1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910452228603321

Autore

Dalsimer Katherine <1944->

Titolo

Virginia Woolf [[electronic resource] ] : becoming a writer / / Katherine Dalsimer

Pubbl/distr/stampa

New Haven, : Yale University Press, c2001

ISBN

1-281-72288-X

9786611722883

0-300-13376-6

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (1 online resource (xvii, 206 p.))

Disciplina

823/.912

B

Soggetti

Novelists, English - 20th century

Women and literature - England - History - 20th century

Young women - England

Electronic books.

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references (p. 197-201) and index.

Nota di contenuto

Front matter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- 1. To the Lighthouse -- 2. The ''Hyde Park Gate News'' -- 3. Diary, Age Fifteen: "A Volume of Fairly Acute Life" -- 4. Journals, Ages Seventeen and Twenty-One: ''The Right Use of Reason'' -- 5. Early Reviews and Essays: Age Twenty-Two to Twenty-Three -- 6. ''I Write of Things As I See Them'': Age Twenty-Four to Twenty-Five -- 7. The Voyage Out -- 8. ''On Being Ill'' -- Bibliography -- Index

Sommario/riassunto

By the time she was twenty-four, Virginia Woolf had suffered a series of devastating losses that later she would describe as "sledge-hammer blows," beginning with the death of her mother when she was thirteen years old and followed by those of her half-sister, father, and brother. Yet vulnerable as she was ("skinless" was her word) she began, through these years, to practice her art-and to discover how it could serve her. Ultimately, she came to feel that it was her "shock-receiving capacity" that had made her a writer. Astonishingly gifted from the start, Woolf learned to be attentive to the movements of her own mind. Through self-reflection she found a language for the ebb and flow of thought,



fantasy, feeling, and memory, for the shifts of light and dark. And in her writing she preserved, recreated, and altered the dead, altering in the process her internal relationship with their "invisible presences." "I will go backwards & forwards" she remarked in her diary, a comment on both her imaginative and writerly practice. Following Woolf's lead, psychologist Katherine Dalsimer moves backward and forward between the work of Woolf's maturity and her early journals, letters, and unpublished juvenilia to illuminate the process by which Woolf became a writer. Drawing on psychoanalytic theory as well as on Woolf's life and work, and trusting Woolf's own self-observations, Dalsimer offers a compelling account of a young artist's voyage out-a voyage that Virginia Woolf began by looking inward and completed by looking back.