I think it's extremely dangerous that two commentators undermine/downplay the impact of Virginia Woolf's sexual abuse by her brother. When a child is HUNTED by a predator, one so many years older than she is, then she is definitely a victim and this trauma burns like a hot iron on the soul. The comments in this video certainly illustrate how far we've come in our understanding of the impact of sexual abuse on a child-to-adult's life.
I agree completely. I spent 26 years with a survivor of childhood sexual abuse. It's effect is deep, structural, permanent. This woman should get real about Virginia Woolf and the reality of her suffering.
I have bipolar type 1, PTSD, social anxiety which I call the inclination to be alone rather than in company of others and I CANNOT write my poetry, allow my mind to wander in deep thought like I love to do, be imaginative, write stories, ponder life or those in it when I am medicated. PERIOD. Now, add the pain caused by others by the traumatic impingement of others on ones on personal privacy and comfort and you get someone who already has a very empathetic, thoughtful and creative imagination turned into a person like what the diagnostic criteria is for my diagnoses and MANY OTHER literary and creative/ philosopher types like myself. I believe that those who are able to think deeply can hurt just as deeply and therefore become so contrastly distant due to the complete knowledge that these people have of their pain in their MINDS. My mind is my favorite place to be, once pain has been let in, it becomes a struggle.
Universities and Lecturers and film and documentary makers have made small fortunes and incomes attributing reasoned but unmeasurable motives and aims to Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group. I was pleased with the general sense of disgust to them all by the public following the drama series on them some four years ago. Too many of us across western civilisation have been told by teachers etc that we should venerate and be interested in them as we got into laters years of education. Why? You are better off watching Breaking Bad and studying Walter White and Jessie.
@@clintockmaconaghie3763 You've confused entertainment with culture. All these TV series that people avidly consume, are more or less diverting, but do not (or rarely) grapple with the profound concerns of humankind. Regrettably they also tend to dull one's sense of what good prose sounds like, and therefore deprive us of one the joys of life, namely that of savouring the ring and meditating on the meaning, of a perfectly made sentence. Have you read Woolf's To the Lighthouse ? Dostoyevksy's The Idiot? G. Eliot's Middlemarch ? I don't deny the superficial allure of TV series, but great literature is there to arouse, and then soothe and placate, our deeper existential concerns, and thus bring human existence into a fuller life.
After being sexually abused as a child, one would be totally disturbed. One does never, never recuperate from this experience. She was not a victim, but a survivor of sexual abuse.
Woolf was neither a remarkable modernist writer nor a remarkable feminist writer...her writing is absolutely extraordinary in so far as it was a real breakthrough in the XXth century: she was both a modernist AND a feminist author...which makes her books all the more delightful to read...
About 15 years ago I visited Virginia Woolf's home in Sussex with a friend who was using her writing as part of her dissertation. We arrived late and I told her to run up the track to the house; I would lock the car and follow. There was one other car in the car park and I parked a few feet away. As I got out, I felt that somebody was watching me and I turned around to look into the car. There, staring out at me, eating an apple, was Virginia Woolf (or her absolute double!). I have no explanation for it. Has anybody else had a similar experience?
no but id do anything to visit and check it out, let you know if i see or sense anything. I live in the states but Im a huge fan of Virginia Woolf, and also Im not afraid and very attuned to the spiritual world...
I had been reading Mrs. Dalloway and listening to podcasts about her with Melvyn Bragg. I drove up my street and there went Virginia in a floppy hat and a book bag!
(6:00) For she was a child, throwing bread to the ducks, between her parents, and at the same time a grown woman coming to her parents who stood by the lake, holding her life in her arms which, as she neared them, grew larger and larger in her arms, until it became a whole life, a complete life, which she put down by them and said, “This is what I have made of it! This!”
"there is a school of thought that argues that her life is dominated by childhood sexual abuse. i am not of that opinion, because i dont' read her life as that of a victim." *shudders*
lo mas hermoso, lo mas dificil,lol mas poetico,lo mas intelectual que he leido en vida,ha sido el libro ´las olas´´ de virginia woolf,es unico,irrepetible.poesia en prosa.todos sus libros son magnificos,pero el mas denso es este...
2:15 "She grew up with parents the age of grandparents." Her mother was 35 and her father was 49 when she was born. Her mother died when Virginia was 13, so her mother was 48. Her father died at 71 when Virginia was 22.
