Virginia Woolf was born in London in 1882 and received her education at home, primarily through extensive reading in the library of her father, Sir Leslie Stephen, a prominent Victorian literary critic and philosopher. Her early intellectual development was influenced by frequent contact with scholars, critics, and exposure to classical studies, including Greek.
The death of her mother in 1895 marked the beginning of a long struggle with depression and emotional instability, which would continue throughout her life. After the death of her father in 1904, Virginia and her siblings moved to the Bloomsbury area of London, where their home became a meeting place for a group of writers, artists, and intellectuals later known as the Bloomsbury Group. This group was characterized by its rejection of Victorian conventions, its liberal views on art, society, and politics, and its skepticism toward religion.
In her later years, Woolf experienced recurring mental health crises, often marked by anxiety and insecurity. These culminated in her tragic suicide: on 28 March 1941, she drowned herself in the River Ouse near her home in Sussex.
Woolf was deeply engaged with issues surrounding the condition and role of women in society. She supported the women’s suffrage movement and wrote some of her most influential essays on female identity and emancipation, including A Room of One’s Own (1929) and Three Guineas (1938).
Virginia Woolf is regarded as one of the foremost modernist novelists of the 20th century. In works such as Jacob’s Room, Mrs Dalloway, Orlando, To the Lighthouse, and The Waves, she experimented with stream-of-consciousness narration, indirect discourse, and a poetic, impressionistic style. Her approach to time in fiction reflects her modernist sensibility: she often focused on brief, meaningful episodes that are subjectively expanded by the internal thoughts and feelings of her characters. This concept is discussed in her essay Modern Fiction, where she contrasts "clock time" — objective and measurable — with "psychological time", shaped by individual perception.
This idea of subjective time is influenced by the philosophy of Henri Bergson, who distinguished between linear time and durée, or lived time.
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