Editing Virginia Woolf (section)

=== Influences ===

Sybil Oldfield examines Woolf's convinced pacifism, its sources and its expression in her life and works.<ref name=":0" />

Michel Lackey argues that a major influence on Woolf, from 1912 onward, was Russian literature and Woolf adopted many of its aesthetic conventions.{{sfn|Lackey|2012}} The style of [[Fyodor Dostoyevsky]] with his depiction of a fluid mind in operation helped to influence Woolf's writings about a "discontinuous writing process", though Woolf objected to Dostoyevsky's obsession with "psychological extremity" and the "tumultuous flux of emotions" in his characters together with his right-wing, monarchist politics as Dostoyevsky was an ardent supporter of the autocracy of the [[Russian Empire]].{{sfn|Lackey|2012}} In contrast to her objections to Dostoyevsky's "exaggerated emotional pitch", Woolf found much to admire in the work of [[Anton Chekhov]] and [[Leo Tolstoy]].{{sfn|Lackey|2012}} Woolf admired Chekhov for his stories of ordinary people living their lives, doing banal things and plots that had no neat endings.{{sfn|Lackey|2012}} From Tolstoy, Woolf drew lessons about how a novelist should depict a character's psychological state and the interior tension within.{{sfn|Lackey|2012}} Lackey notes that, from [[Ivan Turgenev]], Woolf drew the lessons that there are multiple "I's" when writing a novel, and the novelist needed to balance those multiple versions of him- or herself to balance the "mundane facts" of a story vs. the writer's overarching vision, which required a "total passion" for art.{{sfn|Lackey|2012}}

The American writer [[Henry David Thoreau]] also influenced Woolf. In a 1917 essay, she praised Thoreau for his statement "The millions are awake enough for physical labor, but only one in hundreds of millions is awake enough to a poetic or divine life. To be awake is to be alive." They both aimed to capture 'the moment'––as Walter Pater says, "to burn always with this hard, gem-like flame."<ref>Walter Pater. The Renaissance Studies in Art and Poetry. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2398/2398-h/2398-h.htm {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210428025903/http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2398/2398-h/2398-h.htm |date=28 April 2021 }}</ref>{{sfn|Majumdar|1969}} Woolf praised Thoreau for his "simplicity" in finding "a way for setting free the delicate and complicated machinery of the soul".{{sfn|Majumdar|1969}} Like Thoreau, Woolf believed that it was silence that set the mind free to really contemplate and understand the world.{{sfn|Majumdar|1969}} Both authors believed in a certain transcendental, mystical approach to life and writing, where even banal things could be capable of generating deep emotions if one had enough silence and the presence of mind to appreciate them.{{sfn|Majumdar|1969}} Woolf and Thoreau were both concerned with the difficulty of human relationships in the modern age.{{sfn|Majumdar|1969}}

Woolf's preface to [[Orlando: A Biography|''Orlando'']] credits [[Daniel Defoe]], [[Sir Thomas Browne]], [[Laurence Sterne]], [[Sir Walter Scott]], [[Thomas Babington Macaulay|Lord Macaulay]], [[Emily Brontë]], [[Thomas de Quincey]], and [[Walter Pater]] as influences.{{sfn|Woolf|1928}}{{page needed|date=June 2024}} Among her contemporaries, Woolf was influenced by [[Marcel Proust]], writing to [[Roger Fry]], "Oh if I could write like that!"<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Shore |first=Elizabeth M. |date=Summer 1979 |title=Virginia Woolf, Proust, and Orlando |journal=[[Comparative Literature]] |volume=31 |issue=3 |pages=232–245 |doi=10.2307/1770923 |jstor=1770923}}</ref>

==== Virginia Woolf and her mother ====
The intense scrutiny of Virginia Woolf's literary output has led to speculation as to her mother's influence, including psychoanalytic studies of mother and daughter.<ref name=MP67/>{{sfn|Rosenman|1986}}<ref name=MH91/><ref name=Hirsch108/> Her memories of her mother are memories of an obsession,<ref name=Birrento69/> starting with her first major breakdown on her mother's death in 1895, the loss having a profound lifelong effect.<ref name=Simpson12/> In many ways, her mother's profound influence on Virginia Woolf is conveyed in the latter's recollections, "there she is; beautiful, emphatic ... closer than any of the living are, lighting our random lives as with a burning torch, infinitely noble and delightful to her children".{{sfn|Woolf|1908|p=40}}

Woolf's understanding of her mother and family evolved considerably between 1907 and 1940, in which the somewhat distant, yet revered figure, becomes more nuanced and complete.{{sfn|Schulkind|1985|p=13}} She described her mother as an "invisible presence" in her life, and Ellen Rosenman argues that the mother-daughter relationship is a constant in Woolf's writing.{{sfn|Rosenman|1986|loc=cited in {{harvtxt|Caramagno|1989}}}} She describes how Woolf's [[modernism]] needs to be viewed in relationship to her ambivalence towards her Victorian mother, the centre of the former's female identity, and her voyage to her own sense of autonomy. To Woolf, "Saint Julia" was both a martyr whose perfectionism was intimidating and a source of deprivation, by her absences real and virtual and premature death.{{sfn|Caramagno|1989}} Julia's influence and memory pervade Woolf's life and work. "She has haunted me", she wrote.{{sfn|Woolf|1923–1928|p=374}}