VIRGINIA WOOLF AS A NOVELIST

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), was a British novelist as well as a distinguished feminist essayist, critic,
and a central figure of the Bloomsbury group. Virginia Woolf was born on January 25, 1882 in
London, as the daughter of Julia Jackson Duckworth, a member of the Duckworth publishing
family, and Leslie Stephen, a literary critic and the founder of the Dictionary of National Biography.
Virginia was educated at home by her father and grew up at the family home at Hyde Park Gate.
Her mother died when she was in her early teens. Stella Duckworth, her half sister, took her
mother's place, but died two years later. Leslie Stephen, her father, suffered a slow death from
cancer. When her brother Toby died in 1906, she had a prolonged mental breakdown, the first of
many that would mark her life. Following the death of her father in 1904, Virginia moved with her
sister Vanessa and two brothers to the house in Bloomsbury, which would become central to
activities of the Bloomsbury group. Virginia began to write for the Times Literary Supplement in
1905. In 1912 she married the political theorist Leonard Woolf and published her first book, The
Voyage Out in 1915. In 1919 appeared Night And Day, a realistic novel set in London, contrasting
the lives of two friends, Katherine and Mary. Jacob's Room (1922) was based upon the life e and
death of her brother Toby.

 Virginia Woolf was not satisfied with the current form of the novel as presented by the great
Edwardians, Bennet, Wells or Galsworthy. So in 1908, Woolf determined to "re-form" the novel by
creating a holistic form embracing aspects of life that were "fugitive" from the Victorian novel. A
thoroughly talented writer, Woolf was a groundbreaker in this field. She is best known for her
novels, Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927). No element of story, the world of outer
reality not ignored, emergence of an art form, poetisation of the English novel, stream of
consciousness technique, the distinctive nature of reality, artistic sincerity and integrity, and
feminisation of English novel are the chief characteristics of Woolf's art as a novelist.

As a novelist,she depicted the inner life of human beings and the world of outer reality, her novels
do not have the element of story rather has disclosure of an art form, She used stream of
consciousness technique, distinctive nature of reality and artistic sincerity and integrity, and she
gave feministic point of view in her literary works especially in her novels.
 
Woolf firmly believed that if the novelist could base his work upon his own feeling and not upon
convention, there would be no plot, not comedy, no tragedy, no love-interest or catastrophe in the
accepted style. Hence in most of her novels there is hardly any element of story. Mrs. Woolf's
formula for the novel was not humanity in action but in a state of infinite perception. The novel in
her hands is not just an entertainment, or propaganda, or the vehicle of some fixed ideas or
theories, or a social document, but a voyage of exploration to find out how life is lived, and how it
can be rendered as it is actually lived without distortion. Hence she concentrates her attention on
the rendering of inner reality and gives subtle and penetrating inlets into the consciousness of her
characters. 
 
Although Woolf's main purpose is to depict the inner life of human beings, she has not ignored the
world of outer reality, the warm and palpable life of nature. In fact, in her novels we find that the
metaphysical interest is embodied in purely human and personal terms, that the bounding line of
art remains unbroken, that the concrete images which are the very stuff of art are never sacrificed
to abstraction, but are indeed more in evidence than in the work of Bennett and Wells. The
essential subject matter of her novels is no doubt the consciousness of one or more characters, but
the outer life of tree and stream, of bird and fish, of meadow and seashore crowds in upon her and
lends her image after image, a great sparkling and many-coloured world of sight, scent, sound and
touch.

 In Woolf's novels we find a rare artistic integrity and a well-developed sense of form. To
communicate her experience she had to invent conventions as rigid or more rigid than the old ones
that she discarded. And this she does in her best novels of the middle and the final period  Mrs.
Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, The waves and Between the Acts. In each case a small group of people
is selected, and through their closely interrelated experience the reader receives his total
impression. Moreover, certain images, phrases, and symbols bind the whole together. So there are
certain resemblances between them in structure or style. Apart from these general resemblances
each of these novels is a fresh attempt to solve the problems raised by the departure from
traditional conventions. So it is observed that each of her novels grows out of the preceding one and
we see the germ of her later work in her predecessors.

