“When you consider things like the stars, our affairs don't seem to matter very much, do they?” — Virginia Woolf
If you’ve opened this, you probably know who Virginia Woolf is, but on the off chance that you don’t, Virginia Woolf is a renowned British author who lived during the modernist movement in literature. She is most known for Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse and is recognized as one of the most innovative writers of the 20th century.
Here are a couple of posts I’ve written that are inspired by Virginia Woolf herself:
Author Aesthetic: Virginia Woolf
If you aren’t familiar with the Author Aesthetic series I’ve created, this is just a fun series to learn more about authors in the past and imagine what they would be like in our day. This time I chose to create an aesthetic for Virginia Woolf. I admire her unique approach in her writing style and thought process, especially the way she conveyed these in “A Room of One’s Own”.
Something many may not know about Virginia Woolf is that she had a fondness for clothing. During the 1920s, fashion was changing for women, prioritizing comfort with looser cuts, dropped waistlines, raised hemlines, and more affordable materials such as jersey were becoming more widely used. Virginia Woolf embraced this increase in selection for women. For Woolf, the choice of clothing was a form of self-expression.
On being alone: Virginia Woolf’s secret to creativity
Excerpt from my essay On Being Alone:
If creativity is a way to find connection to the world, to the people around us, to ourselves — if being alone creates a longing to feel a connection, then the act of being alone, the pulling ourselves away from reality and immersing ourselves in the overwhelming condition of feeling an emotion other than what matters to anyone else but ourselves is necessary for the survival of the creative mind. But why is it so difficult to allow ourselves to be alone? Are we afraid? Are we afraid that the act of being alone is threatening our sense of worth? Are we afraid to feel the emotions we’ve worked so hard to push away? Or are we afraid that the act of being alone only validates the loneliness we refuse to acknowledge?
Further reading: