The Times Great Lives. Anna Temkin

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      Virginia Woolf

      Novelist, essayist, and critic

      28 March 1941

      The death of Mrs Virginia Woolf, which must now be presumed, and is announced on another page, is a serious loss to English letters. As a novelist she showed a highly original form of sensitivity to mental impressions, the flux of which, in an intelligent mind, she managed to convey with remarkable force and beauty. Adeline Virginia Stephen was born at Hyde Park Gate, London, in 1882, the daughter of Sir Leslie Stephen (then editor of the Cornhill and later of the DNB) by his second wife, Julia Prinsep Duckworth (a widow, born Jackson). She was related to the Darwins, the Maitlands, the Symondses, and the Stracheys; her godfather was James Russell Lowell; and the whole force of heredity and environment was deeply literary. Virginia was a delicate child, never able to stand the rough-and-tumble of a normal schooling. She was reared partly in London and partly in Cornwall, where she imbibed that love of the sea which so often appears in her titles and her novels. Her chief companion was her sister Vanessa (later to become Mrs Clive Bell, and a distinguished painter). Her home studies included the unrestricted use of Sir Leslie’s splendid library, and as she grew up she was able to enjoy the conversation of distinguished visitors like Hardy, Ruskin, Morley, and Gosse. She devoured Hakluyt’s Voyages at a very juvenile age, and early acquired a love of the whole Elizabethan period that never left her. Her mother died when she was 13 and her father in 1904, when she was 22. After Sir Leslie Stephen’s death Virginia, Vanessa, and two brothers set up house together at Gordon Square, Bloomsbury, and as time went on the sisters, with Mr Clive Bell, the late Lytton Strachey, Mr T. S. Eliot, and some others, formed a group with which the name of that London district was associated, sometimes with ill-natured implications. But, so far as Virginia Woolf was concerned, she would have done honour to any district. She very soon displayed a keen and catholic critical sense which found expression in those brilliant and human articles written for The Times Literary Supplement, many of which are contained in her book, The Common Reader. In 1912 she married Mr Leonard Woolf, the critic and political writer, and went to live at Richmond, Surrey.

      The marriage led to much joint work, literary and in publishing; but Mrs Woolf’s private interests remained primarily artistic rather than political. Despite friendships with Mrs Fawcett, the Pankhursts, and Lady Constance Lytton, she took no active part in the movement for woman suffrage, though as she showed in A Room of One’s Own, she passionately sympathized with the movement to secure for women a proper place in the community’s life. It was not until she was 33 (in 1915) that she published her first novel, The Voyage Out, which was a recension of a manuscript dating back some nine years. It was an immature work, but very interesting prophetically, as can be seen by comparing it with To the Lighthouse. By this time Mr and Mrs Woolf had set up as publishers at Hogarth House, Richmond, calling their firm the Hogarth Press. The high level of the works published by this press is universally recognized. Among them are some of the best early works of Katherine Mansfield, Middleton Murry, T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster, besides the works of Mrs Woolf herself. Later transferred to Bloomsbury, the Press acquired an additional reputation for the issue of books having a political trend to the Left.

      In 1919 Mrs Woolf brought out a second novel, Night and Day, which was still by way of being ’prentice work, but with Jacob’s Room (1922) she became widely recognized as a novelist of subtle apprehensions and delicate reactions to life, with a method of her own and a finely wrought and musical style. Her subsequent novels, Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando, and The Waves, rightly earned her an international reputation. These books broke away from the orderly narrative style of the traditional English novel, and are sometimes baffling to minds less agile than hers: but their subtle poetry and their power of inspiring intense mental excitement in imaginative minds are qualities which far outweigh occasional obscurity. The flux of perceptions and the inexorable movement of time were two of her chief themes; and if there is some truth in the criticism that her characters are little more than states of mind, it is also true that they are very highly individualized by the author’s remarkable power of observation. Above all, she had a perfect sense of form and of the unity – even if its expression were unattainable – underlying the whole strange process which we call human life. Mrs Woolf’s last book, published in 1940, was a profoundly interesting biography of Roger Fry.