research paper on virginia woolf

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• Published: 02 January 2024

“Listening to the zoom of a hornet”: Virginia Woolf’s feminist reflections on the sounds of military weapons and war violence

• Haifeng Zhu   ORCID: orcid.org/0009-0003-1303-7005 1 ,
• Hui Ding 2 &
• Weiyu Chen 1  

Humanities and Social Sciences Communications volume  11 , Article number:  20 ( 2024 ) Cite this article

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In her diaries, novels, and essays, Virginia Woolf records the psychological trauma the British people suffered from in the soundscape of military weapons during the two world wars and describes its delayed effects on the populace after the wars. Drawing upon the notions of the soundscape and Johan Galtung’s violence triangle, this paper explores how Woolf’s works portray the traumatic experience brought by the soundscape of military weapons to soldiers and ordinary citizens during the two world wars and discusses how the roar of cars and planes in her works induces the public’s traumatic memory after the wars. Then, through a close study of her essay “Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid”, this paper contends that the soundscape of German air raids compels Woolf to contemplate the roles of feminism in opposing the wars and healing war trauma.

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Introduction.

Virginia Woolf (1882—1941), one of the most influential British feminist writers, lived through two world wars and witnessed the violence of warfare inflicted upon the British people by the sounds of military weapons ranging from cannons and bombers to anti-aircraft guns. She skillfully depicts the suffering inflicted upon the British people by the sounds of military weapons during the two world wars in several of her novels, including Jacob’s Room (1920), Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), The Years (1937), posthumous Between the Acts (1941) and an essay “Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid” (1940), shedding light on the physical and psychological damage on civilians caused by war violence. This paper aims to interpret the depiction of military weapon sounds in Woolf’s works using the notions of soundscape and Johan Galtung’s violence triangle to demonstrate how military weapon sounds inflict traumatic experiences on the listeners. It seeks to illustrate how the roaring sounds of modern vehicles like cars and airplanes after the First World War trigger listeners’ traumatic memories of the war and investigate how the soundscape of air raids stimulates Woolf’s insightful feminist reflections on military weapon sounds and war violence. Woolf suggests that the essence of war violence correlates with patriarchal norms and highlights that fleeting memories of a pre-war idyllic life and the serene sounds of the countryside could serve as therapeutic approaches to address war-induced trauma.

The discordant sounds emitted by military weapons posed a traumatic threat to both the physical and psychological well-being of the affected population. Virginia Woolf records the panic, unease, and existential uncertainty provoked by these sounds during air raids in her diary entries. On August 16, 1940, Woolf encountered German bombers at close range for the first time. She vividly describes the sound they produced as resembling “someone sawing in the air just above us”, amidst a persistent backdrop of disconcerting noises: a blend of “hum & saw & buzz all around us” interspersed with intermittent sounds of “pop pop pop” (Woolf, 1984 , pp. 311–312). Within the distressing soundscape, Woolf remains acutely aware of the imminent danger and acknowledges the haunting possibility that someone “might be killed any moment”, prompting her sensations of “pressure, danger, and horror” (Woolf, 1984 , pp. 313–314). In the essay “Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid”, she employs metaphors such as “the zoom of a hornet which may at any moment sting you to death”, “the sawing of a branch overhead” and “death rattle overhead” to emphasize the menacing threat of the sounds emitted from German bombers in an air raid on the British listeners (Woolf, 1942 , pp. 243–245). She asserts that such sound compels listeners to contemplate peace: “It is a sound—far more than prayers and anthems—that should compel one to think about peace” (Woolf, 1942 , p. 243).

The evocative depictions of sounds emitted by military weapons in Woolf’s literary works and diary entries have received scant scholarly attention. Primarily, researchers, influenced by R. Murray Schafer’s The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Turning of the World (1994), have focused their investigations on the auditory dimensions of everyday life. Cuddy-Keane ( 2000 ) stands out as the first to apply Schafer’s notion of the soundscape to examine Woolf’s works, particularly in the context of sound technology and new aurality. Furthermore, Frattarola ( 2005 ), Varga ( 2014 ), Clements ( 2019 ), Xu ( 2022 ), and Zhou ( 2022 ) have delved into Woolf’s depiction of music and street sounds. Another area of focus that previous researchers have been attentive to is the violence Woolf endured in her childhood, including the sexual abuse inflicted by her two half-brothers and the wartime violence she encountered in her maturity during the two world wars. Scholars such as Brewer ( 1999 ), Cole ( 2012 ), and Zhu and Shen ( 2014 ) have delved into Woolf’s narration of violence. However, the aforementioned research has not sufficiently examined the intricate relationship between auditory writing and war violence in Woolf’s works and has not extensively explored Woolf’s reflections on war violence from the perspective of auditory narration. The intrinsic link between the sounds generated by weapons and the violence of war acts as a crucial gateway for interpreting Woolf’s works, enabling a comprehensive exploration of the direct, indirect, and cultural violence intricately interwoven within her narratives. This perspective provides a significant pathway to scrutinize Woolf’s writings through a feminist lens, stimulating contemplation on humanity’s ability to navigate the traumas inflicted by the violence of war.

Johan Galtung’s violence triangle

Johan Galtung, a prominent pioneer in the field of peace and conflict studies, introduces a framework that categorizes violence into direct, structural, and cultural forms. The framework gives rise to the concept of the violence triangle. In “Violence, Peace, and Peace Research” (1969), Galtung initially proposes the concepts of direct and structural violence. He contends that direct violence typically requires “an actor that commits the violence” (Galtung, 1969 , p. 170). He illustrates it by citing actions like war, genocide, mutilation, rape, imprisonment, slavery, and disciplinary measures, commonly categorized as instances of direct violence. Direct violence primarily emerges from warfare, leading to detrimental somatic and psychological effects on the victims. It encompasses the infliction of harm on the victims’ “body, mind or spirit”, which frequently results in “traumas that may carry violence over time” (Galtung, 1996 , p. 31).

Galtung articulates that structural violence operates covertly and subtly, lacking identifiable individuals committing explicit acts yet inflicting detrimental harm on human well-being. It chiefly emanates from the collective functioning of established and respected societal forces. This form of violence operates through disparities in power, generating unequal life opportunities. Further elaborating on this concept, he defines structural violence as the utilization of “political, oppressive and economic, exploitative” means to perpetuate an unjust distribution of resources and power (Galtung, 1996 , p. 31).

Furthermore, in his 1990 article entitled “Cultural Violence”, Galtung defines cultural violence as any element within a culture that serves to “legitimize violence in its direct or structural form”, and exemplifies this concept by highlighting cultural divisions such as “religion and ideology, art and language, and empirical and formal science” as instances of cultural violence (Galtung, 1990 , p. 291). Additionally, he expounds on how the legitimization of both direct and structural violence occurs through the propagation of “religious, legal, and ideological beliefs within educational institutions and media platforms” (Galtung, 1996 , p. 196).

Throughout the two world wars, the sounds emitted by military weapons, such as cannons, bombers, artillery, and firearms, pervaded the senses of soldiers and civilians, inflicting not only severe physical harm but also psychological trauma upon the listeners. Consequently, these individuals became direct victims of violence. Those who had been traumatized by wars were often perceived as dissenters challenging established social systems. In response, the ruling class employed structural violence to discipline these dissenting individuals, justifying an unequal allocation of resources and power. The legitimization of direct and structural violence frequently occurred within cultural violence, notably through the shaping of beliefs, attitudes, and symbolic representations.