 Moreover, Woolf represented English novel in poetic and lyrical way. Among the English novelists
she is foremost in lyrical technique. She sets out on a quest for mediating form through which she
could convey simultaneously picture of life and manners and a corresponding image of minds. She
aims at conveying inner life and this could be best done in lyrical manner. Hence it is found that in
order to enrich her language, she uses vivid metaphors and symbols which are peculiar to poetry.
Her language is the language of poetry, her prose style has the assonances, the refrains, the
rhythms and the accents of poetry itself. The equilibrium between the lyrical and narrative art
shows how Woolf brilliantly achieves the telescoping of the poet's lyrical self and the novelist's
omniscient point of view.
 To the novelists of the new school, human consciousness is a chaotic welter of sensations and
impressions; it is fleeting, trivial and evanescent. According to Woolf, the great task of the novelist
should be 'to convey this varying, unknown and dissipate spirit'. His or her main business is to
reveal the sensations and impressions to bring us close to the quick of the mind. He should be more
concerned with inner reality rather than outer. This is called 'the stream of consciousness
technique'. Woolf has successfully revealed the very spring of action, the hidden motives which
impel characters to act in a particular way. She takes us directly into the minds of her characters
and shows the flow of ideas, sensations and impressions there.

 The reality that Woolf deals with has a distinctness about it. Jean Guiguet's comments on this are
worth noting. "Her reality is not a factor to be specified in some question of the universe: it is the
Sussex towns, the London streets, the waves breaking on the shore, the woman sitting opposite her
in the train, memories flashing into the mind from nowhere, a beloved being's return into
nothingness; it is all that is not ourselves and yet is so closely mingled with ourselves that the two
enigmas -- reality and self -- make only one. But the important thing is the nature or quality of this
enigma. It does not merely puzzle the mind; it torments the whole being, even while defining it. To
exist, for Virginia Woolf, meant experiencing that dizziness on the ridge between two abysses of the
unknown, the self and the non-self."
 
Woolf has her own original vision of life and she has ever remained truthful to her vision. This
truthfulness and artistic integrity is due to her perfect detachment from all personal prejudices and
preconceived notions. Literary traditions and conventions, or social and political problems of the
day -- nothing could deter her from writing according to her vision, according to the ideal which
exists in her mind with uncommon artistic sincerity and integrity. In the words the Bernard
Blackstone, "She observes new facts, and old facts in a new way; but she also combines them,
through the contemplative act, into new and strange patterns. The outer is not only related to; it is
absorbed into the inner life. Mr. Woolf believed in the power of the mind and she she makes her
reader think."
 Woolf was a woman and naturally in her novels she gives us the woman's point of view. That is why
we find her relying more on intuition than on reason. We also find in her a woman's dislike for the
world of societies churches, banks and schools, and the political, social and economic movements
of the day have hardly any attraction for her. As a sheltered female of her age she had hardly any
scope to have any knowledge of the sordid and brutal aspects of life. Thus we find that her picture
of life does not include vice, sordidness or the abject brutality of our age. So it may be inferred that
Mrs. Woolf thus represents the feminisation of the English novel.

 To conclude,  Woolf's novels, through their nonlinear approaches to narrative, exerted a major
influence on the genre. While Woolf's fragmented style is distinctly modernist, her indeterminacy
anticipates a postmodern awareness of the evanescence of boundaries and categories. Her
characters are definitely convincing in their own way, but they are drawn from a very limited range.
Being a woman of her times she avoids the theme of passionate love. Her work has a rare artistic
integrity. She is the poet of the novel. Above all, Woolf's greatest achievement is that in her novels
the stream of consciousness technique finds a balance. She is one of the most forceful and original
theorists of the 'the stream of consciousness' novel.