A very interesting programme. Thank you. Ms. Woolf is extremely complex as a writer and presumably as a person. Have just finished The Waves for the umpteenth time and am still not sure if understanding it is the word. Very beautiful like a painting in prose. So... it is back to the books I suppose!
The novels are Chaotic...stream of consciousness..stream of chaos...flowing too fast with no stability for Attentive creation. But the mini-fiction, short stories, literary criticism and essays in general are Creative Masterpieces, attentively and ingeniously doctored. Read; ''Virginia Woolf The Death of the Moth, and other essays''.
Totally agree with this. Antidepressants kill the creative process. At least they did for me. I felt like a Goddamn zombie. I'd rather feel intensely than have no feeling at all. I think it's such a fine line to walk as an artist. Yes, there is help; but that help may very well extinguish the creative fire. “The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.” -David Foster Wallace
Please don’t romanticise the idea of the tourtured artist. Having a mental illness is not a personality trait, taking medication is not restrictive/surpressive, and people don’t have to live in hell so you can better appreciate their art or revel in the belief that their life was ‘beautifully tragic’.
Who wants to be a "victim?" There is no power nor joy in victimhood. I know this so well; it is an offensive, ugly thing to give one's allegiance to that persona.
+Jennifer Myre Being a victim is not an identity or destiny. It's a state caused by another person. You can't think your way out of the fact that something happened. Don't worry, this is familiar to me too.
The people who say that 'this person's life isn't about victim-hood at all because, look at what they accomplished,' don't understand that being a victim of something can shape and change a person. Virginia sounded very intelligent, one with dignity and lived the life of a proper lady as she saw for herself. What happened to her is nothing to be ashamed of; it is just an unfortunate circumstance that no one should go through. It's not ugly on the victim, it's ugly on the person who did it to the victim. We must see this as a possible motivation tactic to her writings and her legacy through feminism awareness. She was a victim but, that does not make her any less. She's forever beautiful and a voice for women everywhere.
What the devil is offensive about it? How does it follow that because she doesn't see VW as a victim being a victim must be denied? How is it you fail to notice that we are now in an age in which victimhood is much closer to being the most exalted status one may attain?
This one about her childhood when they spent hollydays at the seaside, "limehouse light", I don't remember exactly the title because I have read the french traduction. This novel is pure magical, it's like an impressionist painting of the beach in summer time at the end of the 19th century.
I'm an avid fan of the film, The Hours, and can't watch five full minutes without crying. I feel very much in tune with Virginia Woolf, as she was born before her time, as I suspect I was born after.
Hermione Lee on Woolf's autobiography in Mrs Dalloway and need to prove one's self:"(Virgina Woolf) was proving herself to her dead parents" . (For my essay on Mrs Dalloway).
Oh FFS. For one thing, there is no consensus or clear evidence even in VW's writing as to what actually happened with George Duckworth. For another, what Hermione Lee said was that certainly she was highly affected by her brothers' actions, but that she was NOT a VICTIM. There is a difference.
She may not have been a "victim" because she was a survivor. THERE is the difference. Having said that, feeling that you're a victim or not, being molested as a child will leave its marks on one's psyche, emotions, and behaviors. Fact, whether you like it or not. Virginia, survivor or victim, she was a tough cookie to stay on this Earth as long as she did.
Universities and Lecturers and film and documentary makers have made small fortunes and incomes attributing reasoned but unmeasurable motives and aims to Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group. I was pleased with the general sense of disgust to them all by the public following the drama series on them some four years ago. Too many of us across western civilisation have been told by teachers etc that we should venerate and be interested in them as we got into laters years of education. Why? You are better off watching Breaking Bad and studying Walter White and Jessie.
Have you read Virginia Woolf's writings? She was a genius. Breaking Bad is interesting to Criminal Justice students not English Literature students. I know, I have studied both.
@@dawnemile4974 The prose of Breaking Bad is part of English literature. The introspective nature of Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group are to limiting. It was an age of self importance that the plurality of internet has enabled to be less valued in comparison. The last work of fiction I really enjoyed reading was the Forsyte Saga.
