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Book: The Cambridge Introduction to Virginia Woolf
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  1. Jane Goldman _ The Cambridge Introduction to

    There are numerous biographies of Woolf. Biography has been highly influential in shaping the reception ofWoolf 's work, and her life has been as much debated as her writing. I would recommend the following three whichrepresent three different biographical contexts and a range of positions on Woolf 's life: Quentin Bell's Virginia Woolf: A Biography {1972}, Hermione Lee's Virginia Woolf {1996}, and Julia Briggs's Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life{2005}. There is no one, true biography of Woolf {as, indeed, there cannot be of any subject of biography}, but these three mark important phases in the writing and rewriting of Woolf 's life. Hot debate continues over how biographers represent her mental health, her sexuality, her politics, her suicide, and of course her art, and over how we are to understand the latter in relation to all the former points of contention.
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  2. Jane Goldman _ The Cambridge Introduction to

    There are numerous biographies of Woolf. Biography has been highly influential in shaping the reception ofWoolf 's work, and her life has been as much debated as her writing. I would recommend the following three whichrepresent three different biographical contexts and a range of positions on Woolf 's life: Quentin Bell's Virginia Woolf: A Biography {1972}, Hermione Lee's Virginia Woolf {1996}, and Julia Briggs's Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life{2005}. There is no one, true biography of Woolf {as, indeed, there cannot be of any subject of biography}, but these three mark important phases in the writing and rewriting of Woolf 's life. Hot debate continues over how biographers represent her mental health, her sexuality, her politics, her suicide, and of course her art, and over how we are to understand the latter in relation to all the former points of contention."
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  3. Jane Goldman _ The Cambridge Introduction to

    In January 1912 Leonard proposed marriage. She was unable to answer directly and he pressed further in a passionate letter: 'It isn't, really it isnt, merely because you are so beautiful – though of course that is a large reason & so it should be – that I love you: it is your mind & your character – I have never known anyone like you in that – wont you believe me?
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  4. Jane Goldman _ The Cambridge Introduction to

    Leonard and Virginia married in August 1912. Virginia was 30. Soon after her marriage she suVered another breakdown and her mental health declined sporadically over the following year, culminating in a suicide attempt in September 1913. They were advised against having children because of Virginia's recurring depressive illness, a cause of some regret to her, and a point of much heated debate among her later biographers.
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  5. Jane Goldman _ The Cambridge Introduction to

    Leonard Woolf was two years older than Virginia, whom he had first met in 1901 in the rooms of her brother Thoby at Cambridge. He went from St Paul's School to Trinity College on a scholarship in 1899 and was the first Jew to be elected to the Cambridge Apostles. His father Sidney Woolf {1844–92} was a barrister who died prematurely, leaving his widow, Marie, with the care of their ten children. After Cambridge, Leonard reluctantly entered the Colonial Civil Service and he served in Ceylon for seven years. The experience forged him as a passionate anti-imperialist. In 1911 he began writing a novel based on his experiences, but written from the point of view of the Sinhalese; The Village in the Jungle was published in 1913. This work may have influenced his wife's novel The Voyage Out, which has a fictional colonial setting. On his return to England he became a committed socialist and he was active on the left for most of his life, publishing numerous pamphlets and books of significance on national and international politics. His role as intimate literary mentor to Virginia Woolf has sometimes overshadowed his considerable import as a political writer in his own right.
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  6. Jane Goldman _ The Cambridge Introduction to

    In 1922 Woolf met the writer Vita Sackville-West, who was to join Vanessa Bell and Leonard Woolf as the most significant people in her life.
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  7. Jane Goldman _ The Cambridge Introduction to