Direct violence: the impact of military weapon soundscape

Woolf’s diary entries vividly depict the direct violence the listeners suffered from the sounds of weapons during air raids in the First World War. In the diary entry dated December 6, 1917, Woolf recounts that “I was wakened by L. (Leonard Woolf, her husband) to a most instant sense of guns: as if one’s faculties jumped up fully dressed” (Woolf, 1979 , pp. 84–85). The sound of the guns at one point is “so loud that the whistle of the shell going up followed the explosion” (Woolf, 1979 , p. 85). In the diary entry dated March 8, 1918, she details her restless night due to a German air raid. She describes hearing an explosion, followed by the abrupt eruption of gunfire all around and the piercing sound of whistles: “The guns went off all around us & we heard the whistles” (Woolf, 1979 , p. 124). Subsequently, she could hear that “there was a great though distant explosion; & after that the guns set in very thick & fast to north & south, never, but once, so near us as Barnes” (Woolf, 1979 , p. 124).

In her essay “Heard on the Downs: The Genesis of Myth” (1916), Woolf vividly portrays the horrible auditory perception of the listeners in the South Downs caused by the sound of guns from France. To listeners in the South Downs, a range of chalk hills in the south-eastern coastal counties of England, the sound of guns in the French fronts “sounds like the beating of gigantic carpets by gigantic women, at a distance” (Woolf, 1987 , p. 40). The listeners treat it as the “sinister sound of far-off beating, which is sometimes as faint as the ghost of an echo, and sometimes rises almost from the next fold of grey land” (Woolf, 1987 , p. 40). The disturbing soundscape evokes haunting imagery for the listeners, described as “many phantoms hovering on the borderland of belief and skepticism” (Woolf, 1987 , p. 40). It compels listeners to correlate the roots of war with human vanity, desire, and a strong sense of national importance.

The sound of nocturnal women beating great carpets in Jacob’s Room is a metaphorical allusion to Jacob’s death in the First World War, effectively highlighting the profound anguish inflicted upon numerous families who endure the tragic loss of their loved ones due to the brutality of war. Awakened from her drowsy state by the resounding gunshots, Mrs. Betty Flanders, Jacob’s mother, sluggishly gets out of bed from her half-asleep and goes to close the window “decorated with a fringe of dark leaves” (Woolf, 2000 , p. 172), while estimating the booming sound coming from the sea far away. The reverberating dullness of the guns penetrates her consciousness, evoking an auditory image that “nocturnal women were beating great carpets”, along with some sob stories about the loss of the family members that occur to her: “There was Morty lost, and Seabrook dead; her sons fighting for their country” (Woolf, 2000 , p. 288). Betty Flanders’s response to the booming sound coming from the sea far away shows “the risk and potential fear that can be invoked by not knowing the source of a sound” (Clements, 2019 , p. 109). David Bradshaw posits that a fringe of dark leaves on the window might “represent the young lives which would be lost in the war, assuming a wreath-like form” (Bradshaw, 2003 , p. 16). Within the soundscape of the gunfire, the juxtaposition of Mrs. Flanders’s window, “decorated with a fringe of dark leaves”, and the narrations of “there was Morty lost, and Seabrook dead; her sons fighting for their country” conveys a poignant implication of Jacob’s eventual sacrifice on the battlefield in the subsequent chapter.

The chapter “1917” in Woolf’s novel The Years sets the scene in a London cellar during a German air raid, a predominantly auditory narrative space. It utilizes the characters’ auditory perception of the sound of guns to unfold their psychological narrative, revealing the direct violence experienced by the characters in the soundscape of an air raid. The sound of British anti-aircraft guns firing at German bombers is an essential focus of narration for Woolf to describe the characters’ auditory perception and depict the threat of war violence. When the guns boom loudly overhead, Eleanor realizes that the German bombers are approaching and feels “a curious heaviness on top of her head. One, two, three, four, she counted, looking up at the greenish-grey stone” (Woolf, 1977 , p. 288). Steven Connor argues that “there is the absolute deprivation of sight for the victims of the air-raid” and they have to “rely on hearing to give them information about the incoming bombs” and points out that “the terror of the air-raid consists in its grotesquely widened bifurcation of visuality and hearing” (Connor, 1997 , p. 210). In this situation, the characters in the cellar cannot perceive the position of the German bombers visually, and the divergence between their visual and auditory perceptions is significantly widened, filling their hearts with fear. They perceive the sound of guns as “a violent crack of sound, like the split of lightning in the sky” and look up, fearing that “at any moment a bomb might fall” (Woolf, 1977 , p. 288). Even as the sound of guns becomes fainter and diminishes into the distance, the characters in the cellar are still unable to escape their fear, only able to turn and shift on “their hard chairs as if they had been cramped” (Woolf, 1977 , p. 289).

While writing Between the Acts , Woolf witnessed the German air raids on England during the Second World War, and she skillfully incorporated the buzzing sounds emitted by warplanes as a disruptive element that intruded upon the narrative process. This intentional interruption heightens the sense of fragmentation in the text and presents the characters’ psychological trauma induced by the violence of war. As the open-air historical pageant draws to a close, Mr. Streatfield, a village rector, delivers the closing speech. However, his speech is abruptly interrupted by the sudden buzzing sounds, and the word “opportunity” in his speech is abruptly cut into “opp…” and “portunity”.

Mr. Streatfield paused. He listened. Did he hear some distant music?

He continued: “But there is still a deficit” (he consulted his paper) “of one hundred and seventy-five pounds odd. So that each of us who has enjoyed this pageant has still an opp…” The word was cut in two. A zoom severed it. Twelve aeroplanes in perfect formation like a flight of wild duck came overhead. That was the music. The audience gaped; the audience gazed. Then zoom became drone. The planes had passed.

“portunity”, Mr. Streatfield continued, “to make a contribution” (Woolf, 1992 , pp. 114–115).

The word “opportunity” was intended to be fully articulated in Mr. Streatfield’s direct quotation; however, the buzzing sounds emanating from the planes instead cut it into “opp” and “ortunity”. Woolf’s unique technique of dividing the direct quotation serves to intensify the sense of fragmentation and tension in the text. Consequently, the intrusion of airplane sounds and the subsequent reaction of the audience further accentuate this fragmentation and tension, creating a fragmented, shattered, and unstable textual space. The listeners’ auditory perception is pierced by the buzzing sounds of the airplanes, eliciting their astonished reaction: “The audience gaped; the audience gazed” (Woolf, 1992 , p. 115).

According to R. Murray Schafer, sound power is “sufficient to create a large acoustic profile, and we may speak of it, too, as imperialistic” (Schafer, 1994 , p. 77). He adopts a military metaphor, i.e., “If cannons had been silent, they would never have been used in warfare” (Schafer, 1994 , p. 78), to clarify the notion of sound imperialism. Thus, the buzzing sounds emitted by the warplanes are sufficient to possess the characteristics of “sound imperialism” as they not only disrupt the speaker’s words but also forcefully dominate the auditory senses of the listeners. Confronted with the overwhelming experience of sudden or catastrophic events, the listeners find themselves unable to fully comprehend the circumstances, exhibiting what Cathy Caruth calls “a numbed state” (Caruth, 1996 , p. 11). The listeners become victims of the direct violence, involuntarily displaying expressions of astonishment and fixation in response to the horrible sounds of warplanes.

