Biography

Adeline Virginia Stephen, later named Virginia Woolf, was born on January 25th, 1882, in Kensington, England. Her father was a notable historian and author, and her mother was a model and a nurse. Each of her parents had children from a previous marriage, and Woolf grew up with eight siblings, all living in the same house.

Woolf had some notable traumas that led to the development of her writing style and the detriment of her mental health. She was sexually abused by two of her half-brothers during childhood. Her mother also died suddenly when Woolf was only 13. The death of her mother led to Woolf’s first nervous breakdown. Two years later, one of her sisters died, followed by her father and one of her brothers.

Despite her struggles with mental illness, Virginia Woolf began her literary career in earnest in 1905, contributing stories and essays to The Times Literary Supplement. During this time, she moved to London and began socializing and writing with the Bloomsbury Group. This modernist intellectual circle included Clive Bell, E.M. Forster, John Maynard Keynes, and many other thinkers, including her future husband, Leonard Woolf.

Virginia Woolf published several novels and a collection of feminist essays during her career. She is one of the most prominent members of both the modernist movement and the feminist literary movement, completing 13 books before dying by suicide in 1941. Posthumously, several more of her books were published, and years after her death, she became a feminist icon.

Context

The historical context is informed by the time of radical change that Virginia Woolf lived through. Woolf reached adulthood at the turn of the century, and by this time, history would declare the end of the Victorian era and the beginning of the Modern era. Her career spanned the second industrial revolution, two world wars, and tremendous scientific, political, literary, and philosophical thinking changes.

Modern technology brought solutions to many problems but created new ones. As the modern era began, life was changed seemingly overnight. Many writers and thinkers in the modernist movement, Woolf, among them, tried to express the feelings of isolation brought on by modern life. As the old rules and traditions of Victorian life broke down, the modernist thinkers, writers, and artists sought to challenge the rules of art and culture in every way possible. Modernist artists like Woolf pushed boundaries by breaking down the fibers of form, plot, dialogue, and any other convention in their work. To The Lighthouse is certainly no exception.

Many influential thinkers changed the cultural consciousness during Woolf’s life and career, but perhaps none more than Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein, and Karl Marx. The genesis of psychology began with Freud, and his insights into human behavior and the human mind were revolutionary. Equally revolutionary was the birth of Marxism, exposing flaws in the conventional economic and political thought. As these thinkers changed the way people thought about themselves and society, Einstein made them question the laws of nature and the universe that they existed in. All of this new thought, and the vocal critics of all of these new ideas, created a landscape ripe for exploration by the Modernist artists, and Woolf proved ready to help lead this charge.