A Century Later: The Legacy of Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf: a household name in literature, but one whose writing remains somewhat undefinable. She was a novelist, an essayist, a publisher with her husband, and a crucial advocate of women’s rights. Nearly one-hundred years have passed since Woolf published one of her best-known novels, Mrs Dalloway, but what is it that makes her such a renowned author and why does she stand out so tremendously among other great writers?
In her novels, Woolf was concerned with transforming traditional experiences of time and plot in such a way that encourages readers to rethink their own perception of these concepts. In To The Lighthouse, for example, she dedicated an entire section to the passing of time, using physical decay and weathering as a useful expression for change, in stark contrast to Mrs Dalloway which expands one day to encompass the whole novel. Additionally, Woolf rejected the clean-cut use of chapters in many of her novels and even discarded punctuation at times in order to better represent the human mind. Woolf’s novels are an embodiment of consciousness getting lost in the everyday; she was a master of thought, mapping the twists and turns of our mind, and writing the distractions and amusements of our consciousness like very few others.
Woolf’s emphasis on poetic technique and language within the novel enabled her to transform the ordinary into the extraordinary and to inspire a constant mindfulness in her readers. In Mrs Dalloway, she devotes time to characters’ interpretations of events which are largely overlooked, such as an aeroplane flying above their heads and a mysterious looking car driving past; her characters constantly contemplate whether there is some special significance in these events. In her essay The Death of the Moth, she illustrated the captivating metaphor of a moth outside her window to shed light on her feelings of life, death, and the meaning of experience. Readers of Woolf learn to pay particular attention to the beauty of everyday life and to rethink that which they might otherwise ignore.
Woolf also paid particular attention to characters who, on the surface, might be considered insignificant and whose stories wouldn’t usually be told: from Septimus Smith to Orlando, Woolf successfully dramatised their complex inner lives. When I read Woolf’s work it seems to me that she wrote for anyone and everyone and aimed to celebrate each individual’s experience of the world. Her characters, as well as her readers, were often ordinary people and it is the often-untold tales of these conventional lives which feature in her novels.
Through her essays, Woolf demonstrated her commitment not only to writing, but to social criticism. With respect to women’s place in the literary sphere, A Room of One’s Own showcased the difficulties faced by women wishing to pursue literary careers, or even those who simply wanted to sit in a library. She emphasised the importance of accessibility and the need for women to have ‘a room of one’s own’ in order to write successfully. In The Art of Biography Woolf pertinently highlighted that every recorded life is ‘worthy of biography’ and that the celebration of individuals should not be reserved solely for powerful men.
Like Shakespeare and Austen, Woolf understood her readers as well as she did her characters. Like the literary giants before her, she survives because of her unique understanding of the human condition. Ultimately, she was a pioneer of the individual and of the mundane, and it is this focus which sets her apart from other writers. A hundred years later, Woolf’s contemporary appeal is still as strong as it has ever been. Woolf will continue to thrive as a distinguished writer for as long as there are common readers in the world.