Structural violence: traumatic memories, auditory hallucinations and sense of proportion

During the First World War, British civilians endured a myriad of German air raids, leading to an increased susceptibility to the sound of bombings. Meanwhile, some soldiers on the battlefield developed shell shock due to prolonged exposure to bomb explosions. Even after the war, they found themselves haunted by the lingering shadows of their traumatic experience. They involuntarily associated certain street sounds with the sounds of war weapons, triggering traumatic delayed reactions and vivid recollections of wartime violence. However, the British government at that time viewed such soldiers as weak or cowardly, a symptom of military neurasthenia, and failed to provide adequate medical treatment. Shell shock was regarded as “a social disease”, and its patients were defined as “outsiders on the margin of established society” (Mosse, 2000 , pp. 101–102). Doctors commonly adopted Silas Weir Mitchell’s rest cure treatment, a combination of isolation, rest, and feeding, to discipline these soldiers. The medical discourse subjected the shell-shock veterans to structural violence, exacerbating their conditions and even tragically pushing some toward suicide.

Van Der Kolk and Van Der Hart argue that the recollection of traumatic events “always depends on the interaction between encoding and retrieval conditions, or compatibility between the engram and the cue”, and they propose that “the more the contextual stimuli resemble conditions prevailing at the time of the original storage, the more retrieval is likely” (Van Der Kolk and Van Der Hart, 1995 , p. 174). In Mrs. Dalloway , the sound of a car backfiring and the rumble of a commercial airplane heard in the streets of post-war London resemble the weapon sounds deeply ingrained in people’s memories, thus leading them to recollect the violence they experienced during the First World War. Anne Fernald further highlights that “bombs dropped from aeroplanes killed over 1000 British civilians during the First World War”, and she suggests that the car backfiring sound and the airplane rumble in Mrs. Dalloway both “sound overtone of threat” (Fernald, 2015 , p. 215).

In Mrs. Dalloway , a sudden car backfiring sound breaks the silence and diffuses itself among the ears of various individuals, including Mrs. Dalloway, Septimus Smith, and those in the vicinity. Engrossed in buying flowers at Miss Pym’s flower shop, Mrs. Dalloway is startled by this sudden noise that resembles a pistol shot. Septimus Smith, a First World War veteran, suffers from shell shock and possesses an extreme sensitivity to sounds resembling pistol shots. He interprets this sound of car backfiring as pistol shots on the battlefield, involuntarily recalling his officer Evans’s death on the battlefield. Consequently, the traumatic experience returns to haunt him, enveloping him in a hallucinated scenario: “This gradual drawing together of everything to one center before his eyes, as if some horror had come almost to the surface was about to burst into flames, terrified him. The world wavered and quivered and threatened to burst into flames” (Woolf, 1996 , p. 18).

The car departs and leaves “a slight ripple which flowed through glove shops and hat shops and tailors’ shops on both sides of Bond Street” (Woolf, 1996 , p. 21). Strangers in the shops recall the traumatic experience of the First World War, and they “looked at each other and thought of the dead; of the flag; of Empire” (Woolf, 1996 , p. 21). The residual impact of the slight ripple left by the car becomes evident as Mr. Bowley is aware of the trauma inflicted by the First World War: “Poor women, nice little children, orphans, widows, the War—tut-tut—actually had tears in his eyes” (Woolf, 1996 , p. 23).

In Mrs. Dalloway , the rumble of a commercial airplane evokes the listeners’ auditory hallucinations, in which they are haunted by psychological trauma caused by wartime violence. The sound of a commercial airplane bores ominously into “the ears of all people in the Mall, in the Green Park, in Piccadilly, in Regent Street, in Regent’s Park” (Woolf, 1996 , p. 25). Having endured the invasion of sounds from air raids during the First World War, listeners after the war hallucinate the rumble of the commercial airplane as an air raid. Upon hearing the rumble of the airplane, Septimus Smith recalls his traumatic experiences on the battlefield and has hallucinations of hearing a distant combat horn, triggering his post-traumatic stress disorder. The hallucinations caused by the sound of an airplane “would have sent him mad. But he would not go mad. He would shut his eyes; he would see no more” (Woolf, 1996 , p. 26).

The horn of a car in the street resonates like cannon fire and triggers Semtimus’s auditory hallucinations. Septimus’s mind continuously oscillates between recollections of the wartime period in the past and the stark realities of the post-war era in the present. Woolf uses the past tense to convey his traumatic experiences in the past: “Red flowers grew through his flesh; their stiff leaves rustled by his head” (Woolf, 1996 , p. 76). The present tense is employed to describe the origin of the sound: “It is a motor horn down in the street” (Woolf, 1996 , p. 76), thus shifting the narrative focus to the present moment. In his auditory hallucinations, the motor horn in the street transforms into music clanging against the rocks “cannoned from rock to rock, divided, met in shocks of sound which rose in smooth columns and becomes an anthem” (Woolf, 1996 , p. 76). Fernald argues the red flowers are “the red poppies bloom abundantly in the battlefields that saw some of the heaviest casualties during the First World War”, and “the red poppy has been a symbol of remembrance of the war dead since 1920” (Fernald, 2015 , p. 251).

Moreover, Septimus interprets the sound of an old man playing the penny whistle by the public house as a shepherd boy’s piping. This involuntary association invokes poignant traumatic memories of those who were killed in the war. He perceives the penny whistle as an elegy emitting a plaintive sound, like weeping and lamenting. The motor horn and the shepherd’s penny whistle trigger his association of the sounds with scenes of war violence, leading him to fantasize about red flowers blooming as symbolic representations of soldiers’ blood. The motor horn penetrates Septimus’s “reverie to provide a respite that generates highly imaginative comminglings of sight, space, and sound”, while the elegy played by the assumed shepherd boy symbolizes “the trace of death still intrudes upon the Arcadian moment” (Clements, 2019 , p. 111). The sounds in the street provoke Septimus’s post-traumatic stress disorder, causing him to feel as if he is “a drowned sailor on a rock” (Woolf, 1996 , p. 77). He contemplates the paradox of being both dead and alive simultaneously. In his hallucinations, Septimus even hears Evans speaking “behind the railings” (Woolf, 1996 , p. 28), “behind the tree” (Woolf, 1996 , p. 78), or “singing behind the screen” (Woolf, 1996 , p. 160). Woolf skillfully portrays how Septimus’s auditory responses misconstrue the sounds in the street as the thunderous sounds of cannons, thereby offering a critique of the violence of war.

According to Galtung, structural violence employs “political, oppressive and economic, exploitative” means to distribute resources and power unjustly (Galtung, 1996 , p. 31). This approach serves the ruling class’s interests and maintains the social system. The direct violence of war inflicted upon Septimus results in his development of post-traumatic stress disorder, while the post-war structural violence exacerbates his symptoms, ultimately pushing him to commit suicide by flinging himself “vigorously, violently down onto Mrs. Filmer’s area railings” (Woolf, 1996 , p. 164). In the aftermath of the First World War, the ruling elites of the British Empire consciously chose to disregard the shell shock as a means to evade their responsibility for the war’s consequences. Instead, they ascribed the condition to a perceived deficiency in the patients’ masculinity and self-control, categorizing it as a social disease. Galtung argues that the ruling class which benefits from the structural violence will attempt to “preserve the status quo so well geared to protect their interests” (Galtung, 1969 , p. 179). Dr. Bradshaw in Mrs. Dalloway , a representative of the imperial ruling class, supports this viewpoint and employs structural violence to discipline shell-shock patients. His treatment for mental disorders is deeply rooted in an unwavering belief in the sense of proportion. This treatment dictates isolating patients from sounds and prescribing long periods of rest, solitude, and silence. Labeled as the unfit, these individuals suffering from mental disorders are not allowed to “propagate their views” until they share “his sense of proportion” (Woolf, 1996 , p. 110). Unfortunately, Bradshaw’s treatment fails to alleviate Septimus’s symptoms of psychological trauma. On the contrary, it exacerbates his mental breakdown, ultimately driving him to resist the prevailing structural violence through the tragic act of suicide.

