Virginia Woolf a Figure of Anglo-Saxon Modernism

Virginia Woolf is one of the most relevant figures of Anglo-Saxon modernism and a feminist voice of the first half of 1900. Although the British writer is still recognized as one of the most influential writers of the 20th century. Her works include the novels ‘Mrs. Dalloway’ (1925) and ‘Al Faro’ (1927), as well as numerous essays in which she investigate the role of women in modern society. Her life was marked by depression and bipolar disorder, which led her to commit suicide in 1941 when she was 56 years old. As a child, she and her sister Vanessa suffered repeated sexual abuse from their half-brothers. Her mother died when he was 13 years old and from there, she began to develop his sudden mood swings. In 1908 and after publishing articles and reviews for various newspapers of London, Woolf made her first literary work with the play ‘Melymbrosia’. She wrote her first novel at the age of 35, was called ‘The Voyage Out’, a work that a lot of people believe it was a premonition regarding the death of the writer herself. ‘In Night and Day’ (1919) the writer analyzes the society in which she lived, where modernity was in conflict with the traditional role of women; so, it began to have transformations in England. She was married with the economist and historian, Leonard Woolf, but Virginia get tired of him, so she had a relationship with the also writer Vita Sackville-West, who was her muse for Orlando, her 1928 novel. On April 28, 1942, Virginia Woolf made the decision to commit suicide. She filled her pockets with a lot of stones and threw herself into the Ouse River. The depression and the fear of something happening with her husband, who was Jewish, in the context of the Second World War, led her to end her life. The writer left a letter to Leonard and another to her sister Vanessa, as does the protagonist of ‘The Voyage Out’. Virginia Woolf wrote 8 novels and more than 30 essays and analyses of other genres where the autobiographical narrative and the analysis to the London society always reigned.

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