The losses that Virginia experienced in her life due to her gender are, mutatis mutandi, losses comparable to the losses that many girls and women around the world historically down to the present time have experienced to one degree or another. For this reason, Virginia Woolf's enormous body of work can be seen as a resource for feminists today.
However, we should remember Virginia's social location. Virginia Stephen was the daughter of a prominent upper-middle-class family. She did not come from a lower-class background. Yes, we could describe her as having been home-schooled. But her father was in the habit of reading aloud to his family, and she did have access to her father's extensive library. In addition, she did receive private lessons in Greek, even though she did not receive the kind of formal education that her older and younger brothers received. As a young woman, she socialized with her older brother's classically educated friends from Cambridge University, marrying Leonard Woolf. As long as she socialized with classically educated men from Cambridge University in the social group that has become known as the Bloomsbury group (or simply Bloomsbury), she was living in a social context in which she would daily be reminded of her already acute awareness of her lack of a formal education.
But let us not forget Shakespeare. As the title of T. W. Baldwin's monumental two-volume study WILLIAM SHAKSPERE'S SMALL LATINE AND LESSE GREEKE (University of Illinois Press, 1944) reminds us, Shakespeare in his day also did not have the full benefit of a formal education in his day. But what he did have by way of formal education was good enough for him to get by on in English, even if he was not fluent enough in Latin or Greek to write poetry or prose work in either of those languages.
In any event, out of this enormous matrix of loss and of mourning, Virginia's creative spirit emerged as almost indomitable -- up to the end of her life. For Virginia, the work of mourning contributed to her literary creativity. Let's be as clear here as we can be. She was going to have to work out her work of mourning, or else she would run the risk of succumbing to the powerful undertow of bereavement and mourning, leading to another mental breakdown or to suicide. So she set to work. However, in the end, she did commit suicide. Her suicide shows how powerful and overpowering bereavement and mourning can be at times for some people.
However, I myself prefer to work here with a far more comprehensive way of contextualizing her life and work than the admittedly learned and highly circumstantial way of contextualizing her life and work that Koulouris ably works with.
War was a way of life in the ancient world and in many other predominantly oral cultures around the world in ancient and medieval and modern times. In oral cultures, warfare required courage and manliness (Greek, "andreia" means both courage and manliness) battle often involved up-close physical combat. Ancient Greek men worked out at the gym to stay fit as warriors. The so-called games in the ancient Olympics involved warrior-training exercises. In imaginative literature, exemplars of warrior courage include Achilles and Hector and Odysseus and Aeneas and Beowulf and Othello and Okonkwo in Chinua Achebe's novel THINGS FALL APART (1958). Oral epic poetry celebrated the heroic ideal. As Virgil's AENEID shows, the heroic ideal of oral epic poetry survived the emergence of phonetic alphabetic writing and the emergence of the written epic.
But an alternative heroic ideal emerged with the heroic death of Socrates in Plato's APOLOGY and the heroic death of Jesus in the Gospel of Mark and the three other canonical gospels. Thus Socrates and Jesus exemplified the non-violent heroic ideal of cultural resistance.
Later, after the emergence of the Gutenberg printing press, the anti-hero emerged as exemplified by Falstaff's critique of honor. Why be courageous and die in the process when you can eat, drink, and be merry, eh?
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