Cultural violence: feminist reflections on air raid soundscape

Galtung argues that cultural violence utilizes various cultural symbols, such as “stars, crosses, crescents; flags, anthems, military parades; the ubiquitous portrait of the Leader; inflammatory speeches, and posters” as well as “religion and ideology, language and art, empirical and formal science” to “justify or legitimize direct or structural violence” (Galtung, 1990 , p. 291). Woolf contemplates the intricate relationship between cultural violence and war manifested within the soundscape of air raids. In her essay “Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid”, Woolf employs onomatopoeia like “buzzing” and “sawing” to construct the soundscape of air raids, effectively depicting the traumatic experience of the listeners. She profoundly reflects on the intricate relations between patriarchal culture and war, seeking a path toward peace. Her profound contemplation within the soundscape of air raids not only aligns with Galtung’s theory of cultural violence but also resonates with the two auditory responses proposed by two Chinese scholars Fu and Qiu. The auditory response of meditation is “like the key to the character’s heart, so the ‘stream of auditory consciousness’ written by some writers promotes the ‘inward turn’ of narrative literature” (Fu and Qiu, 2019 , p. 33). The auditory response of apprehension “implies that sound can stimulate a breakthrough of the mind, thus the mind sparkling brilliantly in a moment” (Fu and Qiu, 2019 , p. 33).

Woolf highlights the close connection between cultural violence and war. Within the soundscape of air raids, the female narrator in “Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid” is astutely aware of the role of broadcasting in propagating cultural violence. She acknowledges that the radio serves as a tool for promoting patriotism and nationalism, fueling the recruitment of young people into the army. Galtung argues that cultural violence is perpetuated through various media platforms, utilizing strategies of instruction, persuasion, and instigation, ultimately legitimizing both direct and structural forms of violence (Galtung, 1990 , p. 299). During German air raids, the broadcasts of the British Empire, assuming the role of perpetuating cultural violence, disseminated the message that “we are a free nation, fighting to safeguard our liberty” (Woolf, 1942 , p. 244), thereby effectively justifying acts of “war-induced killing carried out under the banner of the ‘nation’” (Galtung, 1990 , p. 299).

This mainstream current propagated by the media “has whirled the young airman up into the sky and keeps him circling there among clouds” (Woolf, 1942 , p. 244). The loudspeaker cries that it is Hitler that prevents humans from getting freedom, characterizing him as embodying “aggressiveness, tyranny, the insane love of power made manifest” (Woolf, 1942 , p. 245). These broadcasts assert that the path to peace is to eliminate Hitler through war. Additionally, the British Empire strategically utilizes radio broadcasts to boost the morale of young combatants by showcasing their triumphs against the enemy. The 9 o’clock broadcast announces that “forty-four enemy planes were shot down during the night, ten of them by anti-aircraft fire” (Woolf, 1942 , p. 246). Such broadcasts incessantly reverberate in the minds of the young people, fueling their desires to combat the enemies: “To fight against a real enemy, to earn undying honor and glory by shooting total strangers, and to come home with my breast covered with medals and decorations” (Woolf, 1942 , p. 246).

Amidst the resonating buzz of the bombers, Woolf adopts the stream of auditory consciousness to depict a female narrator’s contemplation on the roots of war violence and how to use the power of media to challenge the prevailing current propagated by cultural violence. The buzzing sounds emitted by the bombers trigger the narrator’s recollection of an article published in The Times this morning. Agreeing with the article’s attribution of war violence to the women’s absence of any political voice, the narrator laments that “there is no woman in the Cabinet; nor in any responsible post. All idea-makers who are in a position to make ideas effective are men” (Woolf, 1942 , p. 244). The narrator further recognizes that the prevailing current of disregarding women’s political voices “damps thinking, and encourages irresponsibility” (Woolf, 1942 , p. 244). Within the soundscape of air raids, the narrator attributes “the helplessness of women during air raids to patriarchal culture” (Chen, 2022 , p. 42).

Likewise, the piercing sawing sound emitted by the bombers reminds the narrator of another article published in The Times this morning by Lady Astor, the first female member of Parliament. Lady Astor comments in this article that women of ability are “held down because of subconscious Hitlerism in the hearts of men” (Woolf, 1942 , p. 245). The narrator observes that both males and females are prisoners tonight. Males are boxed up in bombers with guns handy, while females are lying in the dark with gas masks handy. In the narrator’s view, the cause of this imprisonment for males lies in the Hitlerism hidden within their subconscious. She points out that the essence of Hitlerism is “the desire for aggression; the desire to dominate and enslave”, which is driven by “ancient instincts, instincts fostered and cherished by education and tradition” (Woolf, 1942 , p. 246). Similarly, the narrator astutely highlights that women find themselves imprisoned because of their preoccupation with appearances, even in the face of the imminent threat of air raids. The narrator observes “shop windows blazing; and women gazing; painted women; dressed-up women; women with crimson lips and crimson fingernails” (Woolf, 1942 , p. 245). From the narrator’s perspective, these women are enslaved by patriarchal culture, striving to “dominate and control men through seduction but cannot dominate them because they have no legitimate power” (Andrew, 1994 , p. 94).

The auditory response of apprehension entails a profound moment of epiphany ignited by the sound, signifying the capacity of sound to “stimulate a breakthrough of the mind; thus the mind sparkling brilliantly in a moment” (Fu and Qiu, 2019 , p. 33). The soundscape of the air raids triggers Woolf’s epiphany about how to heal trauma and achieve peace by recalling moments of being from memories. Through profound listening in the air raids, the female narrator realizes that the fleeting memories of a pre-war idyllic life possess the potential to dispel the Hitlerism hidden within the male subconscious. This realization offers humanity a vision to transcend the cycle of war violence. In “Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid”, Woolf extracts beautiful moments of daily life stored in recollection, presenting them in a fragmented pattern to emphasize the significance of peace in individuals’ lives. These fragments are from pre-war memories, including “the memory of other Augusts—in Bayreuth, listening to Wagner; in Rome, walking over the Campagna; in London. Friends’ voices come back. Scraps of poetry return” (Woolf, 1942 , p. 247). Woolf exhibits that “each of these thoughts, even in memory, was far more positive, reviving, healing and creative than the dull dread made of fear and hate” (Woolf, 1942 , p. 247).

Following the cannons’ cease firing, the narrator finds herself hearing once again the peaceful and serene sounds of the countryside, such as “an apple thuds to the ground. An owl hoots, winging its way from tree to tree (Woolf, 1942 , p. 43). Wang argues that these symbols of “the apple” and “the owl”, deeply rooted in traditional Western culture, are utilized poetically by Woolf to convey themes of “rebirth, ideals, and hopes” (Wang, 2019 , p. 74). These wonderful memories rejuvenated by women possess the capacity to inspire men to “give up fighting and compensate the man for the loss of his gun”, while the peaceful and serene sounds of the countryside can help men “conquer their fighting instinct and heal the civilians’ trauma caused by air raids” (Chen, 2022 , p. 44). Woolf employs the juxtaposition between the reemergence of the peaceful and serene sounds of the countryside with the thud of the apple falling and the hoot of the owl. Through this poetic and symbolic approach, she effectively shows the soothing and restorative role played by the countryside sounds in healing the traumas of war.

