short biography virginia woolf

Virginia Woolf

(1882-1941)

Who Was Virginia Woolf?

Born into a privileged English household in 1882, author Virginia Woolf was raised by free-thinking parents. She began writing as a young girl and published her first novel, The Voyage Out , in 1915. She wrote modernist classics including Mrs. Dallowa y, To the Lighthouse and Orlando , as well as pioneering feminist works, A Room of One's Own and Three Guineas . In her personal life, she suffered bouts of deep depression. She committed suicide in 1941, at the age of 59.

Born on January 25, 1882, Adeline Virginia Stephen was raised in a remarkable household. Her father, Sir Leslie Stephen, was a historian and author, as well as one of the most prominent figures in the golden age of mountaineering. Woolf’s mother, Julia Prinsep Stephen (née Jackson), had been born in India and later served as a model for several Pre-Raphaelite painters. She was also a nurse and wrote a book on the profession. Both of her parents had been married and widowed before marrying each other. Woolf had three full siblings — Thoby, Vanessa and Adrian — and four half-siblings — Laura Makepeace Stephen and George, Gerald and Stella Duckworth. The eight children lived under one roof at 22 Hyde Park Gate, Kensington.

Two of Woolf’s brothers had been educated at Cambridge, but all the girls were taught at home and utilized the splendid confines of the family’s lush Victorian library. Moreover, Woolf’s parents were extremely well connected, both socially and artistically. Her father was a friend to William Thackeray, the father of his first wife who died unexpectedly, and George Henry Lewes, as well as many other noted thinkers. Her mother’s aunt was the famous 19th century photographer Julia Margaret Cameron. 

From the time of her birth until 1895, Woolf spent her summers in St. Ives, a beach town at the very southwestern tip of England. The Stephens’ summer home, Talland House, which is still standing today, looks out at the dramatic Porthminster Bay and has a view of the Godrevy Lighthouse, which inspired her writing. In her later memoirs, Woolf recalled St. Ives with a great fondness. In fact, she incorporated scenes from those early summers into her modernist novel, To the Lighthouse (1927).

As a young girl, Virginia was curious, light-hearted and playful. She started a family newspaper, the Hyde Park Gate News , to document her family’s humorous anecdotes. However, early traumas darkened her childhood, including being sexually abused by her half-brothers George and Gerald Duckworth, which she wrote about in her essays  A Sketch of the Past and 22 Hyde Park Gate . In 1895, at the age of 13, she also had to cope with the sudden death of her mother from rheumatic fever, which led to her first mental breakdown, and the loss of her half-sister Stella, who had become the head of the household, two years later. 

While dealing with her personal losses, Woolf continued her studies in German, Greek and Latin at the Ladies’ Department of King’s College London. Her four years of study introduced her to a handful of radical feminists at the helm of educational reforms. In 1904, her father died from stomach cancer, which contributed to another emotional setback that led to Woolf being institutionalized for a brief period. Virginia Woolf’s dance between literary expression and personal desolation would continue for the rest of her life. In 1905, she began writing professionally as a contributor for The Times Literary Supplement . A year later, Woolf's 26-year-old brother Thoby died from typhoid fever after a family trip to Greece. 

After their father's death, Woolf's sister Vanessa and brother Adrian sold the family home in Hyde Park Gate, and purchased a house in the Bloomsbury area of London. During this period, Virginia met several members of the Bloomsbury Group, a circle of intellectuals and artists including the art critic Clive Bell, who married Virginia's sister Vanessa, the novelist E.M. Forster, the painter Duncan Grant, the biographer Lytton Strachey, economist John Maynard Keynes and essayist Leonard Woolf, among others. The group became famous in 1910 for the Dreadnought Hoax, a practical joke in which members of the group dressed up as a delegation of Ethiopian royals, including Virginia disguised as a bearded man, and successfully persuaded the English Royal Navy to show them their warship, the HMS Dreadnought . After the outrageous act, Leonard Woolf and Virginia became closer, and eventually they were married on August 10, 1912. The two shared a passionate love for one another for the rest of their lives.

Literary Work

Several years before marrying Leonard, Virginia had begun working on her first novel. The original title was Melymbrosia . After nine years and innumerable drafts, it was released in 1915 as The Voyage Out. Woolf used the book to experiment with several literary tools, including compelling and unusual narrative perspectives, dream-states and free association prose. Two years later, the Woolfs bought a used printing press and established Hogarth Press, their own publishing house operated out of their home, Hogarth House. Virginia and Leonard published some of their writing, as well as the work of Sigmund Freud, Katharine Mansfield and T.S. Eliot. 

A year after the end of World War I, the Woolfs purchased Monk's House, a cottage in the village of Rodmell in 1919, and that same year Virginia published Night and Day , a novel set in Edwardian England. Her third novel  Jacob's Room  was published by Hogarth in 1922. Based on her brother Thoby, it was considered a significant departure from her earlier novels with its modernist elements. That year, she met author, poet and landscape gardener Vita Sackville-West, the wife of English diplomat Harold Nicolson. Virginia and Vita began a friendship that developed into a romantic affair. Although their affair eventually ended, they remained friends until Virginia Woolf's death.

In 1925, Woolf received rave reviews for  Mrs. Dalloway , her fourth novel. The mesmerizing story interweaved interior monologues and raised issues of feminism, mental illness and homosexuality in post-World War I England. Mrs. Dalloway was adapted into a 1997 film, starring Vanessa Redgrave, and inspired The Hours , a 1998 novel by Michael Cunningham and a 2002 film adaptation. Her 1928 novel, To the Lighthouse , was another critical success and considered revolutionary for its stream of consciousness storytelling.The modernist classic examines the subtext of human relationships through the lives of the Ramsay family as they vacation on the Isle of Skye in Scotland. 

Woolf found a literary muse in Sackville-West, the inspiration for Woolf's 1928 novel Orlando , which follows an English nobleman who mysteriously becomes a woman at the age of 30 and lives on for over three centuries of English history. The novel was a breakthrough for Woolf who received critical praise for the groundbreaking work, as well as a newfound level of popularity.

In 1929, Woolf published A Room of One's Own , a feminist essay based on lectures she had given at women's colleges, in which she examines women's role in literature. In the work, she sets forth the idea that “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” Woolf pushed narrative boundaries in her next work, The Waves (1931), which she described as "a play-poem" written in the voices of six different characters. Woolf published  The Years , the final novel published in her lifetime in 1937, about a family's history over the course of a generation. The following year she published Three Guineas , an essay which continued the feminist themes of A Room of One's Own and addressed fascism and war.

