VIRGINIA Woolf is widely regarded as one of Britain's greatest novelists, whose influence on the literary world continues to be felt to this very day.
As Google celebrates the much-loved author on her 136th birthday with one of its Google Doodles, here's what you need to know about her life, work and tragic death.
Hulton Archive - Getty Virginia Woolf is one of Britain's greatest novelists
Who was Virginia Woolf?
Virginia Woolf was born Adeline Virginia Stephen in Kensington, London on January 25, 1882.
Her parents were the historian and critic Sir Leslie Stephen and the celebrated beauty Julia Stephen, who raised their daughter in a literate, well-connected household.
Upon the death of her mother in 1895, Woolf suffered the first of the mental health episodes which blighted her life, including a more serious breakdown when her father passed away in 1904.
She began writing at an early age, having her first piece published in December 1904, and writing for the Times Literary Supplement from the following year.
Along with her husband, Leonard, whom she married in 1912, she became part of an influential group of writers known as the Bloomsbury Group prominent in London during the early 20th century.
Woolf's first novel, The Voyage Out, was published in 1915, and her subsequent writings established her as one of the leading novelists and essayists of her time.
Alamy After publishing her first novel in 1915 Woolf wrote prolifically until her death
She published prolifically between the First and Second World Wars, with her final novel Between The Acts issued just after her death in 1941.
After producing the final manuscript for that posthumous work, Woolf fell into a depression, her diaries of the time hinting at a growing obsession with death.
On March 28 1941 she drowned herself in the River Ouse near her home, Monk's House in Lewes, Sussex – her body was not found for three weeks.
The 59-year-old's heartbreaking suicide note to her husband began: "Dearest, I feel certain that I am going mad again.
"I feel we can't go through another of those terrible times. And I shan't recover this time."
Google Google is commemorating Woolf on her 136th birthday with this Doodle
Woolf's legacy has endured well beyond her tragic death, with the author's importance coming to the fore with the rise of the feminist movement in the 1970s.
The famous play Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf by Edward Ablee, its title a play on the Disney nursery rhyme, inspired a film version starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton.
Nicole Kidman won an Oscar for portraying Woolf in the 2002 film The Hours, an adaptation of Michael Cunningham's 1998 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel.
The National Portrait Gallery ran an exhibition in her honour for three months in 2014, and she has been cited as an influence on writers such as Margaret Atwood and Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
Google created a commemorative Doodle to mark Woolf's 136th birthday on January 25, 2018, using an image by London-based illustrator Louise Pomeroy.
Which books did Virginia Woolf write?
In total, Woolf published nine novels:
The Voyage Out (1915)
Night and Day (1919)
Jacob's Room (1922)
Mrs Dalloway (1925)
To the Lighthouse (1927)
Orlando (1928)
The Waves (1931)
The Years (1937)
Between the Acts (1941)
She's also well known for her non-fiction, particularly the book-length essays A Room of One's Own and Three Guineas, published in 1929 and 1938 respectively.
Getty - Contributor Woolf's final work, Between The Acts, was published after her death
What were Virginia Woolf's most famous quotes?
"A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction." (A Room of One's Own)
(A Room of One's Own) "Though we see the same world, we see it through different eyes." (Three Guineas)
(Three Guineas) "Never pretend that the things you haven't got are not worth having." (A Moment's Liberty)
(A Moment's Liberty) "Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners." (A Room of One's Own)
(A Room of One's Own) "I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman." (A Room of One's Own)
(A Room of One's Own) "If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people." ( The Moment and Other Essays)
Getty - Contributor Virginia Woolf was one of the foremost author's and essayists of the inter-war period
What is a Google Doodle?
In 1998, the search engine founders Larry and Sergey drew a stick figure behind the second 'o' of Google as a message to that they were out of office at the Burning Man festival and with that, Google Doodles were born.
The company decided that they should decorate the logo to mark cultural moments and it soon became clear that users really enjoyed the change to the Google homepage.
Google Google celebrated the Autumn Equinox with a themed doodle
In that same year, a turkey was added to Thanksgiving and two pumpkins appeared as the 'o's for Halloween the following year.
Now, there is a full team of doodlers, illustrators, graphic designers, animators and classically trained artists who help create what you see on those days.