In the two world wars, Woolf endured the intrusion of weapon sounds and depicted the direct violence inflicted on the public by these sounds in her novels and essays. She also captured the painful memories of war trauma triggered by the soundscape in British streets, exposing the structural violence the First World War soldiers suffered from after the war. In the terrifying soundscape of German air raids on Britain, Woolf gained feminist insight into the intricate relationship between the outbreak of war, cultural violence, and patriarchal norms. She realized through this insight that the fleeting memories of a pre-war idyllic life and the serene sounds of the countryside could serve as a pathway for humanity to distance themselves from the violence of war. After the air raids, Woolf envisioned a new world that emerged after the war, akin to the characters in her novel The Years , who raised their glasses to celebrate their survival and the arrival of a new world.

Unfortunately, Woolf did not live to witness the end of the Second World War and the arrival of a new world. Like Septimus in Mrs. Dalloway , she suffered from auditory hallucinations following the outbreak of the First World War and tragically chose to commit suicide in resistance to the violence of war. Before committing suicide, Woolf left a letter to her husband Leonard, saying, “I shant recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and cant concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do” (Lee, 1999 , p. 744). She believed there was no prospect of her recovery and succumbed to despair. Woolf’s portrayal of military weapon sounds effectively reveals the direct violence imposed on the public during the war and serves as a poignant critique of structural and cultural violence.

Woolf’s portrayal and critique undeniably bear immense relevance in contemporary discussions addressing present-day war violence, as vividly exemplified by the ongoing Russia-Ukraine conflict. The stark parallels drawn between Woolf’s literary exploration and the lived experiences of the Ukrainian people echo resoundingly the sentiments expressed in her works. Within the enveloping darkness that blankets the listeners in conflict zones, akin to those in Woolf’s narrative, they find themselves subjected to the harrowing sounds of death emitted by missiles, drones, fighter jets, and the like—a haunting auditory reminder of the brutalities of war. In “Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid”, Woolf’s proposition to think against the prevailing current that advocates wars and nationalism takes on renewed significance in the context of this regional conflict. Her plea to cherish fleeting memories of pre-war idyllic life and the serene sounds of the countryside becomes a poignant call to envision peace amid the tumultuous tides of war violence.

Furthermore, the idyllic pre-war life and the serene sounds Woolf proposed in “Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid” offer potential insights into shaping the urban soundscape within post-war “peace zones”. Urban architectural planning should prioritize the integration of increased natural elements, such as expansive parks and gardens, alongside the inclusion of natural auditory features like birdsong, rustling winds, and flowing water, to foster an environment conducive to nurturing the inner tranquility of war survivors and facilitating the alleviation of their war-induced trauma.

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Zhu, H., Ding, H. & Chen, W. “Listening to the zoom of a hornet”: Virginia Woolf’s feminist reflections on the sounds of military weapons and war violence. Humanit Soc Sci Commun 11 , 20 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-023-02594-x

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Virginia Woolf

by Jessica Svendsen and Pericles Lewis

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) was an English novelist, essayist, biographer, and feminist. Woolf was a prolific writer, whose modernist style changed with each new novel. [1] Her letters and memoirs reveal glimpses of Woolf at the center of English literary culture during the Bloomsbury era. Woolf represents a historical moment when art was integrated into society, as T.S. Eliot describes in his obituary for Virginia. “Without Virginia Woolf at the center of it, it would have remained formless or marginal…With the death of Virginia Woolf, a whole pattern of culture is broken.” [2]

Virginia Adeline Stephen was the third child of Leslie Stephen, a Victorian man of letters, and Julia Duckworth. The Stephen family lived at Hyde Park Gate in Kensington, a respectable English middle class neighborhood. While her brothers Thoby and Adrian were sent to Cambridge, Virginia was educated by private tutors and copiously read from her father’s vast library of literary classics. She later resented the degradation of women in a patriarchal society, rebuking her own father for automatically sending her brothers to schools and university, while she was never offered a formal education. [3] Woolf’s Victorian upbringing would later influence her decision to participate in the Bloomsbury circle, noted for their original ideas and unorthodox relationships. As biographer Hermione Lee argues “Woolf was a ‘modern’. But she was also a late Victorian. The Victorian family past filled her fiction, shaped her political analyses of society and underlay the behaviour of her social group.” [4]

Mental Illness

In May 1895 , Virginia’s mother died from rheumatic fever. Her unexpected and tragic death caused Virginia to have a mental breakdown at age 13. A second severe breakdown followed the death of her father, Leslie Stephen, in 1904. During this time, Virginia first attempted suicide and was institutionalized. According to nephew and biographer Quentin Bell, “All that summer she was mad.” [5] The death of her close brother Thoby Stephen, from typhoid fever in November 1906 had a similar effect on Woolf, to such a degree that he would later be re-imagined as Jacob in her first experimental novel Jacob’s Room and later as Percival in The Waves . These were the first of her many mental collapses that would sporadically occur throughout her life, until her suicide in March 1941.

Though Woolf’s mental illness was periodic and recurrent, as Lee explains, she “was a sane woman who had an illness.” [6] Her “madness” was provoked by life-altering events, notably family deaths, her marriage, or the publication of a novel. According to Lee, Woolf’s symptoms conform to the profile of a manic-depressive illness, or bipolar disorder. Leonard, her dedicated lifelong companion, documented her illness with scrupulousness. He categorized her breakdowns into two distinct stages:

“In the manic stage she was extremely excited; the mind race; she talked volubly and, at the height of the attach, incoherently; she had delusions and heard voices…she was violent with her nurses. In her third attack, which began in 1914, this stage lasted for several months and ended by her falling into a coma for two days. During the depressive stage all her thoughts and emotions were the exact opposite of what they had been in the manic stage. She was in the depths of melancholia and despair; she scarcely spoke; refused to eat; refused to believe that she was ill and insisted that her condition was due to her own guilt; at the height of this stage she tried to commit suicide.” [7]

During her life, Woolf consulted at least twelve doctors, and consequently experienced, from the Victorian era to the shell shock of World War I, the emerging medical trends for treating the insane. Woolf frequently heard the medical jargon used for a “nervous breakdown,” and incorporated the language of medicine, degeneracy, and eugenics into her novel Mrs. Dalloway . With the character Septimus Smith, Woolf combined her doctor’s terminology with her own unstable states of mind. When Woolf prepared to write Mrs. Dalloway , she envisioned the novel as a “study of insanity and suicide; the world seen by the sane and the insane side by side.” When she was editing the manuscript, she changed her depiction of Septimus from what read like a record of her own experience as a “mental patient” into a more abstracted character and narrative. However, she kept the “exasperation,” which she noted, should be the “dominant theme” of Septimus’s encounters with doctors. [8]

In 1924 , during the heyday of literary modernism, Virginia Woolf tried to account for what was new about “modern” fiction. She wrote that while all fiction tried to express human character, modern fiction had to describe character in a new way because “on or about December, 1910, human character changed.” Her main example of this change in human character was the “character of one’s cook.” Whereas the “Victorian cook lived like a leviathan in the lower depths,” modern cooks were forever coming out of the kitchen to borrow the Daily Herald and ask “advice about a hat.”

Woolf’s choice of December, 1910 as a watershed referred above all to the first Post-Impressionist Exhibition, organized by her friend Roger Fry in collaboration with her brother-in-law Clive Bell. The exhibition ran from November 8, 1910 to January 15, 1911 and introduced the English public to developments in the visual arts that had already been taking place in France for a generation. More broadly, however, Woolf was alluding to social and political changes that overtook England soon after the death of Edward VII in May, 1910, symbolized by the changing patterns of deference and class and gender relations implicit in the transformation of the Victorian cook. Henry James considered that the death of Edward’s mother Victoria meant the end of one age; Edward’s reign was short (1901-1910), but to those who lived through it, it seemed to stand at the border between the old world and the new. This sense of the radical difference between the “modern” world and the “Edwardian” one, or more broadly the world before and after the First World War, became a major theme of Woolf’s fiction.