Throughout her career, Woolf spoke regularly at colleges and universities, penned dramatic letters, wrote moving essays and self-published a long list of short stories. By her mid-forties, she had established herself as an intellectual, an innovative and influential writer and pioneering feminist. Her ability to balance dream-like scenes with deeply tense plot lines earned her incredible respect from peers and the public alike. Despite her outward success, she continued to regularly suffer from debilitating bouts of depression and dramatic mood swings.

Suicide and Legacy

Woolf's husband, Leonard, always by her side, was quite aware of any signs that pointed to his wife’s descent into depression. He saw, as she was working on what would be her final manuscript, Between the Acts  (published posthumously in 1941),that she was sinking into deepening despair. At the time, World War II was raging on and the couple decided if England was invaded by Germany, they would commit suicide together, fearing that Leonard, who was Jewish, would be in particular danger. In 1940, the couple’s London home was destroyed during the Blitz, the Germans bombing of the city. 

Unable to cope with her despair, Woolf pulled on her overcoat, filled its pockets with stones and walked into the River Ouse on March 28, 1941. As she waded into the water, the stream took her with it. The authorities found her body three weeks later. Leonard Woolf had her cremated and her remains were scattered at their home, Monk's House.

Although her popularity decreased after World War II, Woolf's work resonated again with a new generation of readers during the feminist movement of the 1970s. Woolf remains one of the most influential authors of the 21st century.

QUICK FACTS

• Name: Virginia Woolf
• Birth Year: 1882
• Birth date: January 25, 1882
• Birth City: Kensington, London, England
• Birth Country: United Kingdom
• Gender: Female
• Best Known For: English author Virginia Woolf wrote modernist classics including 'Mrs. Dalloway' and 'To the Lighthouse,' as well as pioneering feminist texts, 'A Room of One's Own' and 'Three Guineas.'
• Fiction and Poetry
• Journalism and Nonfiction
• Astrological Sign: Aquarius
• Death Year: 1941
• Death date: March 28, 1941
• Death City: Near Lewes, East Sussex, England
• Death Country: United Kingdom

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CITATION INFORMATION

• Article Title: Virginia Woolf Biography
• Author: Biography.com Editors
• Website Name: The Biography.com website
• Url: https://www.biography.com/authors-writers/virginia-woolf
• Access Date:
• Publisher: A&E; Television Networks
• Last Updated: September 12, 2022
• Original Published Date: April 2, 2014
• I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.
• One of the signs of passing youth is the birth of a sense of fellowship with other human beings as we take our place among them.

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Virginia Woolf: A Short Biography

In 1926 Virginia Woolf contributed an introduction to  Victorian Photographs of Famous Men & Fair Women  by Julia Margaret Cameron. This publication may be seen as a springboard from which to approach Woolf’s life: Virginia saw herself as descending from a distinctive male and female inheritance; Cameron was the famous Victorian photographer and Woolf’s great-aunt; Woolf’s friend Roger Fry also contributed an introduction and leads us to the Bloomsbury Group; and the book was published by the Hogarth Press which Virginia had started with her husband Leonard in 1917.

Adeline Virginia Stephen was born on 25 January 1882 in London. Her father, Leslie Stephen (1832–1904), was a man of letters (and first editor of the  Dictionary of National Biography ) who came from a family distinguished for public service (part of the ‘intellectual aristocracy’ of Victorian England). Her mother, Julia (1846–95), from whom Virginia inherited her looks, was the daughter of one and niece of the other five beautiful Pattle sisters (Julia Margaret Cameron was the seventh: not beautiful but the only one remembered today). Both parents had been married before: her father to the daughter of the novelist, Thackeray, by whom he had a daughter Laura (1870–1945) who was intellectually backward; and her mother to a barrister, Herbert Duckworth (1833–70), by whom she had three children, George (1868–1934), Stella (1869–97), and Gerald (1870–1937). Julia and Leslie Stephen had four children: Vanessa (1879–1961), Thoby (1880–1906), Virginia (1882–1941), and Adrian (1883–1948). All eight children lived with the parents and a number of servants at 22 Hyde Park Gate, Kensington.

Long summer holidays were spent at Talland House in St Ives, Cornwall, and St Ives played a large part in Virginia’s imagination. It was the setting for her novel  To the Lighthouse , despite its ostensibly being placed on the Isle of Skye. London and/or St Ives provided the principal settings of most of her novels.

In 1895 her mother died unexpectedly, and Virginia suffered her first mental breakdown. Her half-sister Stella took over the running of the household as well as coping with Leslie’s demands for sympathy and emotional support. Stella married Jack Hills in 1897, but she too died suddenly on her return from her honeymoon. The household burden then fell upon Vanessa.

Virginia was allowed uncensored access to her father’s extensive library, and from an early age determined to be a writer. Her education was sketchy and she never went to school. Vanessa trained to become a painter. Their two brothers were sent to preparatory and public schools, and then to Cambridge. There Thoby made friends with Leonard Woolf, Clive Bell, Saxon Sydney-Turner, Lytton Strachey and Maynard Keynes. This was the nucleus of the Bloomsbury Group.

Leslie Stephen died in 1904, and Virginia had a second breakdown. While she was sick, Vanessa arranged for the four siblings to move from 22 Hyde Park Gate to 46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury. At the end of the year Virginia started reviewing with a clerical paper called the  Guardian ; in 1905 she started reviewing in the  Times Literary Supplement  and continued writing for that journal for many years. Following a trip to Greece in 1906, Thoby died of typhoid and in 1907 Vanessa married Clive Bell. Thoby had started ‘Thursday evenings’ for his friends to visit, and this kind of arrangement was continued after his death by Vanessa and then by Virginia and Adrian when they moved to 29 Fitzroy Square. In 1911 Virginia moved to 38 Brunswick Square. Leonard Woolf had joined the Ceylon Civil Service in 1904 and returned in 1911 on leave. He soon decided that he wanted to marry Virginia, and she eventually agreed. They were married in St Pancras Registry Office on 10 August 1912. They decided to earn money by writing and journalism.

Since about 1908 Virginia had been writing her first novel  The Voyage Out  (originally to be called  Melymbrosia ). It was finished by 1913 but, owing to another severe mental breakdown after her marriage, it was not published until 1915 by Duckworth & Co. (Gerald’s publishing house). The novel was fairly conventional in form. She then began writing her second novel  Night and Day  – if anything even more conventional – which was published in 1919, also by Duckworth.