The voices were figments with no power to harm, imagination like a movie. In all she conquered them. But I also have conquered them, not as she did but with aThority. Yet it seems as she did. There were patterns in her life that has been the story of many liberals of what is & was & will always be, moving the human family into the future that has been for ordained, catching some by surprize, Like the car, the airplane, the rocket, the Constituional Amendments, human rights international law.
I think it's extremely dangerous that two commentators undermine/downplay the impact of Virginia Woolf's sexual abuse by her brother. When a child is HUNTED by a predator, one so many years older than she is, then she is definitely a victim and this trauma burns like a hot iron on the soul. The comments in this video certainly illustrate how far we've come in our understanding of the impact of sexual abuse on a child-to-adult's life.
Thank you for that comment, FACTS!!!
I agree completely. I spent 26 years with a survivor of childhood sexual abuse. It's effect is deep, structural, permanent. This woman should get real about Virginia Woolf and the reality of her suffering.
Yes appalling... Many people who are abused have tremendous courage and built successful lives. Their mental health can be deeply affected though
I have bipolar type 1, PTSD, social anxiety which I call the inclination to be alone rather than in company of others and I CANNOT write my poetry, allow my mind to wander in deep thought like I love to do, be imaginative, write stories, ponder life or those in it when I am medicated. PERIOD. Now, add the pain caused by others by the traumatic impingement of others on ones on personal privacy and comfort and you get someone who already has a very empathetic, thoughtful and creative imagination turned into a person like what the diagnostic criteria is for my diagnoses and MANY OTHER literary and creative/ philosopher types like myself. I believe that those who are able to think deeply can hurt just as deeply and therefore become so contrastly distant due to the complete knowledge that these people have of their pain in their MINDS. My mind is my favorite place to be, once pain has been let in, it becomes a struggle.
Her art survives her disease. That is the real fact. She was genius.
Universities and Lecturers and film and documentary makers have made small fortunes and incomes attributing reasoned but unmeasurable motives and aims to Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group. I was pleased with the general sense of disgust to them all by the public following the drama series on them some four years ago. Too many of us across western civilisation have been told by teachers etc that we should venerate and be interested in them as we got into laters years of education. Why? You are better off watching Breaking Bad and studying Walter White and Jessie.
@@clintockmaconaghie3763 You've confused entertainment with culture. All these TV series that people avidly consume, are more or less diverting, but do not (or rarely) grapple with the profound concerns of humankind. Regrettably they also tend to dull one's sense of what good prose sounds like, and therefore deprive us of one the joys of life, namely that of savouring the ring and meditating on the meaning, of a perfectly made sentence. Have you read Woolf's To the Lighthouse ? Dostoyevksy's The Idiot? G. Eliot's Middlemarch ? I don't deny the superficial allure of TV series, but great literature is there to arouse, and then soothe and placate, our deeper existential concerns, and thus bring human existence into a fuller life.
Distortion is offtimes revealed in drawerings and a pecking of the wetted bristles ... tit for tat ... of the soul
I think you’re right I think for Virginia Woolf she was smart and genius.
Words were so powerful. For good & ill.
After being sexually abused as a child, one would be totally disturbed. One does never, never recuperate from this experience. She was not a victim, but a survivor of sexual abuse.
Thank you very much for this documentary
Woolf was neither a remarkable modernist writer nor a remarkable feminist writer...her writing is absolutely extraordinary in so far as it was a real breakthrough in the XXth century: she was both a modernist AND a feminist author...which makes her books all the more delightful to read...
Louis Beauchamp Why,why why can't there be more young men like you in the world?!! Kudos!:)
Louis Beauchamp .
Louis Beachamp
I agree, except I would like to add that Virginia was a remarkable writer to me.
@@kristennoelle9447 there are ,you just dont know how to find them
Thank you, this has been added to our playlists here and on facebook....
Ahh!! A multitude of thanks for this posting! I greatly admire this particular doc on V.W.
Thanks for posting.
About 15 years ago I visited Virginia Woolf's home in Sussex with a friend who was using her writing as part of her dissertation. We arrived late and I told her to run up the track to the house; I would lock the car and follow. There was one other car in the car park and I parked a few feet away. As I got out, I felt that somebody was watching me and I turned around to look into the car. There, staring out at me, eating an apple, was Virginia Woolf (or her absolute double!). I have no explanation for it. Has anybody else had a similar experience?
no but id do anything to visit and check it out, let you know if i see or sense anything. I live in the states but Im a huge fan of Virginia Woolf, and also Im not afraid and very attuned to the spiritual world...
