Woolf began writing professionally in
1905, initially for the
Times Literary Supplement with a journalistic piece about
Haworth, home of the
Brontë family. Her first novel,
The Voyage Out, was published in
1915 by her half-brother's imprint,
Gerald Duckworth and Company Ltd.
This novel was originally entitled
Melymbrosia, but Woolf repeatedly changed the draft. An earlier version of
The Voyage Out has been reconstructed by Woolf scholar Louise DeSalvo and is now available to the public under the intended title. DeSalvo argues that many of the changes Woolf made in the text were in response to changes in her own life .
Woolf went on to publish novels and essays as a public intellectual to both critical and popular success. Much of her work was self-published through the
Hogarth Press. She has been hailed as one of the greatest novelists of the twentieth century and one of the foremost
Modernists, though she disdained some artists in this category.
Woolf is considered one of the greatest innovators in the English language. In her works she experimented with
stream-of-consciousness, the underlying psychological as well as emotional motives of characters, and the various possibilities of fractured narrative and chronology. In the words of
E. M. Forster, she pushed the English language "a little further against the dark," and her literary achievements and creativity are influential even today.
Woolf's reputation declined sharply after World War II, but her eminence was re-established with the surge of
Feminist criticism in the
1970s. After a few more ideologically based altercations, not least caused by claims that Woolf was
anti-Semitic and a
snob, it seems that a critical consensus has been reached regarding her stature as a novelist.
Her work was criticised for epitomizing the narrow world of the upper-middle class English intelligentsia. Some critics judged it to be lacking in universality and depth, without the power to communicate anything of emotional or ethical relevance to the disillusioned common reader, weary of the
1920s aesthetes. She is also criticized as an anti-Semite, despite her marriage to a Jewish man. She wrote in her diary, "I do not like the Jewish voice; I do not like the Jewish laugh." However, in a
1930 letter to Ethel Smyth quoted in Nigel Nicolson's biography,
Virginia Woolf, she recollects her boasts of Leonard's Jewishness confirming her snobbish tendencies, "How I hated marrying a Jew- What a snob I was, for they have immense vitality."
Virginia Woolf's peculiarities as a fiction writer have tended to obscure her central strength: Woolf is arguably the major lyrical novelist in the English language. Her novels are highly experimental: a narrative, frequently uneventful and commonplace, is refracted—and sometimes almost dissolved—in the characters' receptive consciousness. Intense lyricism and stylistic virtuosity fuse to create a world overabundant with auditory and visual impressions.
The intensity of Virginia Woolf's poetic vision elevates the ordinary, sometimes banal settings of most of her novels, even as they are often set in an environment of war. For example,
Mrs Dalloway (
1925) centres on the efforts of Clarissa Dalloway, a middle-aged society woman, to organize a party, even as her life is paralleled with that of Septimus Warren Smith, a working-class veteran who has returned from the First World War bearing deep psychological scars.
To the Lighthouse (
1927) is set on two days ten years apart. The plot centers around the Ramsay family's anticipation of and reflection upon a visit to a lighthouse and the connected familial tensions. One of the primary themes of the novel is the struggle in the creative process that beset painter Lily Briscoe while she struggles to paint in the midst of the family drama. The novel is also a meditation upon the lives of a nation's inhabitants in the midst of war, and of the people left behind.
The Waves (
1931) presents a group of six friends whose reflections, which are closer to recitatives than to interior monologues proper, create a wave-like atmosphere that is more akin to a prose poem than to a plot-centered novel.
Her last work,
Between the Acts (
1941) sums up and magnifies Woolf's chief preoccupations: the transformation of life through art, sexual ambivalence, and meditation on the themes of flux of time and life, presented simultaneously as corrosion and rejuvenation - all set in a highly imaginative and symbolic narrative encompassing almost all of English history.
While nowhere near a simple recapitulation of the coterie's ideals, Woolf's work can be understood as consistently in dialogue with Bloomsbury, particularly its tendency (informed by
G.E. Moore, among others) towards doctrinaire rationalism.