From 1911 Virginia had rented small houses near Lewes in Sussex, most notably Asheham House. Her sister Vanessa rented Charleston Farmhouse nearby from 1916 onwards. In 1919 the Woolfs bought Monks House in the village of Rodmell. This was a small weather-boarded house (now owned by the National Trust) which they used principally for summer holidays until they were bombed out of their flat in Mecklenburgh Square in 1940 when it became their home.

In 1917 the Woolfs had bought a small hand printing-press in order to take up printing as a hobby and as therapy for Virginia. By now they were living in Richmond (Surrey) and the Hogarth Press was named after their house. Virginia wrote, printed and published a couple of experimental short stories, ‘The Mark on the Wall’ and ‘Kew Gardens’. The Woolfs continued handprinting until 1932, but in the meantime they increasingly became publishers rather than printers. By about 1922 the Hogarth Press had become a business. From 1921 Virginia always published with the Press, except for a few limited editions.

1921 saw Virginia’s first collection of short stories  Monday or Tuesday , most of which were experimental in nature. In 1922 her first experimental novel,  Jacob’s Room , appeared. In 1924 the Woolfs moved back to London, to 52 Tavistock Square. In 1925  Mrs. Dalloway  was published, followed by  To the Lighthouse  in 1927, and  The Waves  in 1931. These three novels are generally considered to be her greatest claim to fame as a modernist writer. Her involvement with the aristocratic novelist and poet Vita Sackville-West led to  Orlando  (1928), a  roman à clef  inspired by Vita’s life and ancestors at Knole in Kent. Two talks to women’s colleges at Cambridge in 1928 led to  A Room of One’s Own  (1929), a discussion of women’s writing and its historical economic and social underpinning.

See also:  Virginia Woolf’s Holiday Homes in the Country

For a more detailed discussion of Virginia Woolf’s breakdowns, see: Virginia Woolf: Writing the Suicide by Malcolm Ingram

Text copyright© S. N. Clarke & VWSGB 2000

• Sea view from the window of Talland House, St Ives (1999) • Front view of Talland House (1999) • Asheham House, Sussex (1977) • Wooden gate of Monks House entrance, Rodmell, Sussex (1977) • Looking out of the Woolfs’ sitting room, Monks House (2001) • Church view from balcony outside Leonard’s study, Monks House (2001) • Garden view from balcony outside Leonard’s study, Monks House (2001) • Entrance of Monk’s House (1977) • Virginia’s writing lodge, Monk’s House (1977)

Photos copyright© S. N. Clarke & H. Fukushima

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Biography Online

Virginia Woolf Biography

She was born in London, in 1882. Her father, Sir Leslie Stephen, was a notable historian, author and editor of the Dictionary of National Biography. Her mother Julia Stephen was also well connected in cultural circles and acted as a model for the Pre-Raphaelite artists and photographers.

Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell

Virginia was educated at her Kensington home by her parents with her step-brothers and stepsisters. She was quite a delicate child – ill-suited to the rough and tumble of ordinary schools. She grew up in a literary environment, she devoured many books from her father’s library. In particular, she gained a love of the Elizabethan period and read from Hakluyt’s Voyages from an early age. Living in such a literary environment she came into contact with some of the leading intellects of the day, including Thomas Hardy, John Ruskin, and Edmund Gosse.

She later took lessons at the Ladies’ Department of Kings College, London. Her brothers went to Cambridge, and although Virginia resented not being able to study at Cambridge, through her brothers, she later became involved in the circle of Cambridge graduates.

When Virginia was 13, the death of her mother left a profound mark on her, and she had a nervous breakdown. This nervous breakdown was the beginning of a lifetime of mood swings – manic depression and she frequently sought treatment for her mental instability but struggled to find any cure.

These mood swings made social life more difficult, but she still became friendly with some of the leading literary and cultural figures of the day, including Rupert Brooke, John Maynard Keynes , Clive Bell and Saxon Sydney-Turner. These group of literary figures became known as the Bloomsbury Group.

During this time she had an active correspondence with suffragettes such as Mrs Fawcett , Emily Pankhurst and others. Although she never took part in the activities of the suffragettes she wrote her clear support for the aims of female emancipation. This was made particularly clear in an essay ‘A Room of One’s Own’ (1929) where Woolf highlights the difference between how woman are treated by patriarchal society and the idealised view of women in fiction.

“She dominates the lives of kings and conquerors in fiction; in fact she was the slave of any boy whose parents forced a ring upon her finger. Some of the most inspired words and profound thoughts in literature fall from her lips; in real life she could hardly read; scarcely spell; and was the property of her husband.” ‘A Room of One’s Own’ (1929)

She is considered an important feminist writer and argued for the importance of women’s education.

Virginia and Leonard Woolf, 1912

In 1912, Virginia married writer and critic Leonard Woolf, and though he was poor, the marriage was happy. Leonard was Jewish, and she was rather proud of his Jewishness – even though she has been accused of some anti-Semitism in her works – often depicting Jews in a stereotypical way. The couple were both appalled by the rise of fascism in the 1930s, and they were both on Hitler’s list of undesirable cultural figures.

Style of writing

She began working as a journalist, writing articles for the Times Literary Supplement in the early 1900s. In 1915, at the age of 33, she published her first novel. – The Voyage Out . It was a revised version of a novel she began writing several years ago. In 1917, Virginia and Leonard founded the Hogarth Press which published her novels and later works by other writers, such as T.S.Eliot, E.M. Forster and Lauren van der Post.

She was considered a modernist author, for her experimentation in a stream of consciousness writing, reminiscent of the period. Often her novels were based on quite ordinary, even banal situations. But, she sought to explore the underlying psychological and emotional motives of the characters involved. In particular, she used her great powers of observation to examine how perceptions can radically change through time  She also explored ideas of sexual ambivalence (she herself had a brief lesbian affair with Vita Sackville-West,) shell shock from First World War, and the rapid changes of society.

Her three most important novels were Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927) and The Waves (1931)

During the Second World War, she became increasingly depressed, due to a combination of the blitz and the return of her mental demons. Fearing she was going mad again, she took her own life, filling her pockets with stones and jumping into the River Ouse.

Citation: Pettinger, Tejvan . “ Biography of Virginia Wolf” , Oxford, UK.  www.biographyonline.net Published 3 Feb. 2013. Last updated 18 March 2020.

