Virginia Woolf's Death of a Moth
882-1941, English novelist and essayist; daughter of Sir Leslie Stephen. A successful innovator in the form of the novel, she is considered a significant force in 20th-century fiction. She was educated at home from the resources of her father's huge library. In 1912 she married Leonard Woolf, a critic and writer on economics, with whom she set up the Hogarth Press in 1917. Their home became a gathering place for a circle of artists, critics, and writers known as the Bloomsbury group. As a novelist Woolf's primary concern was to represent the flow of ordinary experience. Her emphasis was not on plot or characterization but on a character's consciousness, his thoughts and feelings, which she brilliantly illuminated by the stream of consciousness technique. She did not limit herself to one consciousness, however, but slipped from mind to mind, particularly in The Waves, probably her most experimental novel. Her prose style is poetic, heavily symbolic, and filled with superb visual images. Woolf's early works, The Voyage Out (1915) and Night and Day (1919), were traditional in method, but she became increasingly innovative in Jacob's Room (1922), Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), and The Waves (1931). Other experimental
Her life was filled with grievances and mysteries that molded and influenced her; giving her a reason to create the literature we have today. Considered one of the best of the Modernist writers, Virginia Woolf's personal life is almost as intriguing as her fiction. This wasn't unusual for the time, but it was something Virginia never quite seemed able to forget. One's sympathies, of course, were all on the side of life. At first indifferent, Woolf was eventually moved to pity of the moth:The possibilities of pleasure seemed that morning so enormous and so various that to have only a moth's part in life, and a day moth's at that, appeared a hard fate, and his zest in enjoying his meager opportunities to the full, pathetic. The author reaches out to help when she realizes that it is dying and draws back, reluctant to interfere with this natural process. Despite this heady environment-and having the key to her father's library- Virginia was not afforded the opportunity to attend school like her brothers. Tragic events such as the death of Julia Stephen (her mother), the marriage and death of her half sister, Stella Duckworth Hills, and the sexual abuses from her half-brothers Gerald and George Duckworth, contributed to Virginia's conforming ideas of women rights and capabilities. O yes, he seemed to say, death is stronger than I am. But primarily she was an artist and should be remembered mostly for her artistic talent (Gorsky, 27). novels are Orlando (1928), The Years (1937), and Between the Acts (1941). She was a master of the critical essay, and some of her finest pieces are included in The Common Reader (1925), The Second Common Reader (1933), The Death of the Moth and Other Essays (1942), and The Moment and Other Essays (1948). Her father, Sir Leslie Stephen, is the author of the massive Dictionary of National Biography, a sixty-two volume compilation of the lives of important British citizens. "O yes, he seemed to say, death is much stronger than I am.
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