    By the close of the nineteenth century her studies with her father were being supplemented by tuition in the classics from Dr Warr of King's College, Kensington, and from Clara Pater, sister of the English essayist and critic Walter Pater {1839–94}. Woolf was very fond of Clara and an exchange between them later became the basis for her short story 'Moments of Being: Slater's Pins Have No Points' {1928}. Thoby boarded at Clifton College, Bristol, Adrian was a dayboy at Westminster School, and Vanessa attended Cope's School of Art. Thoby, and later Adrian, eventually went to Trinity College, Cambridge, and Vanessa undertook training in the visual arts {attending the Slade School of Fine Art for a while}. From 1902 Virginia's tuition in classics passed from Clara Pater to the very capable Janet Case, one of the first graduates from Girton College, Cambridge, and a committed feminist. The sisters visited Cambridge a number of times to meet Thoby, whose friends there included Clive Bell 1881–1964}, Lytton Strachey {1880– 1932}, Leonard Woolf {1880–1969} and Saxon Sydney-Turner.
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  8. Jane Goldman _ The Cambridge Introduction to

    The Bloomsbury Group has been characterised as a liberal, pacifist, and at times libertine, intellectual enclave of Cambridge-based privilege. The Cambridge men of the group {Bell, Forster, Fry, Keynes, Strachey, Sydney-Turner} were members of the elite and secret society of Cambridge Apostles. aesthetic understanding, and broader philosophy, were in part shaped by, and at first primarily interpreted in terms of, {male} Bloomsbury's dominant aesthetic and philosophical preoccupations, rooted in the work of {a central influence on the Apostles}, and culminating in Fry's and differing brands of pioneering aesthetic formalism. 'The main things which Moore instilled deep into our minds and characters,' recalls, 'were his peculiar passion for truth, for clarity and common sense, and a passionate belief in certain values.'Increasing awareness of Woolf's feminism, however, and of the influence on her work of other women artists, writers and thinkers has meant that these Moorean and male points of reference, though of importance, are no longer considered adequate in approaching Woolf's work, and her intellectual development under the tutelage of women, together with her involvement with feminist thinkers and activists, is also now acknowledged.
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  9. Jane Goldman _ The Cambridge Introduction to

    The 1950s and 1960s: philosophy, psychology, mythThere was considerable critical interest in Woolf 's life and work in this period, fuelled by the publication of selected extracts from her diaries, in A Writer's Diary {1953}, and in part by J. K. Johnstone's The BloomsburyGroup {1954}. The main critical impetus was to establish a sense of a unifying aesthetic mode in Woolf 's writing, and in her works as a whole, whether through philosophy, psychoanalysis, formal aesthetics, or mythopoeisis.James Hafley identified a cosmic philosophy in his detailed analysis of her fiction, The Glass Roof: Virginia Woolf as Novelist {1954}, and offered a complex account of her symbolism. Woolf featured in the influential TheEnglish Novel: A Short Critical History {1954} by Walter Allen who, with antique chauvinism, describes the Woolfian 'moment' in terms of 'short, sharp female gasps of ecstasy, an impression intensified by Mrs Woolf 's useof the semi-colon where the comma is ordinarily enough'. Psychological and Freudian interpretations were also emerging at this time, such as Joseph Blotner's 1956 study of mythic patterns in To the Lighthouse, an essay that draws on Freud, Jung and the myth of Persephone.4 And there were studies of Bergsonian writing that made much of Woolf, such as Shiv Kumar's Bergson and the Stream of Consciousness Novel {1962}.The most important work of this period was by the French critic Jean Guiguet. His Virginia Woolf and Her Works {1962}; translated by Jean Stewart, 1965} was the first full-length study ofWoolf 's oeuvre, and it stood for a long time as the standard work of critical reference in Woolf studies. Guiguet draws on the existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre to put forward a philosophical reading of Woolf; and he also introduces a psychobiographical dimension in the non-self.' This existentialist approach did not foreground Woolf 's feminism, either.his heavy use of extracts from A Writer's Diary. He lays great emphasis onsubjectivism in Woolf 's writing, and draws attention to her interest in thesubjective experience of 'the moment.' Despite his philosophical apparatus,Guiguet refuses to categorise Woolf in terms of any one school, and insiststhat Woolf has indeed 'no pretensions to abstract thought: her domain is life,not ideology'. Her avoidance of conventional character makes Woolf for hima 'purely psychological' writer.5 Guiguet set a trend against materialist andhistoricist readings ofWoolf by his insistence on the primacy of the subjectiveand the psychological: 'To exist, for Virginia Woolf, meant experiencing thatdizziness on the ridge between two abysses of the unknown, the self and
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