Virginia Woolf – A Room of One’s Own

Virginia Woolf – A Room of One’s Own  at Amazon

Virginia Woolf Quotes

A Room of One’s Own (1929)

The beauty of the world which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder. Ch. 1 (p. 17) Have you any notion how many books are written about women in the course of one year? Have you any notion how many are written by men? Are you aware that you are, perhaps, the most discussed animal in the universe? Ch. 2 (p. 26) Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size. Ch. 2 (p. 35) I would venture to guess than Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman. Ch. 3 (p. 51) Very often misquoted as “For most of history, Anonymous was a woman.” For it needs little skill in psychology to be sure that a highly gifted girl who had tried to use her gift for poetry would have been so thwarted and hindered by other people, so tortured and pulled asunder by her own contrary instincts, that she must have lost her health and sanity to a certainty. Ch. 3 (p. 51) Literature is strewn with the wreckage of men who have minded beyond reason the opinions of others. Ch. 3 (p. 58) The history of men’s opposition to women’s emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself. Ch. 3 (p. 72) Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind. Ch. 4 (p. 90)

The Waves (1931)

But look – he flicks his hand to the back of his neck. For such gesture one falls hopelessly in love for a lifetime. p. 30

Here on this ring of grass we have sat together, bound by the tremendous power of some inner compulsion. The trees wave, the clouds pass. The time approaches when these soliloquies shall be shared. We shall not always give out a sound like a beaten gong as one sensation strikes and then another. Children, our lives have been gongs striking; clamour and boasting; cries of despair; blows on the nape of the neck in gardens. pp. 39-40

The Death of the Moth and Other Essays (1942)

Once you begin to take yourself seriously as a leader or as a follower, as a modern or as a conservative, then you become a self-conscious, biting, and scratching little animal whose work is not of the slightest value or importance to anybody.

The Moment and Other Essays (1948)

‘If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.

Granite and Rainbow (1958)

The extraordinary woman depends on the ordinary woman. It is only when we know what were the conditions of the average woman’s life … it is only when we can measure the way of life and the experience of life made possible to the ordinary woman that we can account for the success or failure of the extraordinary woman as a writer. “Women and Fiction”  

Related pages

• World Biography

Virginia Woolf Biography

Born: January 25, 1882 London, England Died: March 28, 1941 Lewes, Sussex, England English novelist, critic, and essayist

The English novelist, critic, and essayist Virginia Woolf ranks as one of England's most distinguished writers of the middle part of the twentieth century. Her novels can perhaps best be described as impressionistic, a literary style which attempts to inspire impressions rather than recreating reality.

Early years and marriage

Virginia Stephen was born in London on January 25, 1882. She was the daughter of Sir Leslie Stephen, a famous scholar and philosopher (a seeker of knowledge) who, among many literary occupations, was at one time editor of Cornhill Magazine and the Dictionary of National Biography. James Russell Lowell, the American poet, was her godfather. Her mother, Julia Jackson, died when the child was twelve or thirteen years old. Virginia and her sister were educated at home in their father's library, where Virginia also met his famous friends who included G. E. Moore (1873–1958) and E. M. Forster (1879–1970). Young Virginia soon fell deep into the world of literature.

In 1912, eight years after her father's death, Virginia married Leonard Woolf, a brilliant young writer and critic from Cambridge, England, whose interests in literature as well as in economics and the labor movement were well suited to hers. In 1917, for amusement, they founded the Hogarth Press by setting and handprinting on an old press Two Stories by "L. and V. Woolf." The volume was a success, and over the years they published many important books, including Prelude by Katherine Mansfield (1888–1923), then an unknown writer; Poems by T. S. Eliot (1888–1965); and Kew Gardens by Virginia Woolf. The policy of the Hogarth Press was to publish the best and most original work that came to its attention, and the Woolfs as publishers favored young and unknown writers. Virginia's older sister Vanessa, who married the critic Clive Bell, participated in this venture by designing dust jackets for the books issued by the Hogarth Press.

Virginia Woolf's home in Tavistock Square, Bloomsbury, became a literary and art center, attracting such diverse intellectuals as Lytton Strachey (1880–1932), Arthur Waley (1889–1966), Victoria Sackville-West (1892–1962), John Maynard Keynes (1883–1943), and Roger Fry (1866–1934). These artists, critics, and writers became known as the Bloomsbury group. Roger Fry's theory of art may have influenced Virginia's technique as a novelist. Broadly speaking, the Bloomsbury group drew from the philosophic interests of its members (who had been educated at Cambridge) the values of love and beauty as essential to life.

As critic and essayist

Virginia Woolf began writing essays for the Times Literary Supplement (London) when she was young, and over the years these and other essays were collected in a two-volume series called The Common Reader (1925, 1933). These studies range with affection and understanding through all of English literature. Students of fiction have drawn upon these criticisms as a means of understanding Virginia Woolf's own direction as a novelist.

Achievement as novelist

Two of Virginia Woolf's novels in particular, Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927), successfully follow the latter approach. The first novel covers a day in the life of Mrs. Dalloway in postwar London; it achieves its vision of reality through the reception by Mrs. Dalloway's mind of what Virginia Woolf called those "myriad impressions—trivial, fantastic, evanescent [vanishing], or engraved with the sharpness of steel."

To the Lighthouse is, in a sense, a family portrait and history rendered in subjective (characterized by personal views) depth through selected points in time. Part I deals with the time between six o'clock in the evening and dinner. Primarily through the consciousness of Mrs. Ramsay, it presents the clash of the male and female sensibilities in the family; Mrs. Ramsay functions as a means of balance and settling disputes. Part II is a moving section of loss during the interval between Mrs. Ramsay's death and the family's revisit to the house. Part III moves toward completion of this complex portrait through the adding of a last detail to a painting by an artist guest, Lily Briscoe, and through the final completion of a plan, rejected by the father in Part I, for him and the children to sail out to the lighthouse.

Last years and other books

Virginia Woolf was the author of about fifteen books, the last, A Writer's Diary, posthumously (after death) published in 1953. Her death by drowning in Lewes, Sussex, England, on March 28, 1941, has often been regarded as a suicide brought on by the unbearable strains of life during World War II (1939–45; a war fought between the Axis powers: Japan, Italy, and Germany—and the Allies: France, England, the Soviet Union, and the United States). The true explanation seems to be that she had regularly felt symptoms of a mental breakdown and feared it would be permanent.

Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and Jacob's Room (1922) represent Virginia Woolf's major achievements. The Voyage Out (1915) first brought her critical attention. Night and Day (1919) is traditional in method. The short stories of Monday or Tuesday (1921) brought critical praise. In The Waves (1931) she masterfully employed the stream-of-consciousness technique which stresses "free writing." Other experimental novels include Orlando (1928), The Years (1937), and Between the Acts (1941). Virginia Woolf's championship of women's rights is reflected in the essays in A Room of One's Own (1929) and in Three Guineas (1938).

For More Information

Bell, Quentin. Virginia Woolf: A Biography. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972.

