Author Series - 30 - Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941)

Virginia Woolf sought to bring the full weight of women’s concerns and talents to the development of the modern novel. She rejected the rigid hierarchies of a male-dominated society and sought in her own fiction to portray women as proactive, as makers of the world. She admired women writers and artists such as her contemporaries Rebecca West and Vanessa Bell (her sister) and based her eponymous heroine, Orlando, on Bell. Orlando: A Biography (1928) is a quintessential modernist novel that violates the standards of realistic fiction even as it mimics and burlesques biography, one of the most conventional literary genres that depends on linear development and chronological storytelling. Orlando, born in the Elizabethan period and still alive at the time of the novel, exemplified the development of civilization and gender. West was especially intrigued by the passages in which Orlando undergoes gender reassignment from a man to a woman. West maintained in her 1928 essay on Woolf, “High Fountain of Genius,” that these passages made up the heart of the novel