Answer the Questions. 1. What was the pen name of Hector Hugh Munro?

1. What was the pen name of Hector Hugh Munro?

2. In what way were his stories constructed?

3. What kind of endings do most of his stories have?

4. Did he write novels?

5. What did he predict in 1913?

6. Where was he born?

7. When did he come to London?

9 „3o VIRGINIA WOOLF

Virginia Woolf (1882—1941), was a major British novelist, critic, and essayist. She was one of the leading figures in the liter­ary movement called modernism. Other modernists included James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, and T. S. Eliot. Woolf used a literary technique called stream of consciousness to reveal the in­ner lives of her characters and at the same time to criticize the so­cial system of the day.

Woolf's most famous novel, «To the Lighthouse» (1927), ex­amines the life of an upper-middle class British family. It shows the fragility of human relationships and the collapse of social val­ues. Some readers believe the portrait of Mr. Ramsay in this novel resembles Woolf's father, the critic Leslie Stephen.

Woolf's other fiction includes the novels «Jacob's Room» (1922), and «Mrs. Dalloway» (1925), in which she studies the world of characters tragically affected by World War I. «Orlando» (1928), and «Flush» (1933), arc fanciful biographies. In «The Waves» (1931), interior monologues reveal the personalities of the six cen­tral characters. Unlike other modernists, whose politics were rightwing and often profascist, Woolf was a feminist, socialist, and pacifist. She expressed her socialist-feminist theories in the essays «А Room of One's Own» (1929), and «Three Guineas» (1938). Her last novels, «The Years» (1939), and «Between the Acts» (1941), are as experimental as her earlier work.

Virginia Stephen was born in London. In 1912, she married edi­tor and writer Leonard Woolf. She belonged to the Bloomsbury Group, an informal group of intellectuals. With her husband, Woolf founded the Hogarth Press, which published works of noted mod­ern writers. Her reputation has soared with the publication of sev­eral volumes of letters and diaries and her critical essays.