Among the Doodles published in recent months were ones commemorating German scientist Robert Koch, Jan Ingenhousz (who discovered photosynthesis) and the 50th anniversary of kids coding languages being introduced.
Earlier in the year, the search giant celebrated the 2017 Autumn Equinox , which marked the official ending of summer and the coming of autumn.
TRIBUN-TIMUR.COM - Halaman utama situs mesin pencarian Google pada Kamis (25/1/2018) menampilkan doodle sosok Virginia Woolf .
Lahir di Kensington, Middlesex, Inggris pada 25 Januari 1882 dan menghembuskan nafas terakhir pda 28 Maret 1941 atau pada usia 59 tahun.
Lalu, siapa dia sebenarnya dan kenapa menjadi doodle ?
2. Lahir di Kensington, Middlesex, Inggris pada 25 Januari 1882.
5. Alumnus King's College London atau kini bernama Queen Elizabeth London .
Virginia Woolf, the groundbreaking English novelist whose work focused on characters’ complex interior lives, is celebrated in a new Google Doodle.
Ms Woolf, who was born in London in 1882 and took her own life in 1941, would have been 136 on January 25 — an occasion Google is honouring with its latest tribute.
Her influence has far outlasted her life, helping to push the structural possibilities of literature and proving that the contents of a person’s mind can be as compelling and plot-shaping as the world around her. Her books regularly appear on lists of the greatest novels of the 20th century, and she is seen as a crucial architect of modernist literature.
She was a key member of the Bloomsbury Group, a collection of prominent intellectuals and writers whose other participants EM Forster and John Maynard Keynes.
Her most famous works, Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, use stream-of-consciousness narration that illuminates the perspectives of characters whose mundane tasks — in the case of Mrs Dalloway’s eponymous protagonist, preparing for an evening party — take on profound importance when viewed in the context of individual lives and histories, with all their desires, impressions and psychological depth.
“Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself,” the novel’s first line, has become one of the more famous openers in English literature.
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In The Waves, Ms Woolf experimented further with shifting points of view by telling the story of six friends’ unfolding lives through their various first-person experiences over the course of decades.
The book operates on two seemingly contradictory premises: that our experience of life necessarily flows through our separate perspectives, dividing us from one another, and that our lives are nevertheless defined by the other people in them.
“I am not one and simple, but complex and many,” Ms Woolf wrote.
Nonfiction works like A Room of One’s Own helped establish Ms Woolf as an influential feminist thinker.
“A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction,” she wrote, a call for female independence that has become one of her most well-known lines.
London-based illustrator Louise Pomeroy created the Doodle tribute to Ms Woolf, which Google said was meant to reflect her “minimalist style”.
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“I see children running in the garden…The sound of the sea at night…
almost forty years of life, all built on that, permeated by that: so much I could never explain."
These childhood memories inspired the settings and themes of English author Virginia Woolf’s powerful stream-of-consciousness narratives, a unique literary style that established Woolf as one of modern feminism’s most influential voices.
Born in London in 1882, Woolf grew up in a home with a large library, and a constant stream of literary visitors come to call on her author and historian father. Unsurprisingly, Woolf would become an integral member of the Bloomsbury Group, a collective of prominent contemporary intellectuals and artists.
Woolf’s lyrical writing thrived on the introspection of her characters, revealing the complex emotions underlying seemingly mundane events — how the ringing of the Big Ben evokes the passage of time in Mrs. Dalloway (1925) or a family’s visit to the coast hides deep-seated tensions in To the Lighthouse (1927).
Nonfiction works like A Room of One’s Own (1929) and Three Guineas (1938) showcase Woolf’s unflinching feminist perspective by documenting the gendered intellectual stratification and resulting male-dominated power dynamics of the period.
Created by London-based illustrator Louise Pomeroy, today’s Doodle celebrates Woolf’s minimalist style — her iconic profile surrounded by the falling autumn leaves (a frequent visual theme in her work). In Woolf’s words: “The autumn trees gleam in the yellow moonlight, in the light of harvest moons, the light which mellows the energy of labor, and smooths the stubble, and brings the wave lapping blue to the shore.”
Happy 136th birthday, Virginia Woolf!
Early drafts of the Doodle below