In 1911, the year after human character changed, Virginia decided to live in a house in the Bloomsbury neighborhood near the British Museum with several men, none of whom was her husband. Some of her relatives were shocked, and her father’s old friend Henry James found her lifestyle rather too Bohemian. Her housemates were her brother Adrian, John Maynard Keynes, Duncan Grant, and Leonard Woolf, whom she married a year later. Grant and Keynes were lovers, and the heterosexual members of the group too were known for their unconventional relationships. Virginia’s sister, the painter Vanessa Bell, lived for much of her life with Grant, who was also her artistic collaborator, and the two had a daughter. Throughout all this, Vanessa remained married to Clive Bell, who early in marriage had a flirtatious relationship with Virginia, while Duncan had a series of homosexual love affairs. Most of the men in the Bloomsbury group had gone to Cambridge, and many had belonged to an intellectual club called the Apostles, which, under the influence of the philosopher G. E. Moore, emphasized the importance of friendship and aesthetic experience, a more earnest form of Oscar Wilde’s aestheticism.

A typical Bloomsbury figure, Lytton Strachey , wrote his best-known book, Eminent Victorians ( 1918 ), in a satirical vein, debunking the myths surrounding such revered figures as Florence Nightingale. Strachey was the most open homosexual of the group, and Woolf vividly recalled his destruction of all the Victorian proprieties when he noted a stain on Vanessa’s dress and remarked, “Semen”: “With that one word all barriers of reticence and reserve went down.”

Feminist Critiques

Woolf wrote extensively on the problem of women’s access to the learned professions, such as academia, the church, the law, and medicine, a problem that was exacerbated by women’s exclusion from Oxford and Cambridge. Woolf herself never went to university, and she resented the fact that her brothers and male friends had had an opportunity that was denied to her. Even in the realm of literature, Woolf found, women in literary families like her own were expected to write memoirs of their fathers or to edit their correspondence. Woolf did in fact write a memoir of her father, Leslie Stephen, after his death, but she later wrote that if he had not died when she was relatively young (22), she never would have become a writer.

Woolf also concerned herself with the question of women’s equality with men in marriage, and she brilliantly evoked the inequality of her parents’ marriage in her novel To the Lighthouse ( 1927 ). Woolf based the Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay on her parents. Vanessa Bell immediately decoded the novel, discovering that Mrs. Ramsay was based on their mother, Julia Duckworth Stephen. Vanessa felt that it was “almost painful to have her so raised from the dead.” [10] Woolf’s mother was always eager to fulfill the Victorian ideal that Woolf later described, in a figure borrowed from a pious Victorian poem, as that of the “Angel in the House.” Woolf spoke of her partly successful attempts to kill off the “Angel in the House,” and to describe the possibilities for emancipated women independently of her mother’s sense of the proprieties.

The disparity Woolf saw in her parents’ marriage made her determined that “the man she married would be as worthy of her as she of him. They were to be equal partners.” [11] Despite numerous marriage proposals throughout her young adulthood, including offers by Lytton Strachey and Sydney Waterlow, Virginia only hesitated with Leonard Woolf, a cadet in the Ceylon Civil Service. Virginia wavered, partly due to her fear of marriage and the emotional and sexual involvement the partnership requires. She wrote to Leonard: “As I told you brutally the other day, I feel no physical attraction in you. There are moments—when you kissed me the other day was one—when I feel no more than a rock. And yet your caring for me as you do almost overwhelms me. It is so real, and so strange.” [12] Virginia eventually accepted him, and at age 30, she married Leonard Woolf in August 1912. For two or three years, they shared a bed, and for several more a bedroom. However, with Virginia’s unstable mental condition, they followed medical advice and did not have children.

Related to the unequal status of marriage was the sexual double standard that treated lack of chastity in a woman as a serious social offense. Woolf herself was almost certainly the victim of some kind of sexual abuse at the hands of one of her half-brothers, as narrated in her memoir Moments of Being . More broadly, she was highly conscious of the ways that men had access to and knowledge of sex, whereas women of the middle and upper classes were expected to remain ignorant of it. She often puzzled about the possibility of a literature that would treat sexuality and especially the sexual life of women frankly, but her own works discuss sex rather indirectly.

If much of Woolf’s feminist writing concerns the problem of equality of access to goods that have traditionally been monopolized by men, her literary criticism prefigures two other concerns of later feminism: the reclaiming of a female tradition of writing and the deconstruction of gender difference. In A Room of One’s Own ( 1929 ), Woolf imagines the fate of Shakespeare’s equally brilliant sister Judith (in fact, his sister’s name was Joan). Unable to gain access to the all-male stage of Elizabethan England, or to obtain any formal education, Judith would have been forced to marry and abandon her literary gifts or, if she had chosen to run away from home, would have been driven to prostitution. Woolf traces the rise of women writers, emphasizing in particular Jane Austen, the Brontës, and George Eliot, but alluding too to Sappho, one of the first lyric poets. Faced with the question of whether women’s writing is specifically feminine, she concludes that the great female authors “wrote as women write, not as men write.” She thus raises the possibility of a specifically feminine style, but at the same time she emphasizes (citing the authority of Coleridge) that the greatest writers, among whom she includes Shakespeare, Jane Austen, and Marcel Proust , are androgynous, able to see the world equally from a man’s and a woman’s perspective.

The Effect of War

The theme of how to make sense of the changes wrought in English society by the war, specifically from the perspective of a woman who had not seen battle, became central to Woolf’s work. In her short story “Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street” ( 1922 ), Woolf has her society hostess, Clarissa Dalloway, observe that since the war, “there are moments when it seems utterly futile…—simply one doesn’t believe, thought Clarissa, any more in God.” Although her first novel, The Voyage Out ( 1915 ) had tentatively embraced modernist techniques, her second, Night and Day ( 1919 ), returned to many Victorian conventions. The young modernist writer Katherine Mansfield thought that Night and Day contained “a lie in the soul” because it failed to refer to the war or recognize what it had meant for fiction. Mansfield, who had written a number of important early modernist stories, died at the age of 34 in 1923, and Woolf, who had published some of her work at the Hogarth Press , often measured herself against this friend and rival. Mansfield’s criticism of Night and Day as “Jane Austen up-to-date” stung Woolf, who, in three of her major modernist novels of the 1920s, grappled with the problem of how to represent the gap in historical experience presented by the war. The war is a central theme in her three major modernist novels of the 1920s: Jacob’s Room (1922), Mrs. Dalloway (1925), and To the Lighthouse (1927). Over the course of the decade, these novels trace the experience of incorporating the massive and incomprehensible experience of the war into a vision of recent history.

