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Virginia Woolf

Orangey

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Here's a link. Virginia Woolf's Personality.

For those too lazy to click it, here are some snippets that I thought were interesting.

She was a mixture of shyness and liveliness. She 'was shy and awkward, often silent, or, if in the mood to talk, would leap into fantasy and folly and terrify the innocent and unprepared.' (Angelica Garnett). She was 'enormously generous.' 'Shop assistants made her feel shy and out of place.' ('ibid). Away from social life, she was a workaholic like her father. 'Leonard has said that of the sixteen hours of her waking life, Virginia was working fifteen hours in one way or another.' (John Lehmann).

Fellow writers elaborate on the extraverted side of her character. Elizabeth Bowen noted that 'her power in conveying enjoyment was extraordinary. And her laughter was entrancing. It was outrageous laughter, almost a child's laughter. Whoops of laughter, if anything amused her. ......She was awfully naughty. She was fiendish. She could say things about people, all in a flash, which remained with one. Fleetingly malicious, rather than outright cruel.'

Frances Marshall says 'Argument was not her forte, but wild generalisations based on the flimsiest premises and embroidered with elaborate fantasy...'

In a television interview in 1967 her husband said: '.....the way that her mind worked when she was perfectly sane. First of all, in her own conversation she would do what I called "leaving the ground". Suddenly she would begin telling one something quite ordinary, and incident she'd seen in the street or something like that; and when her mind seemed to get completely off the ground she would give the most fascinating and amusing description of something fantastic, quite unlike anything that anyone other than herself would have thought of, which would last for about five or ten minutes.' The young Stephen Spender often attended informal dinner parties given by the Woolfs. 'When entertaining she would, at the start of the evening, be nervous, preoccupied with serving the drinks. Her handshake and her smile of welcome would perhaps be a little distraught.' He was surprised, in the Thirties, that she often cooked and served the meal. She would often smoke a cheroot after dinner. The talk would be of literature, sometimes of politics, when she would fall silent and let the men talk. She loved to talk about social class divisions, and about the Royal Family, sometimes to the point of tedium, Spender thought. Despite her interest she did not approve of honours and refused the C.H. proffered in 1935.

Mystical experience was not part of her public persona, but she had strange feelings of unreality when she was a child in 1894, looking at a puddle in Hyde Park Gardens. She recalled this in her 1940 reminiscences: 'when for no reason I could discover, everything suddenly became unreal; I was suspended, I could not step across a puddle: I tried to touch something.....the whole world became unreal' She quotes the puddle in The Waves, and writes in her diary of the 'semi-mystic very profound life of a woman.' There are no other 'normal' abnormal experiences in her life; all other psychological symptoms are related in time and character to her affective illnesses.

It sounds like she had some problems...but definitely some sort of NF.
 

soleil

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I think INFP? She could of also been a shy ENFP too.
 

zarc

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Orangey, that was a very interesting read. Just reading that, I'd guess ENFP.
 

zarc

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^ Sorry, I edited.

I'm just guessing based on those snippets. I'm not entirely certain of it.
 

Salomé

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^ "A Room of One's Own", was written by an extravert?
I can't see it myself.
 

zarc

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I've been reading more off of that site Orangey posted. The more I read the more it seems highly likely that she's an ENFP.

Her personality was a mixture of shyness and ebullience. She was remembered by friends not as a gloomy depressed person but as a brilliant conversationalist, laughing, joking, gossiping, and often indulging in malicious flights of fantasy at the expense of her friends. She was loved by children, given to interrogating others in her search for material, and often rude and snobbish. She was awkward out of her social class, and had an odd eccentric appearance which made people stare at her in the street.

The picture that emerges from reminiscences is remarkably consistent. Socially she was a talkative, formidably intelligent, witty, and humorous woman. With friends she was talkative, given to flights of fancy, and fond of jokes and gossip. Even in private she talked. When her new housekeeper arrived in 1934, she was surprised: 'The floors in Monks House were very thin, the bathroom was directly above the kitchen and when Mrs Woolf was having her bath before breakfast I could hear her talking to herself. On and on she went, talk, talk, talk: asking questions and giving herself the answers. I thought there must be two or three people up there with her.....it startled me in the mornings for quite some time'.

Orangey said:
I could see ENFP with social anxiety. Plus she obviously had problems that might fuel that sort of thing on, such as childhood sexual abuse and depression.

Yes, I agree with that as well.
 

SillySapienne

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HEY DD!!!!

:D

Long time no see!

:hug:

I am not going to attempt to type the Woolf, but I will say this, there are plenty of people out there who can not imagine, shock-horror, that an extrovert can actually be a writer/intellectual/philosopher.

And this bugs me to no end.

:rolli:
 

Orangey

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Oh God, do I have to give you reasons too? ;)
I'll dig it out tomorrow and get back to you with specifics.

Okay ;).

It's been a while since I've read it, but I'm pretty sure that there's nothing in it that would strongly indicate "introvert", unless we're saying that imagination, pondering, reflection, research skills and a keen interest in the state of women in literature is somehow particular to introverts.

But I'll wait to hear what you've got to say, since you may have read it more recently. Or gleaned something from it that I clearly had not.
 

zarc

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HEY DD!!!!

:D

Long time no see!

:hug:

Yello. :)

It sure has been a while, yups. :hug:


It'd be interesting to hear more from others who are more familiar with her, though. She very well could be an INFP or, cackles and shackles!, even another type!! ESTJ, anyone? ;)
 
Last edited:

soleil

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HEY DD!!!!

:D

Long time no see!

:hug:

I am not going to attempt to type the Woolf, but I will say this, there are plenty of people out there who can not imagine, shock-horror, that an extrovert can actually be a writer/intellectual/philosopher.

And this bugs me to no end.

:rolli:


I hate that too! Seriously, what's up with people thinking that? On top of that, not all Extroverts are super social. :ranting:
 

ragashree

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I will just say this:

If stream-of-consciousness writing was not invented by an ENFP, it surely should have been
 

dynamiteninja

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My bad: I forget how hard it is to try to type people with mental illness! But at least we seem to agree that she's definetly XNFP!
 

Llewellyn

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I happened to be wondering about Virginia Woolf's personality the previous days. From this thread and the referenced site I agree on XNFP. I was thinking myself SF maybe because To The Lighthouse contains a lot of sense descriptions (but, yeah, it's a book) and feelings. It touched my Si. But with XNFP it all fits, including the "wild speculations". Ne, Fi, Si. Maybe shifts between ENFP/INFP?
 
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