Woolf's aesthetic.

As an essayist Virginia Woolf was prolific. She published some 500essays in periodicals and collections, beginning 1905. Characteristic for Woolf's essays are dialogic nature of style – her reader is oftendirectly addressed, in a conversational tone. A number of her writingsare autobiographical (like Jane). When Virginia published To the Lighthouse and The Waves in 1927 and1931 respectively, she had turned a corner and could now be consideredmore than simply avant-garde; she was now, by most critic's accounts, aliterary genius. However, until the end, she remained insecure and fearful of thepublic's reaction to her work.A Room of One's Own was a compilation of lectures Virginia gave atCambridge on the topic of women and fiction, and in this slender volumeshe argues that talented female writers face the two impediments tofully realizing their potentials: social inferiority and lack ofeconomic independence. Virginia proposed five hundred pounds a year anda private room for female writers with talent. She also publishedcriticism, including two volumes of The Common Reader. Woolf, who was educated at home by her father, grew up at the familyhome at Hyde Park Gate. In middle age she described this period in aletter to Vita Sackville-West: "Think how I was brought up! No school;mooning about alone among my father's books; never any chance to pick upall that goes on in schools—throwing balls; ragging; slang;vulgarities; scenes; jealousies!" After the final attack of mental illness, Woolf loaded her pockets fullof stones and drowned herself in the River Ouse near her Sussex home onMarch 28, 1941. On her note to her husband she wrote: "I have a feelingI shall go mad. I cannot go on longer in these terrible times. I hearvoices and cannot concentrate on my work. I have fought against it butcannot fight any longer. I owe all my happiness to you but cannot go onand spoil your life." Woolf's suicide, like Sylvia Plath's, have muchcolored the interpretation of both of their work. Virginia Woolf's concern with feminist thematics are dominant in A ROOMOF ONE'S OWN (1929). In it she made her famous statement: "A woman musthave money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction." The bookoriginated from two expanded and revised lectures the author presentedat Cambridge University's Newnham and Girton Colleges in October 1928.Woolf examined the obstacles and prejudices that have hindered womenwriters. She separated women as objects of representation and women asauthors of representation, and argued that a change in the forms ofliterature was necessary because most literature had been "made by menout of their own needs for their own uses." In the last chapter Woolftouched the possibility of an androgynous mind.