dear ko than naing oo,
i wrote about poet/writer kyi aye and i
compared her to virginia woolf, the leader of the modernists and a product of
the Bloomsbury group of writers.so, correct "Bloomongton group" as
""Bloomsbury group" in my article.also please read about
"Virginia Woolf" in the following paragraph: The Virginia Woolf
Society of Great Britain VIRGINIA WOOLF (1882-1941): A SHORT BIOGRAPHY In 1926
Virginia Woolf contributed an introduction to Victorian Photographs of Famous
Men & Fair Women by Julia Margaret Cameron. This publication may be seen as
a springboard from which to approach Woolf's life: Virginia saw herself as
descending from a distinctive male and female inheritance; Cameron was the
famous Victorian photographer and Woolf's aunt; Woolf's friend Roger Fry also
contributed an introduction and leads us to the Bloomsbury Group; and the book
was published by the Hogarth Press which Virginia had started with her husband
Leonard in 1917. Adeline Virginia Stephen was born on 25 January 1882 in London. Her father,
Leslie Stephen (1832-1904), was a man of letters (and first editor of the
Dictionary of National Biography) who came from a family distinguished for
public service (part of the `intellectual aristocracy' of Victorian England).
Her mother, Julia (1846-95), from whom Virginia
inherited her looks, was the daughter and niece of the six beautiful Pattle
sisters (Julia Margaret Cameron was the seventh: not beautiful but the only one
remembered today). Both parents had been married before: her father to the
daughter of the novelist, Thackeray, by whom he had a daughter Laura
(1870-1945) who was intellectually backward; and her mother to a barrister,
Herbert Duckworth (1833-70), by whom she had three children, George (1868-
1934), Stella (1869-97), and Gerald (1870-1937). Julia and Leslie Stephen had
four children: Vanessa (1879-1961), Thoby (1880-1906), Virginia, and Adrian
(1883-1948). All eight children lived with the parents and a number of servants
at 22 Hyde Park Gate, Kensington. Long summer
holidays were spent at Talland House in St Ives, Cornwall,
and St Ives played a large part in Virginia's
imagination. It was the setting for her novel To the Lighthouse, despite its
ostensibly being placed on the Isle of Skye. London and/or St Ives
provided the principal settings of most of her novels. In 1895 her mother died
unexpectedly, and Virginia
suffered her first mental breakdown. Her half-sister Stella took over the
running of the household as well as coping with Leslie's demands for sympathy
and emotional support. Stella married Jack Hills
in 1897, but she too died suddenly on her return from her honeymoon. The
household burden then fell upon Vanessa. Virginia
was allowed uncensored access to her father's extensive library, and from an
early age determined to be a writer. Her education was sketchy and she never
went to school. Vanessa trained to become a painter. Their two brothers were
sent to preparatory and public schools, and then to Cambridge. There Thoby made friends with
Leonard Woolf, Clive Bell, Saxon Sydney-Turner, Lytton Strachey, and Maynard
Keynes. This was the nucleus of the Bloomsbury Group. Leslie Stephen died in
1904, and Virginia
had a second breakdown. While she was sick, Vanessa arranged for the four
siblings to move from 22 Hyde Park Gate to 46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury.
At the end of the year Virginia
started reviewing with a clerical paper called the Guardian; in 1905 she started
reviewing in The Times Literary Supplement and continued writing for that
journal for many years. Following a trip to Greece in 1906, Thoby died of
typhoid and in 1907 Vanessa married Clive Bell. Thoby had started `Thursday
evenings' for his friends to visit, and this kind of arrangement was continued
after his death by Vanessa and then by Virginia and Adrian when they moved to
29 Fitzroy Square. In 1911 Virginia
moved to 38 Brunswick Square.