Do you remember what she was wearing?
@@inglatera1910 It was a long time ago but I have a vague memory it some kind of dark dress. I do remember that the car was red.
Ann TwoShoes that’s pretty incredible! Thank you for sharing that experience.
I had been reading Mrs. Dalloway and listening to podcasts about her with Melvyn Bragg. I drove up my street and there went Virginia in a floppy hat and a book bag!
(6:00) For she was a child, throwing bread to the ducks, between her parents, and at the same time a grown woman coming to her parents who stood by the lake, holding her life in her arms which, as she neared them, grew larger and larger in her arms, until it became a whole life, a complete life, which she put down by them and said, “This is what I have made of it! This!”
"there is a school of thought that argues that her life is dominated by childhood sexual abuse. i am not of that opinion, because i dont' read her life as that of a victim."
*shudders*
I like that they use the soundtrack from the hours in this.
lo mas hermoso, lo mas dificil,lol mas poetico,lo mas intelectual que he leido en vida,ha sido el libro ´las olas´´ de virginia woolf,es unico,irrepetible.poesia en prosa.todos sus libros son magnificos,pero el mas denso es este...
2:15 "She grew up with parents the age of grandparents." Her mother was 35 and her father was 49 when she was born. Her mother died when Virginia was 13, so her mother was 48. Her father died at 71 when Virginia was 22.
A very interesting programme. Thank you. Ms. Woolf is extremely complex as a writer and presumably as a person. Have just finished The Waves for the umpteenth time and am still not sure if understanding it is the word. Very beautiful like a painting in prose. So... it is back to the books I suppose!
I absolutely love Virginia Woolf, and "coffee after dinner" (7:03) makes her even more amazing!
I always find V.W. and the whole Bloomsbury circle ...fascinating.
Oh my gosh me too
The novels are Chaotic...stream of consciousness..stream of chaos...flowing too fast with no stability for Attentive creation. But the mini-fiction, short stories, literary criticism and essays in general are Creative Masterpieces, attentively and ingeniously doctored. Read; ''Virginia Woolf
The Death of the Moth, and other essays''.
6:52 Is thaat guy Roger Fry holding a laptop in the early 20th or even late 19th century !!?? :D :D :D
Nah, he was a painter. It's what he used to mix pigments, man
Yeah, if she had had lithium, she might have lived longer, and she might not have been Virginia Woolf either.
Totally agree with this. Antidepressants kill the creative process. At least they did for me. I felt like a Goddamn zombie. I'd rather feel intensely than have no feeling at all. I think it's such a fine line to walk as an artist. Yes, there is help; but that help may very well extinguish the creative fire.
“The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.” -David Foster Wallace
It's true that it might, but walking into a lake while your pockets are full of rocks also extinguishes the fire. Permanently.
Exactly my beautiful beloved’s indeed......👌🙏🦊
Please don’t romanticise the idea of the tourtured artist. Having a mental illness is not a personality trait, taking medication is not restrictive/surpressive, and people don’t have to live in hell so you can better appreciate their art or revel in the belief that their life was ‘beautifully tragic’.
@@freya1340 many people with mental illness will tell that they find medication to be suppressing
Is the transcript of this document available? (not the one which is on youtube)
"I don't see her life as that of a victim" That is so offensive and ugly. So now being a victim is shameful and ugly and needs to be denied?
Who wants to be a "victim?" There is no power nor joy in victimhood. I know this so well; it is an offensive, ugly thing to give one's allegiance to that persona.
+Jennifer Myre Being a victim is not an identity or destiny. It's a state caused by another person. You can't think your way out of the fact that something happened. Don't worry, this is familiar to me too.
Тhis mоooоviе is now аvailablе tо wаtch hеrеeеe => twitter.com/d840affddb9b89425/status/795843648935972865 TTТThе Мind aааnd Тimes of Virginiа Wооoоlf Раrt 1 оооof 3
The people who say that 'this person's life isn't about victim-hood at all because, look at what they accomplished,' don't understand that being a victim of something can shape and change a person. Virginia sounded very intelligent, one with dignity and lived the life of a proper lady as she saw for herself. What happened to her is nothing to be ashamed of; it is just an unfortunate circumstance that no one should go through. It's not ugly on the victim, it's ugly on the person who did it to the victim.
