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اعظم 100 كتاب في التاريخ: ما سر هذه العظمة؟- دراسة بحثية
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تاريخ الإنضمام :
Sep 2009
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Adeline Virginia Woolf (
/
ˈ
w
ʊ
l
f
/
; 25 January 1882 – 28 March 1941) was an English writer, regarded as one of the foremost
modernist
literary figures of the twentieth century.
During the
interwar period
, Woolf was a significant figure in London literary society and a member of the
Bloomsbury Group
. Her most famous works include the novels
Mrs Dalloway
(1925),
To the Lighthouse
(1927) and
Orlando
(1928), and the book-length essay
A Room of One's Own
(1929), with its famous dictum, "A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction."
Virginia Woolf was born Adeline Virginia Stephen in London in 1882 to Sir
Leslie Stephen
and Julia Prinsep Stephen (née Jackson).
Virginia's father, Sir Leslie Stephen (1832–1904), was a notable historian, author, critic and mountaineer.
[1]
He was the editor of the
Dictionary of National Biography
, a work that would influence Woolf's later experimental biographies.
Virginia's mother Julia Stephen (1846–1895) was a renowned beauty, born in
India
to Dr. John and Maria Pattle Jackson. She was also the niece of the photographer
Julia Margaret Cameron
and first cousin of the temperance leader
Lady Henry Somerset
. Julia moved to England with her mother, where she served as a model for
Pre-Raphaelite
painters such as
Edward Burne-Jones
.
[2]
Woolf was educated by her parents in their literate and well-connected household at 22
Hyde Park Gate
,
Kensington
. Her parents had each been married previously and been widowed, and, consequently, the household contained the children of three marriages. Julia had three children by her first husband, Herbert Duckworth:
George
, Stella, and
Gerald Duckworth
. Leslie first married Harriet Marian (Minny) Thackeray (1840–1875), the daughter of
William Thackeray
, and they had one daughter: Laura Makepeace Stephen, who was declared
mentally disabled
and lived with the family until she was institutionalised in 1891.
[3]
Leslie and Julia had four children together:
Vanessa Stephen
(1879),
Thoby Stephen
(1880), Virginia (1882), and
Adrian Stephen
(1883).
Sir Leslie Stephen's eminence as an editor, critic, and biographer, and his connection to
William Thackeray
, meant that his children were raised in an environment filled with the influences of
Victorian
literary society.
Henry James
,
George Henry Lewes
, and Virginia's honorary godfather,
James Russell Lowell
, were among the visitors to the house. Julia Stephen was equally well connected. Descended from an attendant of
Marie Antoinette
,[
citation needed
] she came from a family of beauties who left their mark on Victorian society as models for Pre-Raphaelite artists and early photographers, including her aunt
Julia Margaret Cameron
who was also a visitor to the Stephen household. Supplementing these influences was the immense library at the Stephens' house, from which Virginia and Vanessa were taught the
classics
and
English literature
. Unlike the girls, their brothers Adrian and Julian (Thoby) were formally educated and sent to Cambridge, a difference which Virginia would resent. The sisters did, however, benefit indirectly from their brothers' Cambridge contacts, as the boys brought their new intellectual friends home to the Stephens' drawing room.[
citation needed
]
According to Woolf's memoirs, her most vivid childhood memories were not of London but of
St. Ives
in
Cornwall
, where the family spent every summer until 1895. The Stephens' summer home, Talland House, looked out over Porthminster Bay, and is still standing today, though somewhat altered. Memories of these family holidays and impressions of the landscape, especially the
Godrevy Lighthouse
, informed the fiction Woolf wrote in later years, most notably
To the Lighthouse
.
The sudden death of her mother in 1895, when Virginia was 13, and that of her half-sister Stella two years later, led to the first of Virginia's several
nervous breakdowns
. She was, however, able to take courses of study (some at degree level) in Greek, Latin, German and history at the Ladies’ Department of
King's College London
between 1897 and 1901, and this brought her into contact with some of the early reformers of women’s higher education such as Clara Pater, George Warr and Lilian Faithfull (Principal of the King’s Ladies’ Department and noted as one of the
Steamboat ladies
).
[4]
Her sister Vanessa also studied Latin, Italian, art and architecture at King’s Ladies’ Department.
The death of her father in 1904 provoked her most alarming collapse and she was briefly institutionalised.
[3]
Modern scholars (including her nephew and biographer,
Quentin Bell
) have suggested
[5]
her breakdowns and subsequent recurring
depressive
periods were also influenced by the
sexual abuse
to which she and her sister Vanessa were subjected by their half-brothers
George
and
Gerald Duckworth
(which Woolf recalls in her autobiographical essays
A Sketch of the Past
and
22 Hyde Park Gate
).
Throughout her life, Woolf was plagued by periodic
mood swings
and associated illnesses. Though this instability often affected her social life, her literary productivity continued with few breaks throughout her life.
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