Bond, Alma Halbert. Who Killed Virginia Woolf?: A Psychobiography. New York: Human Sciences Press, 1989.

Caws, Mary Anne. Virginia Woolf. Woodstock, NY: Overlook Books, 2002.

Lee, Hermione. Virginia Woolf. New York: A. A. Knopf, 1997.

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Mrs. Dalloway , To the Lighthouse , A Room of One’s Own and other major works of Virginia Woolf

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At the beginning of 1924, the Woolfs moved their city residence from the suburbs back to Bloomsbury , where they were less isolated from London society. Soon the aristocratic Vita Sackville-West began to court Virginia, a relationship that would blossom into a lesbian affair. Having already written a story about a Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf thought of a foiling device that would pair that highly sensitive woman with a shell-shocked war victim, a Mr. Smith, so that “the sane and the insane” would exist “side by side.” Her aim was to “tunnel” into these two characters until Clarissa Dalloway’s affirmations meet Septimus Smith’s negations. Also in 1924 Woolf gave a talk at Cambridge called “Character in Fiction,” revised later that year as the Hogarth Press pamphlet Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown . In it she celebrated the breakdown in patriarchal values that had occurred “in or about December, 1910”—during Fry’s exhibit “Manet and the Post-Impressionists”—and she attacked “materialist” novelists for omitting the essence of character.

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In Mrs. Dalloway (1925), the boorish doctors presume to understand personality, but its essence evades them. This novel is as patterned as a Post-Impressionist painting but is also so accurately representational that the reader can trace Clarissa’s and Septimus’s movements through the streets of London on a single day in June 1923. At the end of the day, Clarissa gives a grand party and Septimus commits suicide. Their lives come together when the doctor who was treating (or, rather, mistreating) Septimus arrives at Clarissa’s party with news of the death. The main characters are connected by motifs and, finally, by Clarissa’s intuiting why Septimus threw his life away.

Woolf wished to build on her achievement in Mrs. Dalloway by merging the novelistic and elegiac forms. As an elegy, To the Lighthouse —published on May 5, 1927, the 32nd anniversary of Julia Stephen’s death—evoked childhood summers at Talland House. As a novel, it broke narrative continuity into a tripartite structure. The first section, “The Window,” begins as Mrs. Ramsay and James, her youngest son—like Julia and Adrian Stephen—sit in the French window of the Ramsays’ summer home while a houseguest named Lily Briscoe paints them and James begs to go to a nearby lighthouse. Mr. Ramsay, like Leslie Stephen, sees poetry as didacticism, conversation as winning points, and life as a tally of accomplishments. He uses logic to deflate hopes for a trip to the lighthouse, but he needs sympathy from his wife. She is more attuned to emotions than reason. In the climactic dinner-party scene, she inspires such harmony and composure that the moment “partook, she felt,…of eternity.” The novel’s middle “Time Passes” section focuses on the empty house during a 10-year hiatus and the last-minute housecleaning for the returning Ramsays. Woolf describes the progress of weeds, mold, dust, and gusts of wind, but she merely announces such major events as the deaths of Mrs. Ramsay and a son and daughter. In the novel’s third section, “The Lighthouse,” Woolf brings Mr. Ramsay, his youngest children (James and Cam), Lily Briscoe, and others from “The Window” back to the house. As Mr. Ramsay and the now-teenage children reach the lighthouse and achieve a moment of reconciliation, Lily completes her painting. To the Lighthouse melds into its structure questions about creativity and the nature and function of art. Lily argues effectively for nonrepresentational but emotive art, and her painting (in which mother and child are reduced to two shapes with a line between them) echoes the abstract structure of Woolf’s profoundly elegiac novel.

In two 1927 essays, “ The Art of Fiction” and “ The New Biography,” she wrote that fiction writers should be less concerned with naive notions of reality and more with language and design. However restricted by fact, she argued, biographers should yoke truth with imagination, “granite-like solidity” with “rainbow-like intangibility.” Their relationship having cooled by 1927, Woolf sought to reclaim Sackville-West through a “biography” that would include Sackville family history. Woolf solved biographical, historical, and personal dilemmas with the story of Orlando , who lives from Elizabethan times through the entire 18th century; he then becomes female, experiences debilitating gender constraints, and lives into the 20th century. Orlando begins writing poetry during the Renaissance, using history and mythology as models, and over the ensuing centuries returns to the poem “The Oak Tree,” revising it according to shifting poetic conventions. Woolf herself writes in mock-heroic imitation of biographical styles that change over the same period of time. Thus, Orlando: A Biography (1928) exposes the artificiality of both gender and genre prescriptions. However fantastic, Orlando also argues for a novelistic approach to biography.

In 1921 John Maynard Keynes had told Woolf that her memoir “on George,” presented to the Memoir Club that year or a year earlier, represented her best writing. Afterward she was increasingly angered by masculine condescension to female talent. In A Room of One’s Own (1929), Woolf blamed women’s absence from history not on their lack of brains and talent but on their poverty. For her 1931 talk “Professions for Women,” Woolf studied the history of women’s education and employment and argued that unequal opportunities for women negatively affect all of society. She urged women to destroy the “angel in the house,” a reference to Coventry Patmore ’s poem of that title, the quintessential Victorian paean to women who sacrifice themselves to men.

Having praised a 1930 exhibit of Vanessa Bell’s paintings for their wordlessness, Woolf planned a mystical novel that would be similarly impersonal and abstract. In The Waves (1931), poetic interludes describe the sea and sky from dawn to dusk. Between the interludes, the voices of six named characters appear in sections that move from their childhood to old age . In the middle section, when the six friends meet at a farewell dinner for another friend leaving for India, the single flower at the centre of the dinner table becomes a “seven-sided flower…a whole flower to which every eye brings its own contribution.” The Waves offers a six-sided shape that illustrates how each individual experiences events—including their friend’s death—uniquely. Bernard, the writer in the group, narrates the final section, defying death and a world “without a self.” Unique though they are (and their prototypes can be identified in the Bloomsbury group), the characters become one, just as the sea and sky become indistinguishable in the interludes. This oneness with all creation was the primal experience Woolf had felt as a child in Cornwall. In this her most experimental novel, she achieved its poetic equivalent. Through To the Lighthouse and The Waves , Woolf became, with James Joyce and William Faulkner , one of the three major English-language Modernist experimenters in stream-of-consciousness writing.