Hogarth Press

In 1915, Leonard and Virginia moved to Hogarth House, Richmond, and two years later, brought a printing press in order to establish a small, independent publishing house. Though the physical machining required by letterpress exhausted the Woolfs, the Hogarth Press flourished throughout their careers. Hogarth chiefly printed Bloomsbury authors who had little chance of being accepted at established publishing companies. The Woolfs were dedicated to publishing the most experimental prose and poetry and the emerging philosophical, political, and scientific ideas of the day. They published T.S. Eliot , E.M. Forster , Roger Fry , Katherine Mansfield , Clive Bell , Vita Sackville-West, and John Middleton Murry, among numerous others. Though they rejected publishing James Joyce ’s Ulysses , they printed T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and the first English translations of Sigmund Freud. Hogarth additionally published all of Woolf’s novels, providing her the editorial freedom to do as she wished as a woman writer, free from the criticism of a male editor. J.H. Willis explains that Woolf “could experiment boldly, remaking the form and herself each time she shaped a new fiction, responsible only to herself as writer-editor-publisher…She was, [Woolf] added triumphantly, ‘the only woman in England free to write what I like.’ The press, beyond doubt, had given Virginia a room of her own.” [13]

Female Relations

Woolf’s liberated writing parallels her relationships with women, who gave her warm companionship and literary stimulus. In her girlhood, there was Violet Dickinson; in her thirties, Katherine Mansfield; and in her fifties, there was Ethel Smyth. But none of these women emotionally aroused Virginia as did Vita Sackville-West. They met in 1922, and it developed into the deepest relationship that Virginia would ever have outside her family. [14] Virginia and Vita were more different than alike; but their differences in social class, sexual orientation, and politics, were all were part of the attraction. Vita was an outsider to Bloomsbury and disapproved of their literary gatherings. Though the two had different intellectual backgrounds, Virginia found Vita irresistible with her glamorous and aristocratic demeanor. Virginia felt that Vita was “a real woman. Then there is some voluptuousness about her; the grapes are ripe; & not reflective. No. In brain & insight she is not as highly organised as I am. But then she is aware of this, & so lavishes on me the maternal protection which, for some reason, is what I have always wished from everyone.” [15] Though Vita and Virginia shared intimate relations, they both avoided categorizing their relationship as lesbian. Vita rejected the lesbian political identity and even Woolf’s feminism. Instead, Vita was well-known in her social circles as a “Sapphist.” Virginia, on the other hand, did not define herself as a Sapphist. She avoided all categories, particular those that categorized her in a group defined by sexual behavior. [16]

Woolf’s relationship with Vita ultimately shaped the fictional biography Orlando , a narrative that spans from 1500 to the contemporary day. It follows the protagonist Orlando who is based on “Vita; only with a change about from one sex to another.” [17] For Virginia, Vita’s physical appearance embodied both the masculine and the feminine, and she wrote to Vita that Orlando is “all about you and the lusts of your flesh and the lure of your mind.” Though Virginia and Vita’s love affair only lasted intermittently for about three years, Woolf wrote Orlando as an “elaborate love-letter, rendering Vita androgynous and immortal, transforming her story into a myth.” [18] Indeed, Woolf’s ideal of the androgynous mind is extended in Orlando to an androgynous body.

When it was published in October 1928, Orlando immediately became a bestseller and the novel’s success made Woolf one of the best-known contemporary writers. In the same month, Woolf gave the two lectures at Cambridge, later published as A Room of One’s Own (1929), and actively participated in the legal battles that censored Radclyffe Hall’s lesbian novel, The Well of Loneliness . Despite this concentrated period of reflection on gender and sexual identities, Woolf would wait until 1938 to publish Three Guineas , a text that expands her feminist critique on the patriarchy and militarism.

Woolf clearly expressed her reasons for committing suicide in her last letter to her husband Leonard: “I feel certain that I am going mad again: I feel we cant go through another of those terrible times. And I shant recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and cant concentrate.” [20] On March 18, she may have attempted to drown herself. Over a week later on March 28, Virginia wrote the third of her suicide letters, and walked the half-mile to the River Ouse, filled her pockets with stones, and walked into the water. [21]

Virginia’s body was found by some children, a short way down-stream, almost a month later on April 18. An inquest was held the next day and the verdict was “Suicide with the balance of her mind disturbed.” Her body was cremated on April 21 with only Leonard present, and her ashes were buried under a great elm tree just outside the garden at Monk’s House, with the concluding words of The Waves as her epitaph, “Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death!” [22]

The last words Virginia Woolf wrote were “Will you destroy all my papers.” [23] Written in the margin of her second suicide letter to Leonard, it is unclear what “papers” he was supposed to destroy—the typescript of her latest novel Between the Acts ; the first chapter of Anon, a project on the history of English literature; or her prolific diaries and letters. If Woolf wished for all of these papers to be destroyed, Leonard disregarded her instructions. He published her novel, compiled significant diary entries into the volume The Writer’s Diary , and carefully kept all of her manuscripts, diaries, letters, thereby preserving Woolf’s unique voice and personality captured in each line.

• ↑ Spender, Stephen. “Virginia Woolf’s Obituary Notice.” Listener. 10 April 1941.
• ↑ Eliot, T.S. “Virginia Woolf’s Obituary.” Horizon. May 1941.
• ↑ Nicolson, Nigel. Introduction to The Letters of Virginia Woolf: Volume One: 1888-1912. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1975.
• ↑ Lee, Hermione. Virginia Woolf. New York: Vintage, 1990. 55
• ↑ Bell, Quentin. Virginia Woolf: A Biography. London: Hogarth Press, 1990.
• ↑ Lee, Hermione. Virginia Woolf. New York: Vintage, 1990. 171.
• ↑ Ibid 174.
• ↑ Ibid 188.
• ↑ Nicolson, Nigel. The Letters of Virginia Woolf: Volume One: 1888-1912. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1975. 183.
• ↑ Ibid 572.
• ↑ Woolf, Virginia. The Letters of Virginia Woolf: Volume One: 1888-1912. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1975. 1 May 1912.
• ↑ Willis, J. H. Leonard and Virginia Woolf As Publishers: The Hogarth Press, 1917-41. Charlottesville, Virginia: University Press of Virginia, 1992. 400.
• ↑ Nicolson, Nigel. Introduction to The Letters of Virginia Woolf: Volume Three: 1923-1928. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1977.
• ↑ Woolf, Virginia. The Diary of Virginia Woolf: Volume 3: 1925-1930. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1980. 51.
• ↑ Lee, Hermione. Virginia Woolf. New York: Vintage, 1990. 484.
• ↑ Woolf, Virginia. The Diary of Virginia Woolf: Volume 3: 1925-1930. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1980. 428.
• ↑ Nicolson, Nigel. Introduction to The Letters of Virginia Woolf: Volume Six: 1936-1941. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1980.
• ↑ Ibid 486.
• ↑ Ibid 481.
• ↑ Ibid 487.

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All human beings are extremely complicated. Virginia Woolf was one of the few people I have ever met who I think was a genius, and geniuses are slightly more complicated than ordinary people. I have myself met two people whom you have to call geniuses; one was G. E. Moore the philosopher, and the other was my wife. Her mind acted in a way in which ordinary people, who are not geniuses, never let their minds run. She had a perfectly ordinary way of thinking and talking and looking at things and living; but she also at moments had a sight of things which does not seem to me to be exactly the ordinary way in which ordinary people think and let their minds go. It was partly imagination, and it worked in ordinary life in exactly the same way every now and then as it worked in her books. She would be describing what she had seen in the street, for instance, or what someone had said to her, and then go on to weave a character of the person and everything connected with them, and it would be quite amusing. Then suddenly it would become something entirely different. I always called it leaving the ground. She would weave not the sort of scene or conversation which one felt was what anyone else would have seen and described, but something entirely different.

Listener , 4 March 1965, pp. 327–8.

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Japan Women’s University, Tokyo, Japan

J. H. Stape ( Professor of English ) ( Professor of English )

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© 1995 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited

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Woolf, L. (1995). Virginia Woolf: Writer and Personality. In: Stape, J.H. (eds) Virginia Woolf. Macmillan Interviews and Recollections. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-23807-1_33

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ENGL 2508: Virginia Woolf

• Critical & Biographical Resources
• Reception History & Publication History
• Bibliography & Citation Resources
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Librarian for English

Hyper-Concordance for Virginia Woolf

The Victorian Literary Studies Archive has produced an online Hyper-Concordance of words used in numerous works by many authors, including Virginia Woolf . Select one of her works from the drop down list, then run a search for any word used in the book to find out how many times and where it is used. 

