Virginia Woolf, long appreciated in high literary circles and hailed as a feminist activist, is becoming appreciated by a younger audience with recent adaptations of her work, including a movie of her novel Night and Day. It is released this week starring Haley Bennett, Timothy Spall, Jennifer Saunders, Jack Whitehall and Lily Allen, and focuses on a female astronomer trying to gain admission to the University of Cambridge to read maths and battling academia’s anti-women attitudes (women students were being refused degrees in those days even if they were admitted). As she confronts the patriarchal expectations of Edwardian society, she realises her intellectual ambitions are only possible as a married woman.
Born 25 January 1882 12.15pm London, she grew up in a literary and artistic household with a free run of her father’s library, so was better educated than most girls of the time. As an adult she became part of the upmarket bohemian, intellectual Bloomsbury Group and married Leonard Woolf, a writer, publisher, civil servant and Labour supporter. All of her life she suffered mood swings and depression; and ultimately took her life during World War 11, drowning herself in a river. Although she married Woolf, she had many affairs with women to whom she was more attracted than men.
She had an ambitious, career-oriented Sun Aquarius on her Midheaven in a downbeat square to Saturn in determined Taurus and trine Pluto in late Taurus – so quite a driven, battened down temperament with problems of self-worth. Her Aries Moon was square Venus in Capricorn and sextile an upfront and wordy Mars in Gemini in her 1st. She had a stellium in Taurus including a Jupiter Neptune conjunction trine Uranus as well as Pluto. Her Pluto was also in an intensely emotionally trine to Venus.
What a complicated personality. On the masculine side Sun Saturn Pluto – unyielding, dominating, not supportive. On the feminine side the Moon Venus, referred to by astrologer Richard Idemon as the ‘poisoned apple’, a mother’s love mixed in with sexuality, heightened by Pluto Venus. And an eye-catching idealistic, visionary, impressionable Jupiter Neptune conjunction in an innovative trine to Uranus. Her Jupiter conjunct Chiron marked her out as one who would inspire and teach others.
When she died on 28 March 1941, having become increasingly obsessed with death since the start of the war in 1939, she was hearing voices and felt she was sliding towards another breakdown. She was on her exact Jupiter Return, with tr Jupiter also exactly conjunct her Chiron, no doubt longing for peace, as a build up of darker influences wore her down – tr Pluto was close to challenging opposition to her Sun and in an unrelentingly gloomy square to her Saturn; tr Saturn was conjunct her Neptune increasing her uncertainty; and her Solar Arc Mars was bearing down on her Pluto in a square which must have made her feel her life had come to a halt and she couldn’t see a way through.
Her creative 5th and 7th harmonics were heavily aspected, though troubled especially her 7H. Her writer’s 21st harmonic was notable, influential and tortured. Her leaving-a-legacy-for-history also marked her out as a fighter for women’s freedom against oppression.
Thanks. I must say I am puzzled by Virginia Woolf. She is fiercely championed by some but, despite several tries, I find her unreadable. And I read most things. Maybe it is because my Saturn is opposite opposite her Jupiter Neptune. The Bloomsbury people are less attractive the more you look at them, but they never did anything without writing about it, and so provide material for academics.
I found reading Virginia Woolf uncomfortable, Mrs Dalloway and To The Lighthouse. All that pressure behind her writing, I found so difficult to read, all that trying to write stories of her times, with not much empathy for her characters. I feel how disturbed she had been, then protected by her class and art, under the guise of feminism.
Now, I look at our synastry, her Neptune, Jupiter and Chiron conjunct my Sun, her 12th House.
Sorry, 12th house, in the composite chart.
No, my mistake, in synastry.
I must confess I could never ‘get’ her novels and I read voraciously in those days, adored MiddleMarch etc etc.
The Bloomsbury members were an incredibly cruel lot. I find it hard to warm to them. Virginia wasn’t just racist in terms of her times, she was actively nasty and spiteful about other races. For all her feminism, she and her sister would bully other women – Ottoline Morell, Dora Carrington, the ballerina, Lydia Lopokova and Lady Dorothy Brett whose deafness they mocked relentlessly, and indeed any mistress who dared to venture into their circle – they believed in free love, because any conventional relationships were considered ‘Victorian’ and ‘Bourgeois’. Angelica Garnett – the daughter of Vanessa Bell, who married her father’s former lover – when Angelica was a baby, he apparently told her parents that he would marry her when she was of age, to which they had no objection! Angelica Garnett wrote a scathing memoir about her upbringing, ‘Deceived with Kindness: A Bloomsbury Childhood’ in 1984. When you overemphasise the intellect, kindness and decency can get eclipsed. But to see VW’s packed 12th house and somewhat cold Aquarius Sun – which i notice is currently being triggered by transit Pluto – does demonstrate how very troubled and tumultuous her interior was.
Thank you for posting VW’s birth time, Marjorie, and your comments. VF was a true trail blazer. Her life was mostly awful, with intermittent mental illness, having been sexually abused by an older half brother, and growing up in a tense, intellectually competitive family. All of them brilliant and troubled. Her mother, Julia, was also much admired and troubled – she was painted by the Pre-Raphaelite painters. There are long Wikipedia articles on Virginia, Julia and all of the famous people in the Stephens/Woolf circle, as well as many biographies. Her clan make a big rabbit hole for literary types to fall into with fascination and sometimes horror. There was (is) something quite Gothic about Virginia, even though her writing is as smooth as silk to read and emotionally evocative. She was apparently snobbish and racially prejudiced, which has tarnished her reputation a bit, but her writing withstands the flaws and her literary reputation is unassailed to this day. She was a product of her times, as is everybody, and although her point of view could only have happened in her own era, her themes are universal. Had she lived now, she might have had a chance of beating her mental illness with medication and therapy, but that did not exist for women in her day, but then she might not have written so beautifully.
Thanks, Marjorie. With women’s rights under attack from all directions, it’s great to hear that Virginia Woolf is appealling to a younger audience. Also a sad story, but having lived through one war, it must have been harsh to endure another.