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Definition: Woolf from Merriam-Webster's Collegiate(R) Dictionary

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(Adeline) Virginia Woolf 1882–1941 née Stephen Eng. author

Woolf, Virginia

From The Encyclopedia of Literary and Cultural Theory
Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) was a novelist whose innovations in narrative form and point of view have earned her acclaim as one of the most accomplished modernist writers. She was also an active literary critic, who composed nearly 500 critical pieces (more than 1,000,000 words) over almost 40 years as a professional writer. Her essays, reviews, lectures, journalistic articles, biographical studies, and two books - A Room of One's Own (1929) and Three Guineas (1938) - also mark her out as one of the greatest of English essayists. If it had not been for the central role played by her novels in defining the literary revolution of “high Modernism” and in forming a crucial model and inspiration for feminism and women's writing since 1920, Woolf's essays alone would have guaranteed her a central position in twentieth-century literature. At least four interlinking areas of interest can be identified in Woolf's theoretical thinking: her critique of “traditional” realist conventions of novel…
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Full text Article Woolf, Virginia

From Philip's Encyclopedia
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Full text Article Woolf, [née Stephen] (Adeline) Virginia

From The Palgrave Macmillan Dictionary of Women's Biography
English writer. She was born at Hyde Park Gate, London, the daughter of Julia (née Jackson) and Sir Leslie Stephen. Her adolescence and early adult life were greatly affected by the deaths of her mother, her stepsister Stella and her elder brother Thoby. After her father’s death in 1904 she, her…
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Full text Article Woolf, Virginia (1882–1941).

From The Oxford Companion to British History
The daughter of Sir Leslie Stephen, editor of the DNB , Virginia Stephen was a sensitive child. Abused at the age of 6, the death of her mother when she was 13 caused a breakdown. She was engaged at one time to Lytton Strachey but in 1912 married Leonard Woolf. The physical side of the marriage was…
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Full text Article Woolf, (Adeline) Virginia (1882–1941)

From The Hutchinson Unabridged Encyclopedia with Atlas and Weather Guide
English novelist and critic. In novels such as Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), and The Waves (1931), she used a ‘stream of consciousness’ technique to render inner experience. In A Room of One's Own (1929) (non-fiction), Orlando (1928), and The Years (1937), she examines the…
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Full text Article WOOLF, VIRGINIA (1882–1941)

From Historical Dictionary of the Lesbian and Gay Liberation Movements
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Full text Article Virginia Woolf 1882–1941

From The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations
English novelist. On Woolf: see sitwell Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The Common Reader (1925) ‘Modern Fiction’ Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of…
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Full text Article (Adeline) Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)

From The Hutchinson Unabridged Encyclopedia with Atlas and Weather Guide
He was mischievous and obscene; he gibbered and mocked and pelted the shrines with nutshells. And yet with what a grace he did it – with what ease and brilliancy and wit! On Horace Walpole, in Essays His immense egoism has paved the way for all psychological novelists, autobiographers, …
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Full text Article MATHEMATICS AND LITERATURE

From Gaither's Dictionary of Scientific Quotations
English novelist and essayist When she was rid of the pretense of paper and pen, phrase-making and biography, she turned her attention in a more legitimate direction, though, strangely enough, she would rather have confessed her wildest dreams of hurricane and prairie than the fact that, upstairs, …
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Full text Article POETS

From Collins Dictionary of Quotations
It is a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practising it. AUDEN, W. H. The Dyer’s Hand (1963). I agree with one of your reputable critics that a taste for drawing-rooms has spoiled more poets than ever did a taste for…
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Full text Article FICTION

From Collins Dictionary of Quotations
Science fiction is no more written for scientists than ghost stories are written for ghosts. ALDISS, Brian Penguin Science Fiction (1961). It does not matter that Dickens’ world is not lifelike: it is alive. CECIL, Lord David Early Victorian Novelists (1934). …
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