From the early death of her mother at age 13 to the sexual abuse from her own half brothers led to the many mental and emotional breakdowns that made Virginia Woolf, a pioneer in the use of stream of consciousness. Most authors are highly educated to become a great success, but Virginia Woolf is not like most authors. She never had a formal education because of her gender, but she had access to her father’s library which became a staple to her. She had the confidence and seriousness to use what happened to her-early traumatic events-as the foundation for her brightest ideas.
Virginia Woolf was born on January 25, 1882, into a Victorian world and family. The third child and second daughter of Leslie and Julia Stephen, lived in a high Victorian-era social class and had many privileges.
After her mother’s death, Virginia suffered her first mental breakdown which grew into someting nightmarish. Approximately ten years later, following her father’s death and sexual attention from her half brother George, she suffered her second nervous breakdown and also attempted commit suicide by jumping from a window. She was shortly inhabitlized. Her pattern of mental imbalance was thus established by the time she and her full brothers and sister moved to a house in the Bloomsbury section of London. For the rest of her life she constantly was dancing between literay expression and personal desolation.
During this time, feminism emergered because of how the way women were treated, having limited rights and the opprotunity to have a proper education. Virginia Woolf often wrote about how women were limited or didn’t have any access to be able to have an education. Unlike men, they had the opprotunity to study at Oxford and Cambridge like her brothers, or any college/university they desired.
Woolf began to write when she was a young girl and published her first novel, The Voyage Out, in 1915
During the interwar period, Woolf was a significant figure in London literary society and a member of the Bloomsbury Group. The Boomsbury Group
In 1929 she published, A Room of One’s Own, an essay about feminism based on lectures she had given at women’s colleges. She examines the woman’s role in literature. She initiates the idea that, “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction”.
Regardless of how much her husband loved her, she couldn’t help but feel she was the one holding him back from true happiness. Leonard Woolf was aware of any signs that signaled Virginia Woolf’s descent to severe depression.
Unfortunately, she wasn’t strong enough to cope with it any longer, Woolf put on her coat, filled its pockets with rocks, and walked in the River Ouse on March 28, 1941. The authorites didn’t find her body till three weeks later.
