Virginia Woolf (25 January 1882 – 28 March 1941), born Adeline Virginia Stephen, was a British writer who is considered to be one of the foremost modernist/feminist literary figures of the twentieth century.
Birth Name:
Adeline Virginia Stephen
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Adeline Virginia Alexandra Stephen
Alternative Names:
Virginia Stephen
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Adeline Virginia Woolf
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Virginia Adeline Woolf
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Adeline Virginia Stephen Woolf
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Virginia Stephen Woolf
•
Adeline Virginia Alexandra Woolf
Few people ask from books what books can give us. Most commonly we come to books with blurred and divided minds, asking of fiction that it shall be true, of poetry that it shall be false, of biography that it shall be flattering, of history that it shall enforce our own prejudices. If we could banish all such preconceptions when we read, that would be an admirable beginning.
It seems that a profound, impartial, and absolutely just opinion of our fellow-creatures is utterly unknown. Either we are men, or we are women. Either we are cold, or we are sentimental. Either we are young, or growing old. In any case life is but a procession of shadows, and God knows why it is that we embrace them so eagerly, and see them depart with such anguish, being shadows. And why, if this — and much more than this is true — why are we yet surprised in the window corner by a sudden vision that the young man in the chair is of all things in the world the most real, the most solid, the best known to us — why indeed? For the moment after we know nothing about him.
Such is the manner of our seeing. Such the conditions of our love.
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