In the first half of the 20th century, the "stream of consciousness" novel became a very influential literary genre in the West, and its representative figures were Virginia Woolf in Britain, in addition to Proust in France, Joyce in Ireland and Faulkner in the United States.
As a symbol of london's literary circle during the two world wars and a pioneer of modernist trends, as the ideological vanguard of the feminist movement in the 20th century, the works and lives of British female writer Virginia Woolf are undoubtedly full of convincing stories. It has been said that Woolf's memory has two hidden sides- one side is clear and the other is dark; one side is cold and one is warm; one side is creation, the other side is destruction; one side is the light of heaven, and the other side is burning the fire of hell...
Family, achievement she also hurt her
Virginia was born on 25 January 1882 in London to a family of scholars. His father, Leslie Stephen, was a prominent critic and biographer of the "Victorian era" of Britain in the second half of the 19th century. His original wife was the daughter of the novelist Thackeray. Woolf was the son of his successor wife, Lilia Dekwarts.
Woolf's family was well-off, and after receiving basic knowledge about Latin, French, history, mathematics, etc. from her parents, she freely read widely in her father's richly booked study, forming a high degree of cultural literacy and aesthetic concepts, laying the foundation for her lifelong literary career. In addition, her father had contacts with many famous scholars and writers of the time, and Hardy, Meredith, Henry James, Edmund Goss, etc. were all guests of his family. Woolf has benefited greatly from her childhood, and her later outstanding achievements have a certain relationship with the origin of family learning.
On the other hand, however, the family is also the root of Woolf's tragic life. Woolf's father was severely patriarchal, Woolf never received a formal schooling education throughout her life, and the sexual harassment of her by her two half-brothers brought her permanent psychological trauma. Under the long-term forbearance and repression, Woolf could only firmly cling to her mother's blood love, and the death of her mother in 1895 finally caused her to have a mental breakdown at the age of thirteen, and since then madness has plagued her all her life.
Marriage was the right thing in her life
Woolf's greatest fortune was his union with the political scientist Leonard, and the years proved that marrying Leonard was the most correct thing Woolf had ever done in his life.
Woolf was by no means a qualified housewife: she would throw her wedding ring in lard while cooking; she would wear her petticoat backwards at a ball; she would fall into a brief period of insanity after each of her works; she would even have an instinctive resistance to intimacy between the opposite sexes, but she was extremely attached to same-sex feelings. But this man who was overwhelmed by Woolf's extraordinary talent was not intimidated by the world's vision, he calmly accepted the reality of his wife's cold sex, willingly spent 29 years of sexless married life, gave up his reproductive rights, endured Woolf's ambiguous scandals with a series of male and female lovers, and carefully cared for his wife who was always in the shadow of madness.
Under Leonard's meticulous care, Woolf ushered in the full bloom of literary life, and all her novels were written after marriage. She also tried to find the key to women's problems, and her stream-of-consciousness novels "Spots on the Wall", "Sailing", "To the Lighthouse", "Mrs. Dalloway", etc., are like a "history of the female mind".
More often Woolf was an inferior and sensitive child, leonard was always the first reader of her works, other than which she was afraid to show to others, afraid of others laughing at her. For the convenience of publishing, Leonard even helped her set up her own publishing house. In 1930, Woolf told a friend that without Leonard, she might have shot herself long ago. On March 28, 1941, when the symptoms of schizophrenia, such as madness and auditory hallucinations, repeated and finally became unbearable, Woolf chose to commit suicide. In her last words to Leonard, she said, "I can't ruin your life anymore." However, she did not know that the years with her day and night were the best time for this man.
Talented and prolific writers
Woolf, though not formally educated, was one of the few talented and prolific writers. Although she had several insanities and attempted suicide several times during her lifetime, her writing was as elegant and beautiful as ever.
Virginia Woolf is a serious artist who captures the thousands of impressions that the mind receives with her wise eyes, and then uses her vertiginous linguistic talent to maximize the expression of moments, until they are polished into a finished product with a timeless texture to achieve peace. The short story "Spots on the Wall", written in 1917, established Woolf's status as a representative writer of stream-of-consciousness novels, and it embodied Woolf's artistic proposition that literature should adhere to the primary value of inner experience, and that spiritual activity was more meaningful than the material world.
Throughout his life, Woolf worked tirelessly to explore the possibilities of modern fiction art in both creative and theoretical terms. As one of the pioneers of the "stream of consciousness" novel, his novel masterpieces include: "Night and Day", "Jacob's Room", "Mrs. Dalloway", "To the Lighthouse", "Waves", etc., in addition to "Orlando", "Years", "Intermission" and so on. Her novel, "no doubt wants to discover a new technique for the novelist to portray the inner reality very realistically; moreover, she also wants to show that this reality can only be an inner being." The famous French writer André Moloa said that the result of this exploration made her abandon the traditional naturalistic depiction method in her creation, and finally adopted the kind of prose poetry that combines prose and poetry, flowing and flying, euphemistic prose poetry, which is most suitable for capturing and depicting the imaginative and ever-changing mental state of the characters, which is the stream of consciousness novel technique we often see in Woolf's novels.
Aside from fiction, Woolf's most important genre of work is prose. She has written for British and American newspapers such as the Times Literary Supplement and the Yale Review, and has published more than one million words of essays, book reviews, character features, and travelogues. In contrast, prose seems to be more suitable for her thoughts, disposition, and style, and is written elegantly and elegantly and wantonly, so it is known as "the master of traditional prose and the pioneer of new prose", and is known as "the last person in British prose". The Death of a Moth is Woolf's most famous essay. In the text, she describes for us the tragic fate of a moth. On the stage that was doomed to break through, the moth used all its spirit and courage to continue to fly outward, and was blocked again and again, and finally met the fate of its own death. In the text, Woolf's tone is compassionate and enthusiastic, such an insignificant moth, which at the last moment, still let its life burn, relentlessly pursuing light and hope. The indomitable soul and spirit of the moth, coupled with Woolf's enthusiasm, have made this article a favorite of readers. Some people believe that Woolf told her fate through "The Death of the Moth", and the moth told her last words to the world.
Woolf was also a well-known critic, writing more than three hundred and fifty literary reviews, essays, and book reviews during her lifetime. These articles were later included in The General Reader and The General Reader II. In addition, she is the author of the biography "Roger Frye" and the treatise "A House of Oneself" and "Three Gini Gold Coins".
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