From her earliest days, Woolf had framed experience in terms of oppositions, even while she longed for a holistic state beyond binary divisions. The “perpetual marriage of granite and rainbow” Woolf described in her essay “The New Biography” typified her approach during the 1930s to individual works and to a balance between writing works of fact and of imagination. Even before finishing The Waves , she began compiling a scrapbook of clippings illustrating the horrors of war, the threat of fascism , and the oppression of women. The discrimination against women that Woolf had discussed in A Room of One’s Own and “Professions for Women” inspired her to plan a book that would trace the story of a fictional family named Pargiter and explain the social conditions affecting family members over a period of time. In The Pargiters: A Novel-Essay she would alternate between sections of fiction and of fact. For the fictional historical narrative, she relied upon experiences of friends and family from the Victorian Age to the 1930s. For the essays, she researched that 50-year span of history. The task, however, of moving between fiction and fact was daunting .

Woolf took a holiday from The Pargiters to write a mock biography of Flush, the dog of poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning . Lytton Strachey having recently died, Woolf muted her spoof of his biographical method; nevertheless, Flush (1933) remains both a biographical satire and a lighthearted exploration of perception, in this case a dog’s. In 1935 Woolf completed Freshwater , an absurdist drama based on the life of her great-aunt Julia Margaret Cameron . Featuring such other eminences as the poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson , and the painter George Frederick Watts , this riotous play satirizes high-minded Victorian notions of art.

Meanwhile, Woolf feared she would never finish The Pargiters . Alternating between types of prose was proving cumbersome, and the book was becoming too long. She solved this dilemma by jettisoning the essay sections, keeping the family narrative, and renaming her book The Years . She narrated 50 years of family history through the decline of class and patriarchal systems, the rise of feminism , and the threat of another war. Desperate to finish, Woolf lightened the book with poetic echoes of gestures, objects, colours, and sounds and with wholesale deletions, cutting epiphanies for Eleanor Pargiter and explicit references to women’s bodies. The novel illustrates the damage done to women and society over the years by sexual repression, ignorance, and discrimination. Though (or perhaps because) Woolf’s trimming muted the book’s radicalism, The Years (1937) became a best seller .

When Fry died in 1934, Virginia was distressed; Vanessa was devastated. Then in July 1937 Vanessa’s elder son, Julian Bell, was killed in the Spanish Civil War while driving an ambulance for the Republican army. Vanessa was so disconsolate that Virginia put aside her writing for a time to try to comfort her sister. Privately a lament over Julian’s death and publicly a diatribe against war, Three Guineas (1938) proposes answers to the question of how to prevent war. Woolf connected masculine symbols of authority with militarism and misogyny , an argument buttressed by notes from her clippings about aggression, fascism, and war.

Still distressed by the deaths of Roger Fry and Julian Bell, she determined to test her theories about experimental, novelistic biography in a life of Fry. As she acknowledged in “The Art of Biography” (1939), the recalcitrance of evidence brought her near despair over the possibility of writing an imaginative biography. Against the “grind” of finishing the Fry biography, Woolf wrote a verse play about the history of English literature . Her next novel, Pointz Hall (later retitled Between the Acts ), would include the play as a pageant performed by villagers and would convey the gentry’s varied reactions to it. As another holiday from Fry’s biography, Woolf returned to her own childhood with “ A Sketch of the Past,” a memoir about her mixed feelings toward her parents and her past and about memoir writing itself. (Here surfaced for the first time in writing a memory of the teenage Gerald Duckworth, her other half brother, touching her inappropriately when she was a girl of perhaps four or five.) Through last-minute borrowing from the letters between Fry and Vanessa, Woolf finished her biography. Though convinced that Roger Fry (1940) was more granite than rainbow, Virginia congratulated herself on at least giving back to Vanessa “her Roger.”

Woolf’s chief anodyne against Adolf Hitler , World War II , and her own despair was writing. During the bombing of London in 1940 and 1941, she worked on her memoir and Between the Acts . In her novel, war threatens art and humanity itself, and, in the interplay between the pageant—performed on a June day in 1939—and the audience, Woolf raises questions about perception and response. Despite Between the Acts ’s affirmation of the value of art, Woolf worried that this novel was “too slight” and indeed that all writing was irrelevant when England seemed on the verge of invasion and civilization about to slide over a precipice . Facing such horrors, a depressed Woolf found herself unable to write. The demons of self-doubt that she had kept at bay for so long returned to haunt her. On March 28, 1941, fearing that she now lacked the resilience to battle them, she walked behind Monk’s House and down to the River Ouse, put stones in her pockets, and drowned herself. Between the Acts was published posthumously later that year.

Virginia Woolf Biography

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(1882-1941) British writer. Virginia Woolf became one of the most prominent literary figures of the early 20th century, with novels like Mrs. Dalloway (1925), Jacob's Room (1922), To the Lighthouse (1927), and The Waves (1931).

Birth and Early Life

Virginia Woolf was born Adeline Virginia Stephen on January 25, 1882, in London. Woolf was educated at home by her father, Sir Leslie Stephen, the author of the Dictionary of English Biography , and she read extensively. Her mother, Julia Duckworth Stephen, was a nurse, who published a book on nursing. Her mother died in 1895, which was the catalyst for Virginia's first mental breakdown. Virginia's sister, Stella, died in 1897, and her father died in 1904.

Woolf learned early on that it was her fate to be "the daughter of educated men." In a journal entry shortly after her father's death in 1904, she wrote: "His life would have ended mine... No writing, no books; — inconceivable." Luckily, for the literary world, Woolf's conviction would be overcome by her itch to write.

Virginia Woolf's Writing Career

Virginia married Leonard Woolf, a journalist, in 1912. In 1917, she and her husband founded Hogarth Press, which became a successful publishing house, printing the early works of authors such as E.M Forster, Katherine Mansfield, and T.S. Eliot, and introducing the works of Sigmund Freud . Except for the first printing of Woolf's first novel, The Voyage Out (1915), Hogarth Press also published all of her works.

Together, Virginia and Leonard Woolf were a part of the famous Bloomsbury Group, which included E.M. Forster, Duncan Grant, Virginia's sister, Vanessa Bell, Gertrude Stein , James Joyce , Ezra Pound, and T.S. Eliot.

Virginia Woolf wrote several novels which are considered to be modern classics, including Mrs. Dalloway  (1925),  Jacob's Room  (1922),  To the Lighthouse  (1927), and  The Waves  (1931). She also wrote A Room of One's Own (1929), which discusses the creation of literature from a feminist perspective.

Virginia Woolf's Death

From the time of her mother's death in 1895, Woolf suffered from what is now believed to have been bipolar disorder, which is characterized by alternating moods of mania and depression.

