Who is the real Virginia Woolf? - Forster's Views

Virginia Woolf was a woman of many talents, but writing by far was her passion. She wrote for the sake of writing. In Forster's Rede lecture on the author, he said that Woolf had neither the desire for money nor the desire for reputation nor philanthropy could influence her (206). She enjoyed writing and it was her sense of humor that kept her from tiring of it. She experimented with syle and form and this kept her writing fresh. "Literature was her merry-go-round as well as her study" (207).

Even though she enjoyed the humorous side of life, she was always in control of her writing. She was a perfectionist which sometimes made life difficult for her. For example, her first novel, The Voyage Out, took seven years to complete, but she was always supported by her friends in the Bloomsbury Group, including Forster, whose opinion she valued. It was obvious that Forster was most impressed with her novels Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and the Waves. In his description of these novels, Forster focused on her development of the characters in the novels as well as a sense of poetry in these works.

In her works, particularly her short stories, Woolf allowed her characters to melt into one another. What mattered to her was what happened inside the characters. They were symbolic of the human community - both unique and typical. Woolf's gift was her development of character rather than plot. According to Forster, her characters can be remembered on their own account.

Woolf was an experimenter. Even though she wrote a few conventional novels, she liked to take chances. Forster pointed out that her ideas did not always work out, particularly when she was inspired to write about Feminism. He referred to her Feminism as extreme and said that she was sometimes not really aware how much progress had been made since her support of the Suffragette movement during her youth. He characterized her as a snob, particularly shince she was more attuned to an upper-class upbringing than what people of the Labour class endured.

It was amazing the amount of work Woolf accomplished during her short period of life. It was unfortunate that her mental illness cut her great literary career short. I think that Forster summed her up best with this description: "She is like a plant which is supposed to grow in a well-prepared garden bed - the bed of esoteric literature - and then pushes up suckers all over the place, through the gravel of the front drive, and even through the flagstones of the kitchen yard" (204-5). What is it that fascinates you , the reader about Virginia Woolf?