more positive light, escaped suppression
to become a mainstream best-seller. The novel was written for, and dedicated
to,
Vita
Sackville-West and was subsequently described by Vita's son, Nigel, as the
longest and most charming love-letter in literature. Historians and
biographers continue to be divided over the extent to which Vita and
Virginia's relationship was lesbian. However, Virginia Woolf's own diary
entries and her frequent letters to Vita suggest that she did care
passionately for her. In one letter she declared: But I fo adore you, every
part of you from heel to hair. Never will you shake me off, try as you may...
But if being loved by Virginia is any good, she does do that; and always will,
and please believe it. She wrote to Vita up to four times a week furing the
height of their relationship, and although Virginia was particularly
circumspect about their meetings, even in the privacy of her own diary, their
private correspondence gives some indication of the nature of their
relationship. Virginia Woolf's letters reveal a playful coyness: Should you
say, if I rang up to ask, that you were fond of me? If I saw you would you
kiss me? If I were in bed would you, I'm rather excited about Orland
tonight: Have been lying by the fire and making up the last chapter.
Gisèle Freund (French, born Germany 1908-2000)
Virginia Woolf
1939
© Gisèle Freund
Virginia Woolf, 1939, by Gisèle Freund
Virginia Woolf, 1939, by Gisèle Freund
Virginia Woolf, by Man Ray, 1934
Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)
by Roger Fry,
Leeds Art Gallery, Leeds Museums and Galleries
Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) c.1912
Vanessa Bell (1879–1961)
National Trust, Monk's House
Katherine Stephen, Virginia Woolf's aunt, by
Glyn Warren Philpot
The Green, Richmond
The Round House
Monk's House
Virginia Woolf was born in an affluent household in South Kensington, London, attended
the Ladies' Department of King's College and was acquainted with the early
reformers of women's higher education. Having been home-schooled for the most
part of her childhood, mostly in English classics and Victorian literature,
Woolf began writing professionally in 1900. During the interwar period,
Virginia Woolf was an important part of London's literary society as well as a
central figure in the group of intellectuals known as the Bloomsbury Group.
She published her first novel titled The Voyage Out in 1915, through
her half-brother’s publishing house, Gerald Duckworth and Company. Her
best-known works include the novels Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the
Lighthouse (1927) and Orlando (1928). She is also known for her
essay A Room of One's Own (1929),
where she wrote the much-quoted dictum, "A woman must have money and a room of
her own if she is to write fiction."
When Thoby went up to Trinity in 1899 he became friends with a circle of
young men, including Clive Bell,
Lytton Strachey,
Leonard Woolf, Saxon
Sydney-Turner, that he would soon introduce to his sisters at the Trinity May
Ball in 1900. These men formed a reading group they named the Midnight
Society.[106]
Despite his low material status (Woolf referring to Leonard during their
engagement as a "penniless Jew") the couple shared a close bond. Indeed, in
1937, Woolf wrote in her diary: "Love-making—after 25 years can't bear to be
separate ... you see it is enormous pleasure being wanted: a wife. And our
marriage so complete."
However, Virginia made a suicide attempt in 1913.
The ethos of the Bloomsbury group encouraged a liberal approach to
sexuality, and in December 1922 she met the writer and gardener
Vita
Sackville-West,
wife of Harold
Nicolson. At the time, Sackville-West was the more successful writer both
commercially and critically, and it was not until after Woolf's death that she
became considered the better writer.
After a tentative start, they began a sexual relationship, which, according to
Sackville-West in a letter to her husband dated 17 August 1926, was only twice
consummated.
However, Virginia's intimacy with Vita seems to have continued into the early
1930s.[178]
Woolf was also inclined to brag of her affairs with other women within her
intimate circle, such as Sibyl Colefax and
Winnaretta Singer. Woolf was also a close friend of
Dorothy Brett.
In 1928, Woolf presented Sackville-West with Orlando,
a fantastical biography in which the eponymous hero's life spans three
centuries and both sexes. Nigel Nicolson, Vita Sackville-West's son, wrote,
"The effect of Vita on Virginia is all contained in Orlando, the
longest and most charming love letter in literature, in which she explores
Vita, weaves her in and out of the centuries, tosses her from one sex to the
other, plays with her, dresses her in furs, lace and emeralds, teases her,
flirts with her, drops a veil of mist around her."
After their affair ended, the two women remained friends until Woolf's death
in 1941. Virginia Woolf also remained close to her surviving siblings, Adrian
and Vanessa; Thoby had died of typhoid fever at the age of 26. Later Adrian married
Karin Stephen, a British psychoanalyst and psychologist.