Virginia Woolf died on March 28, 1941 near Rodmell, Sussex, England. She left a note for her husband, Leonard, and for her sister, Vanessa. Then, Virginia walked to the River Ouse, put a large stone in her pocket, and drowned herself.

Virginia Woolf's Approach to Literature

Virginia Woolf's works are often closely linked to the development of feminist criticism , but she was also an important writer in the modernist movement. She revolutionized the novel with stream of consciousness , which allowed her to depict the inner lives of her characters in all too intimate detail. In A Room of One's Own Woolf writes, "we think back through our mothers if we are women. It is useless to go to the great men writers for help, however much one may go to them for pleasure."

Virginia Woolf Quotes

"I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman." - A Room of One's Own

"One of the signs of passing youth is the birth of a sense of fellowship with other human beings as we take our place among them." - "Hours in a Library"

"Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself." - Mrs. Dalloway

"It was an uncertain spring. The weather, perpetually changing, sent clouds of blue and purple flying over the land." - The Years

"What is the meaning of life?... a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years. The great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark." - To the Lighthouse

"The extraordinary irrationality of her remark, the folly of women's minds enraged him. He had ridden through the valley of death, been shattered and shivered; and now, she flew in the face of facts..." - To the Lighthouse

"Imaginative work... is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners.... But when the web is pulled askew, hooked up at the edge, torn in the middle, one remembers that these webs are not spun in midair by incorporeal creatures, but are the work of suffering, human beings, and are attached to the grossly material things, like health and money and the houses we live in." - A Room of One's Own

"When...one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even of a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet, of some mute and inglorious Jane Austen, some Emily Brontë who dashed her brains out on the moor or mopped and mowed about the highways crazed with the torture that her gift had put her to. Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman." - A Room of One's Own

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Virginia Woolf

AUTHORS (1882–1941); LONDON, ENGLAND

Best known for her highly imaginative and nonlinear novels like Mrs. Dalloway , Orlando , and  To the Lighthouse —and also perhaps because her name was borrowed for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? , Edward Albee's Tony Award-winning play (which was also nominated for a Pulitzer Prize)—writer Virginia Woolf lived her life as unabashedly as many of the characters in her novels. Find out what books she wrote, what quotes she said, and how she ultimately succumbed to a lifelong battle with mental illness.

1. Virginia Woolf's books rarely stuck to the status quo.

Author Virginia Woolf was born in London in 1882 and helped pioneer modern literature and feminist theory by refusing to adhere to the status quo on just about anything. Not only does she break the normal linear narrative structure in novels like Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse , but she also often presents complex characters who struggle to escape the confines of certain societal expectations of them—especially women.

2. Virginia Woolf’s novel The Waves is a prime example of her unconventional style of writing.

Though technically a novel, Virginia Woolf called The Waves a “play-poem”—and for good reason. It’s told from the perspectives of six different characters, but it doesn’t switch perspectives between chapters or otherwise relatively long segments. Instead, each character narrates their version of whatever’s happening (and their reaction to whatever’s happening) in quick succession, resulting in a piecemeal portrait of a very ambiguous plot. Their narration is punctuated with lyrical descriptions of the sea and sky, making it seem like a play at times, and a poem at others.

3. Virginia Woolf’s book Orlando: A Biography is based on her lover, Vita Sackville-West.

Orlando , a sweeping story that spans more than 400 years in the life of the slowly aging protagonist, is actually a novel, not a biography—though it is heavily inspired by Woolf’s female lover, the writer Vita Sackville-West, who sometimes dressed as a man and went by the name “Julian.”

“A biography beginning in the year 1500 and continuing to the present day, called Orlando . Vita; only with a change about from one sex to the other,” Woolf  wrote of the book in her diary. In the book, the main character, Orlando, begins the story as a man and ends it as a woman.

4. Virginia Woolf’s essay "A Room of One’s Own" imagines the life of a fictional sister of William Shakespeare.

At one point in "A Room of One’s Own," an extended essay based on two lectures Woolf gave at university literary societies in 1928, the author creates a character named Judith Shakespeare, who was “as adventurous, as imaginative, as agog to see the world” as her brother, William. However, while William gets to further his education and live up to his potential, Judith must stay at home and eventually marry for convenience. Interestingly enough, William Shakespeare did have a sister who lived into adulthood, but her name was Joan.

5. Virginia Woolf’s death by suicide was the result of a lifelong battle with mental illness.

In 1941, at 59 years old, Woolf filled her pockets with rocks and drowned herself in a river. She had lived through sexual abuse, both her parents’ premature deaths, nervous breakdowns, manic depression, hallucinations, and several suicide attempts.

“I feel certain I am going mad again. I feel we can’t go through another of those terrible times,” Woolf wrote in a heartbreaking suicide note to her husband, Leonard. “You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I don’t think two people could have been happier till this terrible disease came. I can’t fight any longer.”

6. The author of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? got the inspiration for its title from graffiti in a bar bathroom.

In the early 1950s, playwright Edward Albee saw the question "Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" written in soap on the bathroom mirror of a Greenwich Village bar. Later, while writing the now-famous play , he recalled the phrase, thinking it a fitting pun on the song “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?” from Disney’s 1933 film The Three Little Pigs . In a 1966 interview with The Paris Review , Albee explained that it was meant as a “typical university, intellectual joke” about being afraid of “living life without false illusions.” In other words, it’s not actually about being afraid of Virginia Woolf herself, but of the authentic, unabashed life she championed in her life and works.

Famous Virginia Woolf Books

• The Voyage Out (1915)
• Night and Day (1919)
• Jacob’s Room (1922)
• Mrs. Dalloway (1925)
• To the Lighthouse (1927)
• Orlando: A Biography (1928)
• A Room of One’s Own (1929)
• The Waves (1931)
• Flush: A Biography (1933)
• The Years (1937)
• Roger Fry: A Biography (1940)
• Between the Acts (1941)

Famous Virginia Woolf Quotes

• “If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.”
• “When you consider things like the stars, our affairs don’t seem to matter very much, do they?”
• “Words do not live in dictionaries, they live in the mind.”
• “Humor is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue.”
• “Time, unfortunately, though it makes animals and vegetables bloom and fade with amazing punctuality, has no such simple effect upon the mind of man.”
• “One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.”
• “Nothing has really happened until it has been described.”
• “So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say.”
• “Fiction is like a spider’s web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners.”

‘It Had a Lifelong Effect on Her.’ A New Virginia Woolf Biography Deals With the Author’s Experience of Childhood Sexual Abuse

T he English author Virginia Woolf is one of the 20th century’s literary giants, renowned for the pioneering stream-of-consciousness style she immortalized in novels like To the Lighthouse and Mrs. Dalloway — but her fame has never been solely based on her work, as her personal life has long been the subject of fascination. Her involvement in the influential intellectual circle known as the Bloomsbury Group brought her attention, and her 1929 essay A Room of One’s Own did the same for her feminist ideas.