We must see this as a possible motivation tactic to her writings and her legacy through feminism awareness. She was a victim but, that does not make her any less. She's forever beautiful and a voice for women everywhere.
What the devil is offensive about it? How does it follow that because she doesn't see VW as a victim being a victim must be denied? How is it you fail to notice that we are now in an age in which victimhood is much closer to being the most exalted status one may attain?
great ! wonder which is the book about her life to be read...
santiago mansilla moment of being
This one about her childhood when they spent hollydays at the seaside, "limehouse light", I don't remember exactly the title because I have read the french traduction. This novel is pure magical, it's like an impressionist painting of the beach in summer time at the end of the 19th century.
I'm an avid fan of the film, The Hours, and can't watch five full minutes without crying.
I feel very much in tune with Virginia Woolf, as she was born before her time, as I suspect I was born after.
❤❤
Is that the very lovely Penelope Keith speaking as Virginia? Anyway I love them both...
Hallo, I know posted this 3 yrs ago, I have just only come across it. But I think that as Virginia we hear Eileen Atkins.
@@goodstorylover I thought Dame Eileen's voice was who I was hearing :)
eileen Atkins is ideal : she has ascerbity and remoteness as well as incisive intellect as indeed did W oolf
Dame Eileen is on YT in "A Room of One's Own" she also wrote the screenplay for the film "Mrs Dalloway".
Such a icon. I love her🤗
I deeply love 「the Waves」「Mrs.Dalloway」full of sorrows of Verginia Woolf
I cannot read Mrs.Dalloway without sorrows and sympathy to Septimus
Hermione Lee on Woolf's autobiography in Mrs Dalloway and need to prove one's self:"(Virgina Woolf) was proving herself to her dead parents" . (For my essay on Mrs Dalloway).
Apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. She had gifted parents.
You’re not of the opinion that she was sexually abused because she didn’t live as a victim? Your opinion is no longer wanted in my opinion.
7:03 Vrginia: we were going to have coffee after dinner instead of tea at nine o' clock...
Spanish people: Yeah, so what?
Stop romanticizing her misfortunes.
She would be called bi polar today.
A beauty... English beauty must be quite different from everyone else's.
and all she needed was medical cannabis/marijuana , case closed .
Oh FFS. For one thing, there is no consensus or clear evidence even in VW's writing as to what actually happened with George Duckworth. For another, what Hermione Lee said was that certainly she was highly affected by her brothers' actions, but that she was NOT a VICTIM. There is a difference.
She may not have been a "victim" because she was a survivor. THERE is the difference.
Having said that, feeling that you're a victim or not, being molested as a child will leave its marks on one's psyche, emotions, and behaviors. Fact, whether you like it or not.
Virginia, survivor or victim, she was a tough cookie to stay on this Earth as long as she did.
Sorry. She was very clear about what happened with Duckworth.
B
She was a hyper/manic-empath. Always the victim, and finding fault.
Universities and Lecturers and film and documentary makers have made small fortunes and incomes attributing reasoned but unmeasurable motives and aims to Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group. I was pleased with the general sense of disgust to them all by the public following the drama series on them some four years ago. Too many of us across western civilisation have been told by teachers etc that we should venerate and be interested in them as we got into laters years of education. Why? You are better off watching Breaking Bad and studying Walter White and Jessie.
No.
@@dawnemile4974 Why?
Have you read Virginia Woolf's writings? She was a genius. Breaking Bad is interesting to Criminal Justice students not English Literature students. I know, I have studied both.
@@dawnemile4974 The prose of Breaking Bad is part of English literature. The introspective nature of Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group are to limiting. It was an age of self importance that the plurality of internet has enabled to be less valued in comparison. The last work of fiction I really enjoyed reading was the Forsyte Saga.
Not eating with napkins? This video should be flagged as inappropriate.
xxx
CUCUMBERRR!
6 min woman is creepy AF.
Yep, anarchy in the UK.
:'(
Snob
The voices were figments with no power to harm, imagination like a movie. In all she conquered them. But I also have conquered them, not as she did but with aThority. Yet it seems as she did. There were patterns in her life that has been the story of many liberals of what is & was & will always be, moving the human family into the future that has been for ordained, catching some by surprize, Like the car, the airplane, the rocket, the Constituional Amendments, human rights international law.