In 1930, after dining with various homosexual men, including
E.M. Forster and
Lytton Strachey, whose
conversation strayed on to the topic of attractive youths,
Virginia Woolf said she had received ‘a
tinkling, private, giggling impression. As if I had gone into a men’s urinal.’
Of
Eddy Sackville-West she said, quite simply, ‘I can’t take Buggerage
seriously.’ Hermione Lee, her biographer, comments, as follows: ‘Like
Simone de Beauvoir twenty years later … the feminist in her deplored the fact that
gay men seemed to want to be women. And she must also have felt that
homosexuality was, for the next generation of writers, an exclusive exclusive
passport for literary success.’
Vita Sackville-West worked tirelessly to lift up Woolf's self-esteem,
encouraging her not to view herself as a quasi-reclusive inclined to sickness
who should hide herself away from the world, but rather offered praise for her
liveliness and sense of wit, her health, her intelligence and achievements as
a writer.
Sackville-West led Woolf to reappraise herself, developing a more positive
self-image, and the feeling that her writings were the products of her
strengths rather than her weakness.
Starting at the age of 15, Woolf had believed the diagnosis by her father and
his doctor that reading and writing were deleterious to her nervous condition,
requiring a regime of physical labour such as gardening to prevent a total
nervous collapse. This led Woolf to spend much time obsessively engaging in
such physical labour.
Sackville-West was the first to argue to Woolf she had been misdiagnosed, and
that it was far better to engage in reading and writing to calm her
nerves—advice that was taken.
Under the influence of Sackville-West, Woolf learned to deal with her nervous
ailments by switching between various forms of intellectual activities such as
reading, writing and book reviews, instead of spending her time in physical
activities that sapped her strength and worsened her nerves.
Sackville-West chose the financially struggling Hogarth Press as her publisher
in order to assist the Woolfs financially. Seducers in Ecuador, the
first of the novels by Sackville-West published by Hogarth, was not a success,
selling only 1500 copies in its first year, but the next Sackville-West novel
they published, The Edwardians, was a bestseller that sold 30,000
copies in its first six months.
Sackville-West's novels, though not typical of the Hogarth Press, saved
Hogarth, taking them from the red into the black.
However, Woolf was not always appreciative of the fact that it was
Sackville-West's books that kept the Hogarth Press profitable, writing
dismissively in 1933 of her "servant girl" novels.
The financial security allowed by the good sales of Sackville-West's novels in
turn allowed Woolf to engage in more experimental work, such as The Waves,
as Woolf had to be cautious when she depended upon Hogarth entirely for her
income.
After completing the manuscript of her last novel (posthumously published),
Between the Acts (1941),
Woolf fell into a depression similar to that which she had earlier
experienced. The onset of World War II, the destruction of her London home
during the Blitz, and the cool reception given to her biography
of her late friend Roger Fry
all worsened her condition until she was unable to work.
When Leonard enlisted in the Home Guard, Virginia disapproved. She held fast
to her pacifism and criticized her husband for wearing what she considered to
be the silly uniform of the Home Guard.
After World War II began, Woolf's diary indicates that she was obsessed with
death, which figured more and more as her mood darkened.
On 28 March 1941, Woolf drowned herself by filling her overcoat pockets with
stones and walking into the River Ouse near her home.
Her body was not found until 18 April.[216]
Her husband buried her cremated remains beneath an elm tree in the garden of
Monk's House, their home in Rodmell, Sussex.
Woolf became one of the central subjects of the 1970s movement of feminist
criticism, and her works have since garnered much attention and widespread
commentary for "inspiring feminism", an aspect of her writing that was
unheralded earlier. Her works are widely read all over the world and have been
translated into more than fifty languages. She suffered from severe bouts of
mental illness throughout her life and took her own life by drowning in 1941
at the age of 59.
My published books:
BACK TO HOME PAGE
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Woolf
- Vita Sackville-West: Selected Writings
Vita Sackville-West
Palgrave Macmillan, Nov 8, 2003
- A Lesbian History of Britain: Love and Sex Between Women Since 1500,
Rebecca Jennings, Greenwood World Pub., 2007
- Rossini, Gill. Same Sex Love 1700-1957: A History and Research
Guide . Pen and Sword. Edizione del Kindle.
- Woods, Gregory. Homintern . Yale University Press. Edizione del
Kindle.
- Clay, Catherine. British Women Writers 1914-1945 (p.2). Taylor and
Francis. Edizione del Kindle.