Google Doodle celebrates 136th birthday of novelist Virginia Woolf

New Delhi: Search engine Google on Friday celebrated the life and literature of one of the foremost novelists of the 20th century –Virginia Woolf.

Created by London-based illustrator Louise Pomeroy, Doodle celebrates Woolf’s minimalist style — her iconic profile surrounded by the falling autumn leaves (a frequent visual theme in her work), Google said.

Woolf, pioneered the use of "stream of consciousness" narrative approach that elevated mundane settings as she examined the complex interior lives of her characters.

Born in London in 1882, Woolf described in a 1921 diary entry how memories of family holidays and the surrounding landscape, especially the Godrevy Lighthouse, impacted her fiction in later years.

Woolf was homeschooled in the English classics and Victorian literature for much of her childhood.

She began writing professionally in 1900, becoming a significant member of London`s literary society and the Bloomsbury Group, a collective of prominent contemporary intellectuals and artists.

Woolf’s lyrical writing thrived on the introspection of her characters, revealing the complex emotions underlying seemingly mundane events — how the ringing of the Big Ben evokes the passage of time in Mrs. Dalloway (1925) or a family’s visit to the coast hides deep-seated tensions in To the Lighthouse (1927).   

Nonfiction works like A Room of One’s Own (1929) and Three Guineas (1938) showcase Woolf’s unflinching feminist perspective by documenting the gendered intellectual stratification and resulting male-dominated power dynamics of the period.

Woolf also suffered from mental illness for much of her life, and she ultimately took her own life at the age of 59.

She published prolifically between the First and Second World Wars, with her final novel "Between The Acts" issued just after her death in 1941.

After producing the final manuscript for that posthumous work, Woolf fell into a depression, her diaries of the time hinted at a growing obsession with death.

On March 28, 1941, she drowned herself in the River Ouse near her home, Monk`s House in Lewes, Sussex - her body was not found for three weeks.

Her heartbreaking suicide note to her husband began: "Dearest, I feel certain that I am going mad again. I feel we can`t go through another of those terrible times. And I shan`t recover this time."