John Steinbeck in 1939 Born

Fiction and drama[edit]

Novels[edit]

Main article: The Voyage Out

Her first novel, The Voyage Out,^[166] was published in 1915 at the age of 33, by her half-brother's imprint, Gerald Duckworth and Company Ltd. This novel was originally titled Melymbrosia, but Woolf repeatedly changed the draft. An earlier version of The Voyage Out has been reconstructed by Woolf scholar Louise DeSalvo and is now available to the public under the intended title. DeSalvo argues that many of the changes Woolf made in the text were in response to changes in her own life.^[310] The novel is set on a ship bound for South America, and a group of young Edwardians onboard and their various mismatched yearnings and misunderstandings. In the novel are hints of themes that would emerge in later work, including the gap between preceding thought and the spoken word that follows, and the lack of concordance between expression and underlying intention, together with how these reveal to us aspects of the nature of love.^[311]

Main article: Mrs Dalloway

"Mrs Dalloway (1925)^[195] centres on the efforts of Clarissa Dalloway, a middle-aged society woman, to organise a party, even as her life is paralleled with that of Septimus Warren Smith, a working-class veteran who has returned from the First World War bearing deep psychological scars".^[309]

Main article: To the Lighthouse

"To the Lighthouse (1927)^[38] is set on two days ten years apart. The plot centres on the Ramsay family's anticipation of and reflection upon a visit to a lighthouse and the connected familial tensions. One of the primary themes of the novel is the struggle in the creative process that beset painter Lily Briscoe while she struggles to paint in the midst of the family drama. The novel is also a meditation upon the lives of a nation's inhabitants in the midst of war, and of the people left behind."^[309] It also explores the passage of time, and how women are forced by society to allow men to take emotional strength from them.^[312]

Main article: Orlando: A Biography

Orlando: A Biography (1928)^[196] is one of Virginia Woolf's lightest novels. A parodic biography of a young nobleman who lives for three centuries without ageing much past thirty (but who does abruptly turn into a woman), the book is in part a portrait of Woolf's lover Vita Sackville-West.^[313] It was meant to console Vita for the loss of her ancestral home, Knole House, though it is also a satirical treatment of Vita and her work. In Orlando, the techniques of historical biographers are being ridiculed; the character of a pompous biographer is being assumed for it to be mocked.^[314]

Main article: The Waves

"The Waves (1931) presents a group of six friends whose reflections, which are closer to recitatives than to interior monologues proper, create a wave-like atmosphere that is more akin to a prose poem than to a plot-centred novel".^[309]

Main article: Flush: A Biography

Flush: A Biography (1933)^[315] is a part-fiction, part-biography of the cocker spaniel owned by Victorian poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning. The book is written from the dog's point of view. Woolf was inspired to write this book from the success of the Rudolf Besier play The Barretts of Wimpole Street. In the play, Flush is on stage for much of the action. The play was produced for the first time in 1932 by the actress Katharine Cornell.

Main article: The Years

The Years (1936),^[1] traces the history of the genteel Pargiter family from the 1880s to the "present day" of the mid-1930s. The novel had its origin in a lecture Woolf gave to the National Society for Women's Service in 1931, an edited version of which would later be published as "Professions for Women".^[316] Woolf first thought of making this lecture the basis of a new book-length essay on women, this time taking a broader view of their economic and social life, rather than focusing on women as artists, as the first book had. She soon jettisoned the theoretical framework of her "novel-essay" and began to rework the book solely as a fictional narrative, but some of the non-fiction material she first intended for this book was later used in Three Guineas (1938).

Main article: Between the Acts

"Her last work, Between the Acts (1941),^[242] sums up and magnifies Woolf's chief preoccupations: the transformation of life through art, sexual ambivalence, and meditation on the themes of flux of time and life, presented simultaneously as corrosion and rejuvenation—all set in a highly imaginative and symbolic narrative encompassing almost all of English history."^[309] This book is the most lyrical of all her works, not only in feeling but in style, being chiefly written in verse.^[317] While Woolf's work can be understood as consistently in dialogue with the Bloomsbury Group, particularly its tendency (informed by G.E. Moore, among others) towards doctrinaire rationalism, it is not a simple recapitulation of the coterie's ideals.^[14]

Themes[edit]

Woolf's fiction has been studied for its insight into many themes including war, shell shock, witchcraft, and the role of social class in contemporary modern British society.^[318] In the postwar Mrs Dalloway (1925),^[195] Woolf addresses the moral dilemma of war and its effects^[319][320] and provides an authentic voice for soldiers returning from World War I, suffering from shell shock, in the person of Septimus Smith.^[321] In A Room of One's Own (1929) Woolf equates historical accusations of witchcraft with creativity and genius among women^[322] "When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils...then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet, of some mute and inglorious Jane Austen".^[323] Throughout her work Woolf tried to evaluate the degree to which her privileged background framed the lens through which she viewed class.^[324][238] She both examined her own position as someone who would be considered an elitist snob, but attacked the class structure of Britain as she found it. In her 1936 essay Am I a Snob?,^[325] she examined her values and those of the privileged circle she existed in. She concluded she was, and subsequent critics and supporters have tried to deal with the dilemma of being both elite and a social critic.^{[326][327][328]}

The sea is a recurring motif in Woolf's work. Noting Woolf's early memory of listening to waves break in Cornwall, Katharine Smyth writes in The Paris Review that ‘the radiance [of] cresting water would be consecrated again and again in her writing, saturating not only essays, diaries, and letters but also Jacob’s Room, The Waves, and To the Lighthouse.’^[329] Patrizia A. Muscogiuri explains that ‘seascapes, sailing, diving and the sea itself are aspects of nature and of human beings’ relationship with it which frequently inspired Virginia Woolf's writing.’^[330] This trope is deeply embedded in her texts’ structure and grammar: James Antoniou notes in Sydney Morning Herald how ‘Woolf made a virtue of the semicolon, the shape and function of which resembles the wave, her most famous motif.’^[331]

Despite the considerable conceptual difficulties, given Woolf's idiosyncratic use of language,^[332] her works have been translated into over 50 languages.^[318][333] Some writers, such as the Belgian Marguerite Yourcenar, had rather tense encounters with her, while others, such as the Argentinian Jorge Luis Borges, produced versions that were highly controversial.^[332][260]

Drama[edit]

Main article: Freshwater (play)

Virginia Woolf researched the life of her great-aunt, the photographer Julia Margaret Cameron, publishing her findings in an essay titled "Pattledom" (1925),^[334] and later in her introduction to her 1926 edition of Cameron's photographs.^[335][336] She had begun work on a play based on an episode in Cameron's life in 1923, but abandoned it. Finally it was performed on 18 January 1935 at the studio of her sister, Vanessa Bell on Fitzroy Street in 1935.^[337] Woolf directed it herself, and the cast were mainly members of the Bloomsbury Group, including herself. Freshwater is a short three act comedy satirising the Victorian era, only performed once in Woolf's lifetime.^[198] Beneath the comedic elements, there is an exploration of both generational change and artistic freedom. Both Cameron and Woolf fought against the class and gender dynamics of Victorianism^[338] and the play shows links to both To the Lighthouse and A Room of One's Own that would follow.^[336]