Leonard Woolf had joined the Ceylon Civil Service in 1904 and returned in 1912
on leave. He soon decided that he wanted to marry Virginia, and she eventually agreed. They
were married in St Pancras Registry Office on 10 August 1912. They decided to
earn money by writing and journalism. Since about 1908 Virginia had been writing her first novel
The Voyage Out (originally to be called Melymbrosia). It was finished by 1913
but, owing to another severe mental breakdown after her marriage, it was not
published until 1915 by Duckworth & Co. (Gerald's publishing house). The
novel was fairly conventional in form. She then began writing her second novel
Night and Day - if anything even more conventional - which was published in
1919, also by Duckworth. From 1911 Virginia
had rented small houses near Lewes in Sussex, most notably Asheham House.
Her sister Vanessa rented Charleston Farmhouse nearby from 1916 onwards. In
1919 the Woolfs bought Monks House in the village of Rodmell.
This was a small weather-boarded house (now owned by the National Trust) which
they used principally for summer holidays until they were bombed out of their
flat in Mecklenburgh Square
in 1940 when it became their home. In 1917 the Woolfs had bought a small hand
printing-press in order to take up printing as a hobby and as therapy for Virginia. By now they
were living in Richmond (Surrey)
and the Hogarth Press was named after their house. Virginia
wrote, printed and published a couple of experimental short stories, The Mark
on the Wall and Kew
Gardens. The Woolfs
continued handprinting until 1932, but in the meantime they increasingly became
publishers rather than printers. By about 1922 the Hogarth Press had become a
business. From 1921 Virginia
always published with the Press, except for a few limited editions.
Nineteen-twenty-one saw Virginia's
first collection of short stories Monday or Tuesday, most of which were
experimental in nature. In 1922 her first experimental novel, Jacob's Room,
appeared. In 1924 the Woolfs moved back to London, to 52 Tavistock Square. In 1925 Mrs.
Dalloway was published, followed by To the Lighthouse in 1927, and The Waves in
1931. These three novels are generally considered to be her greatest claim to
fame as a modernist writer. Her involvement with the aristocratic novelist and
poet Vita Sackville- West led to Orlando (1928),
a roman à clef inspired by Vita's life and ancestors at Knole in Kent. Two talks
to women's colleges at Cambridge
in 1928 led to A Room of One's Own (1929), a discussion of women's writing and
its historical economic and social underpinning. [You can get larger ones if
you click above three.]. The 1930s was a less happy time for the Woolfs as the
deaths of friends and the prospect of war increasingly overshadowed the decade.
Virginia produced Flush (1933), a fictional biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's
dog; The Years (1937), a family saga (more unconventional than that sounds)
which was a best-seller in America but had been a long and painful time in the
writing; Three Guineas (1938), in a sense a successor to A Room of One's Own;
and in 1940 a biography of her friend Roger Fry who had died in 1934. She had
practically completed her final novel Between the Acts when she committed
suicide by drowning in the River Ouse near Monks House on 28 March 1941. cf.
VIRGINIA WOOLF'S HOLIDAY HOMES IN THE COUNTRY [For a more detailed discussion
of Virginia Woolf's breakdowns, see Virginia Woolf's Psychiatric History by
Malcolm Ingram. (<http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/malcolmi>)]
copyright © S.N.Clarke & VWSGB 2000 photos from top to bottom and left to
right Try to put the mouse pointer on each photo, the title will pop up. ·
Seaview from the window of the Talland House, St.Ives (1999) · Frontview of the
Talland House (1999) · The Asheham House, Sussex (1977) · Wooden door of the
Monks House entrance, Rodmell Sussex (1977) · Looking out of the Woolfs'
Sitting Room, Monks House (2001) · Church View from balcony outside Leonard's
Study, Monks House (2001) · Garden View from balcony outside Leonard's Study,
Monks House (2001) · The entrance of the Monk's House (1977) · The Lodge in the
Garden of the Monk's House (1977) © The Photos were taken and offered by
S.N.Clarke and H.Fukushima
Burmese Physician-Writers
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