Virginia Woolf | Empathic revolutionary
“Woolf’s haunting language, her prescient insights into wide-ranging historical, political, feminist, and artistic issues, and her revisionist experiments with novelistic form during a remarkably productive career altered the course of Modernist and postmodernist letters” (Britannica.com).
Although best known for her non-linear novels, “Woolf also wrote pioneering essays on artistic theory, literary history, women’s writing, and the politics of power. A fine stylist, she experimented with several forms of biographical writing, composed painterly short fictions, and sent to her friends and family a lifetime of brilliant letters” (Britannica.com).
Critics have credited Woolf with “evolving a distinctly feminine diary form, one that explores, with perception, honesty, and humour, her own ever-changing, mosaic self” (Britannica.com).
One of Woolf’s most famous novels, To the Lighthouse (1927), foregrounds questions about creativity and the nature and function of art; and in the essays “The Art of Fiction” and “The New Biography,” Woolf proposed that biographers yoke truth with imagination, or “granite-like solidity” with “rainbow-like intangibility” (Britannica.com).
Sources: Reid, P.. “Virginia Woolf.” Encyclopedia Britannica, Invalid Date. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Virginia-Woolf.
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