Researching Virginia Woolf and her works

The resources on this guide will help you as you undertake research related to Virginia Woolf this semester. This page includes information for finding Woolf-related critical scholarship and biographical information. Use the other tabs in this guide to find resources for researching the reception history and publication history of Woolf's works, as well as guidance on citing works you have used in your research papers and tools for making off-Grounds access to our resources easier.

Finding Woolf-related critical scholarship - Library databases

The MLA International Bibliography (MLAIB)   indexes the broadest range of resources about literature in all languages. If a literary study of your novel or work exists, you will likely find it here. Not everything in the MLA Bibliography is full-text, meaning that you may only see a description of an article, rather than the text of the article. To get full text of an article, click on “Find article @ UVa Libraries”, or look up the journal title in Virgo, the library catalog. If the citation is for a book or an essay/chapter in a book, look for the book title in Virgo. 

ProQuest One Literature  contains 3 million literature citations from thousands of journals, monographs, and dissertations. It also includes more than 500,000 primary works – including rare and obscure texts, multiple versions, and non-traditional sources like comics, theatre performances, and author readings.

JSTOR  includes older issues of scholarly journals, from their beginnings to 3-5 years ago, so this may be another good database to look for articles related to your novel or work. Articles in JSTOR should be full-text, if we subscribe to the journal. 

Project MUSE includes searchable full text of nearly 600 scholarly journals in the humanities, social sciences, and more, mostly from North American university presses. 

Finding print and ebooks - critical scholarship

Virgo  is UVA Library's catalog. Search Virgo for scholarship about Woolf and her works. Use subject headings to help you find resources that meet your research needs. You can use a general subject to get started, like:  Woolf, Virginia -- 1882-1941 -- Criticism and interpretation  or  Woolf, Virginia -- 1882-1941 -- To the lighthouse   (substitute titles of other works to look for criticism on those).

You can also run an advanced search and pair a search for Woolf with a search for subjects that relate to themes/topics of interest. For example, you might search for a keyword of Woolf and a subject of:  Subconsciousness in literature  or  Realism in literature  or  World War (1914-1918) . 

Once you find a book that includes a subject heading that relates to your topic of interest, click on the subject heading in the item record to find other items marked with that subject. 

Below are a few examples of print books and ebooks that critically examine Woolf and her works. 

Finding biographical information about Woolf, another author, an illustrator, or publisher

The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB)   provides entries on the lives of British persons from the earliest times to the end of the 20th century.  IMPORTANT:  our access is limited so please click the Sign Out link at the bottom of the page and close the window when you are finished. 

Orlando: Women's Writing in the British Isles provides entries on authors' lives and writing careers, contextual material, timelines, sets of internal links, and bibliographies. Interacting with these materials creates a dynamic inquiry from any number of perspectives into centuries of women's writing. 

Literature Resource Center (LRC) includes the full text of important literary reference works. Among them are articles from the Dictionary of Literary Biography,  which is a terrific source for finding detailed biographies and profiles of authors, illustrators, publishers, and other literary figures. Run a search for a person's name and then choose the Biographies tab, if there are articles available (though other articles - critical or otherwise -- could be useful, too!) 

There are also many book-length works on Woolf and her friends, family, and associates. Find them using a Virgo catalog search. A few examples: 

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Virginia Woolf as A Feminist Writer

Related Papers

The Expression: An International Multidisciplinary e-Journal

Pallavi Pallavi

Virginia Woolf was a prominent feminist writer of the early 20th century, who addressed various issues related to gender inequality and gender roles in her literary works. Her books, A Room of One's Own and Orlando, are considered significant contributions to feminist thought. A Room of One's Own, published in 1929, is one of Woolf's most famous books, which explores the theme of women and literature. The book argues that women writers have been historically marginalized and oppressed due to various societal and institutional barriers, such as lack of access to education, financial independence, and opportunities for creative expression. She emphasizes the importance of women having their own space and resources to pursue their literary ambitions and asserts that women need "a room of one's own and five hundred a year" to write freely and independently. This study is prepared to present pearls and pitfalls of the feminist thought and explains Virginia Woolf's ideas of equality between sexes.

International Journal of Applied Research

Anjali Kurra

Usama Muneer

Abstract--Virginia Woolf in Mrs Dalloway (1925) primarily focuses on Clarissa Dalloway’s multifaceted identity. In this study I intend to shed more light on the problematic of subjectivity from feminist perspective. The present study draws on Woolf’s own understanding regarding the formation of identity as well as Simone de Beauvoir’s, Judith Butler’s and Susan Bordo’s to locate Clarissa’s feminine qualities and resistance in the novel. All the above mentioned figures believe in the constructivity of identity formation: that Clarissa's identity, far from being given in advance for her to step into, emerge over time through discursive and other social practices; her identity is inflected and constructed by ideologies of gender and other social constructs. The interactions between language and gender on the one hand, and feminist theory on the other, are of tremendous significance in this study. The present study challenges the essentialist notion that identities in general, and gender identities in particular, are inevitable, natural and fixed. Clarissa’s identity needs to be constructed socially through language, but this very language is patriarchal and therefore, marginalizes feminine identity. I conclude that Clarissa Dalloway as a social being is not able to achieve a stable and unified position as a subject and her struggles are frustrated and ultimately lead to defeat of constructing a unified subjectivity.

The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf

Suzanne Raitt

Annika Hawkinson

In this project I explore Virginia Woolf’s modernist preoccupation with representing ordinary, female life in her fiction. Reading her novel Mrs. Dalloway alongside some of her more explicitly feminist essays, I analyze the way that her female protagonist, Clarissa, navigates the physical world around her, and why the spaces she occupies are so crucial to her character. Because I am primarily interested in the question of feminine space, this project is divided in two parts that respectively explore Clarissa’s relationship with the “outside” world of the city and the “inside” world of her home. It is my belief that by making a physical space on the page for the everyday woman, Woolf celebrates the often trivialized experiences of domesticity and femininity while simultaneously expanding the definition of what it means to have a novel-worthy story

International Journal of Comparative Literature and Translation Studies [IJCLTS]

Marta Ratyńska

In the presented thesis I focus on the topics related to gender in Virginia Woolf’s essay A Room of One’s Own (1929) and novel Orlando (1928). I aim to establish whether and how Woolf offers a solution to 20th-century female writers’ problems, and to decide if the offered model is effective in the fight against patriarchal oppression. Proceeding from the historical sources and literary criticism I set out the conditions of living in England in the interwar period, social relations and sex hierarchy, as well as outlining the aims of the feminism movement. Analysis of the chosen works enables me to validate whether the author follows her own advice given in A Room of One’s Own. The thesis draws on Judith Butler’s ideas regarding gender classification and the issue of performativity. I analyse the character of Orlando through the prism of Butler’s research and the situation of women, their opportunities and possibilities. It is concluded that Woolf offers women a model of society in which the qualities characteristic of female and male sex intermix. It allows women having a lifestyle typical of men, which would provide them with freedom and equality. Moreover, performativity proves that gender identity is not acquired naturally, but it is shaped culturally and socially, and undergoes changes in time and space.

Genres/genre dans la littérature anglaise et américaine, vol.1. Eds. Alfandary, Broqua

Anne Besnault

Proceedings from the 31st Aedean Conference Recurso Electronico 2008 Isbn 978 84 9749 278 2 Pags 181 188

MARGARITA SÁNCHEZ CUERVO

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