Tragedy crept in the happy childhood of Virginia with the death of her mother from rheumatic fever in 1895. This terrible loss caused her a mental breakdown, when she was only thirteen. Leslie Stephen suffered from abdominal cancer and passed away on 22 February, 1904. Virginia felt an intense though ambivalent liberation, as she felt that if her father would have lived longer, she would have been unable to write. His moral and intellectual Victorian judgements would have cut off her creativity. At the age of 46, Virginia Woolf notes in A Writer’s Diary: Father’s birthday. He would have been 96...but mercifully was not. His life would have entirely ended mine... No writing, no books...
No doubt she was intellectually indebted to her father, but she was emotionally oppressed by him. In her father’s presence, she felt dwarfed. The death of Leslie set Virginia free from a father, whose guidance, though
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This informal association was based on friendship and interest in the arts, and it derived many of its attitudes from George Edward Moore’s (1873-1958) Principia Ethica (1903);
By far the most valuable things...are...the pleasure of human intercourse and the enjoyment of beautiful objects; ...it is they...that form the rational ultimate end of social progress. (Drabble 113)
Its members were in conscious revolt against the artistic, social, and sexual restrictions of Victorian society. They profoundly affected the development of the avant-garde in art and literature in Britain. The main figures of the coterie were Virginia Woolf, Leonard Woolf, Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell, Vanessa Bell, Roger fry, Duncan Grant, Maynard Keynes, E. M. Forster, David Garnett. Though they did not form a ‘school’, they had a considerable influence in the world of letters, art, and