Almanac of Story Tellers: Virginia Woolf

Every day brings a new story.  And each day contributes to the art of story telling -- in prose and poetry, in music, on the stage, on the screen, in podcasts, and in books. 

Today is a story of January 25th

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    It is the 25th day of the year, leaving 340 days remaining in 2023.

 

    On this date in 1882, the writer Virginia Woolf was born in London.

    She told her stories with a feminist touch, in poetry and prose that had a modernist non-linear style that helped to create the stream-of-consciousness genre. She wrote novels and biographies, and critical essays that received both intellectual and popular acclaim.

    Her essays dealt with political culture and its power, artistic freedom, literary works, and women's writing, social class and status.

    She started writing at a young age -- she wrote her first story when she was 8, and, until the death of her mother when Virginia was 13, she would write up witty accounts for her family newspaper. 

    Her first novel, The Voyage Out, was published in 1915. Her two best known novels, Mrs. Dalloway and To The Lighthouse, came out two years apart, in 1925 and 1927.

    Mrs. Dalloway is a day-in-the-life story of an upper-class woman planning a party. The novel travels back and forth in time, and compares the main character's life with that of a man watching her, a veteran suffering from his time in World War I. To The Lighthouse tells of a woman's difficulty creating art while struggling to carry on her daily life.

    That novel relates to Woolf's most famous essay, A Room of One's Own, published in 1929. It explores the idea that to create, or write, a woman "must have money and a room of her own." It discusses the history of women writers and the difficulties they had to overcome.

    The title is often mimicked in modern culture. It is the name of a bookstore in Madison, Wis., that specializes in feminist and LGBT writings. The 1992 movie about the All American Girls Professional Baseball League was titled A League of Their Own (as is the followup streaming TV show). A podcast featuring several women writers and reporters from Amazing Avenue talking about the New York Mets and other baseball topics is called A Pod of Their Own.

    Woolf died in 1941.