Virginia woolf

1882—1941

Virginia Woolf, a famous novelist, had been regarded as one of the principal exponents of Modernism in English literature in the period between the two wars. Her writings were admired by T. S. Eliot, who said (1922) 'you have freed yourself from any compromise between the traditional novel and your original gift' and attacked by F. R. Leavis: '... in The Waves there is a fatal falsification between what her impressions actually are and what they are supposed to signify'.

Virginia Woolf's creative work can be roughly divided into three periods:

The first period (1915—1922) is the time when her artistic method and style are formed. It starts with The Voyage Out and is continued with Night and Day (1919), a realistic novel set in London, which contrasted the lives of two friends: Katherine, the daughter of a famous literary family, and Mary, who becomes involved with the suffragette movement.

The second period (mid-twentieths) is the most fruitful time in her writing' career. In Mrs. Dalloway (1925) she fulfilled the purpose of fiction laid down in her essay Modern Fiction (1919): "Life is not a series of gig-lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning .of consciousness to the end. Is it not the task of the novelist to convey this... with as little mixture of the alien and external as possible?" In this novel, like in Joyce's Ulysses, she solves a task of showing the whole life of her characters through the prism of one day in their lives. The novel presents a series of single 'moments of life' with rather vague borderlines and is composed as a stream of characters' feelings and events centred around an evening party in Mrs Dalloway's house. With To the Lighthouse (1927) and The Waves (1931) she fully established herself as a leading exponent of Modernism.

The third period in her career (1928—1941) beginning with Orlando (1928), a fantastic biography which traces the history of its androgynous protagonist through four centuries, is unlike any of her other novels and was her greatest commercial success. Another 'biography', Flush (1933), revolves around the life of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's pet spaniel and gives a dog's-eye view of the love affair between his mistress and Robert Browning.

Woolfe’s contribution to feminist criticism has been widely recognized: A Room of One 's Own (1929) and its still more radical sequel, Three Guineas (1938), are now established classics.

Mrs. Dalloway

The events of Mrs. Dalloway take place on a single day in June in central London where Clarissa Dalloway, the wife of Richard Dalloway, MP, sets off to buy flowers for a party that she is hosting in the evening. Some critics have argued that the novel is a sharp and critical examination of the governing social milieu at the turning point of its power, and of people's ability to deal with change, be it change of life, changes from war to peace, change of class or change of family life. Although the novel was initially accused by some critics of triviality, it was well received on the whole and sold well. Over time, Mrs. Dalloway has become one of Woolf's texts that is the most frequently discussed by students and critics because it depicts a richly textured impressionistic canvas of the social life, as well as describing the mysterious path of change which human relationships and personalities take over the passage of time.

Mrs. Dalloway is also distinctive for its portrait of a society woman which manages to be both fascinating and alarming in its scope, as well as Woolf's genuine concern with the life cycle of one generation of women as it is about to repeat itself in another generation: in this case, Clarissa who is past the end of her childbearing years at the age of fifty-two, and her daughter Elizabeth, who stands on the threshold of her eighteenth birthday. Each of the women in the novel represent one of the decades in a woman's life from her daughter's adolescence to the nameless old woman whom Clarissa sees through a window. Woolf uses these women characters to confront such issues as femininity, sexuality, identity, and menopause.

There is much speculation and research that attempts to link the bouts of psychosis which Woolf suffered in her own life with the sensationalism of the male hysteria or "shell-shock" that is suffered by Septimus Smith which ends with his eventual suicide. Woolf's concern with hallucinations, delusions and illusions are also explored through the religious fanaticism of Doris Kil-man.

Perhaps the most important aspect of Mrs. Dalloway, as in all of Woolf's texts, is her concern with the role of women that has been the legacy of the Victorian and Edwardian era. Although her quarrel is not discussed until later in explicitly feminist terms, her concerns are directly reflected in her desire to invent a new way of representing female characters that would capture their subjectivities. In her novels, Woolf's aesthetic theories come to incorporate gender and genre, feminism and modernism to show how as religion, conduct, politics, and literature change, so do human relations.

D(AVID) H(ERBERT) (RICHARDS) LAWRENCE

1885—1930

Novelist, short-story writer, poet, critic, playwright and essayist, master of the 'novel of sentiment'. Lawrence was a prominent representative of Modernism in art and an adept of Freud's concept of the person. His creative activities presented an attempt at defending the person's self from mechanical civilization. Lawrence wrote: "Art performs two great functions: firstly, it reproduces the emotional life and then, if our emotions are brave enough, it becomes a source of our ideas about the truth of everyday reality".

Unlike Joyce and Woolf Lawrence was not interested in formalism. The Freudian scheme dominated in his understanding of the nature of people's relations. He perceived the main task of a novelist in conveying the emotional life of the person in its dynamics, in exposing the relations of the person and the world devoid of their ties with social reality. One of his major themes is sexuality and its place in supposedly emancipated human relations, others are industrialism and art.

Sons and Lovers (1913), which draws on Lawrence's childhood has always been one of his most popular books. The same year he explained his philosophic principles in a letter to A. Collings as a belief in 'blood and flesh' and in the fact that 'they are wiser than an intellect'.

His last novel Lady Chatterley's Lover was published in Florence in 1928 but had to await favourable court verdicts in 1959 and 1960 before it became freely available in its original form. The novel summed up Lawrence's search of the emotional and his belief that it is superior to the rational. At the same time in an article about this novel he wrote that life is only tolerable when 'the mind and body are in harmony', in an equilibrium. The pessimism of the novel reveals his disbelief in the possibility of their harmony.

Much of Sons and Lovers is taken from his own early life: his hero, Paul Morel, grows up near Nottingham in the English Midlands as Lawrence did, and also wants to be a creative artist. The centre of the novel is the relationship between Paul and his mother: he loves her and needs her to help him make sense of the world around him, but in order to become an independent man and a true artist he has to make his own decisions about his life and work, and has to struggle to become free from her influence. Like Forster's characters, Paul Morel needs to put the outer and inner world together in a true relation. Lawrence shows how the daily life of his characters influences them (Paul's father is affected by his life as a miner, and Miriam, one of the women Paul loves, is influenced by her life on the farm) but he is also concerned to express the inner qualities of human nature. This is often done through a description of nature - when Miriam watches a sunset with Paul, Lawrence's description gives the story of their relationship:

She went to the fence and sat there, watching the gold clouds fall to pieces, and go in immense, rose-coloured ruin towards the darkness. Gold flamed to scarlet, like pain in the intense brightness. Then the scarlet sank to rose, and rose to crimson⁰, and quickly the passion went out of the sky. All the world was dark grey.