In her death, interest in the woman behind the books continued. After a lifelong struggle with her mental health, including periods of severe depression and suicide attempts, Woolf died in 1941 by drowning herself near her house in Sussex, England, at the age of 59. As TIME noted in her obituary , she left behind a body of work that was complex and lyrical. “To some readers [her books] didn’t always make sense,” the piece noted, “but they made her name and parts of them almost made music.”

To biographer Gillian Gill, it’s important to note another part of the Virginia Woolf story: her experience of sexual abuse during her childhood and as a young woman. In Gill’s recent book Virginia Woolf and the Women Who Shaped Her World , she highlights Woolf’s identity not only as a literary titan and a woman shaped by her female relationships , but also as a survivor of traumatic abuse at the hands of her half-brothers and later — not coincidentally — as an advocate for protecting children vulnerable to similar experiences.

“This [sexual abuse] is a subject of enormous controversy in Virginia Woolf literature,” Gill says. “By her own account, it had a lifelong effect on her and we see this when she’s in her 40s and she writes about it in her memoirs in 1939.”

During her lifetime, Woolf publicly stated — in her 1939 memoirs as well as a 1920 speech at the Bloomsbury Memoir Club — that, when she was a child, her genitals had been fondled by her half-brother Gerald Duckworth, and that, after the death of her father in 1904, both Woolf and her sister Vanessa Bell had been abused over a period of five years by their other older half-brother, George . The Duckworth brothers were the sons of Virginia Woolf’s mother, Julia Jackson, from her first marriage. Per the account of her nephew and biographer Quentin Bell, Woolf’s statements were met with some skepticism. Some biographers suggested that Woolf fantasized the abuse, and attributed her claims to her supposed “madness.” Bell wrote that several people had attempted to persuade him “that these ugly stories were untrue, that they were phantoms of Virginia Woolf’s wild imagination, delusions conceived during periods of nervous breakdown. ”

Others like Gill, especially more recently, have suggested the opposite, that Woolf’s lifelong struggles with mental health were at least in part a result of the abuse perpetrated by the Duckworth brothers. Though many Woolf scholars today don’t question whether the abuse happened (in fact, much research in recent years has focused on this part of her life, among literature and psychology experts alike) disagreement persists about its effect on the rest of her life. Gill — building on the work of scholars like Louise DeSalvo, author of the 1989 book Virginia Woolf: The Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse on Her Life and Work — holds that it’s impossible to understand Woolf without acknowledging the abuse.

“The incident where a child Virginia is placed on a table and has her knickers opened, that’s brushed off as being trivial. But what she says is that it wasn’t trivial for her,” says Gill. “What we have learnt now, as we hear more and more about what the effect of sexual abuse has, is that even a single incident can scar a girl or a boy. It’s something that they carry with them, and that molds them in unfortunate ways.”

From Gill’s reading of Woolf’s life, “as a great writer, as a great novelist, as a great understander of human relations,” the trauma she experienced would fuel her advocacy for children, and lead her to form a close and caring relationship with her sister Vanessa’s children. Their father, the author Clive Bell, was also part of the Bloomsbury Group; during her research, Gill came across suggestive postcards he had been sent, framing children as an object of sexual attraction. Gill argues that Virginia always “distrusted and disliked” Bell. “As I read more and more about the Bloomsbury group, I get more and more disturbed by aspects of it,” she says, “and I see Virginia as standing in opposition to so much of that.”

In some ways, this bond between Woolf and her nephews and niece paralleled other relationships that she had experienced earlier on in her life. “For some time I’ve been interested in mother-daughter and sister-sister relationships,” says Gill. “Mothering is not just biological, it can be adoptive.” Indeed, much of Virginia Woolf and the Women Who Shaped Her World is focused on the women of the Victorian era who were key influences in Woolf’s early life, like Anne Thackeray Ritchie, daughter of Vanity Fair author William Makepeace Thackeray, acted as a surrogate aunt, and her own career as a writer made an impression on a young Virginia, who was frustrated by the opportunities her brothers had that she did not due to her gender.

Gill sees Woolf’s public revelations in her later life as her way of speaking therapeutically about the abuse — and argues that, in doing so, she helped many people deal with the issues she faced.

When Woolf addressed an audience of friends and colleagues with an autobiographical speech in 1920 and even when she collated her memoirs about two decades later, it was a “remarkably early” moment in history, Gill says, for a woman like her to give witness to sexual abuse within the family. Attitudes at this time , which are still pervasive today, tended to characterize child abuse as something perpetrated by “strangers” outside the family, with victim-shaming and blaming often accompanying these views. “This is one of the things Virginia says: Abuse is within families, it’s not the unknown predator from outside who snatches children from the streets. It’s the uncle, it’s the brother, this is the dark side of family life,” says Gill.

As late as the 1950s and 1960s, discourse surrounding child sexual abuse referred to its apparent minimal impacts on children , and some narratives attempted to portray incest as not harmful. For Gill, Woolf’s efforts to speak up about her own case set an example, and is still relevant today.

“It indicates to me that if you’re able to talk about it, you’ve made a stride, you’ve moved forward, you’re no longer a victim, you’re a survivor, you’re a protester,” Gill says. “This is such a complicated subject, but it seems to me that we’re making progress here, in a very dark area of human life. And listening is the least we can do.”

If you or someone you know may be contemplating suicide, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-273-8255 or text HOME to 741741 to reach the Crisis Text Line. In emergencies, call 911 or seek care from a local hospital or mental-health provider.

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Virginia Woolf Was More Than Just a Women’s Writer

She was a great observer of everyday life..

Virginia Woolf, in one of the more lively and often-seen photos of her from the 1930s.

HIP / Art Resource, NY

Virginia Woolf, that great lover of language, would surely be amused to know that, some seven decades after her death, she endures most vividly in popular culture as a pun—within the title of Edward Albee’s celebrated drama,  Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?  In Albee’s play, a troubled college professor and his equally pained wife taunt each other by singing “Who’s Afraid of the Big, Bad Wolf?,” substituting the iconic British writer’s name for that of the fairy-tale villain.

The Woolf reference seems to have no larger meaning, but, perhaps inadvertently, it gives a note of authenticity to the play’s campus setting. Woolf’s experimental novels are much discussed within academia, and her pioneering feminism has given her a special place in women’s studies programs across the country.

It’s a reputation that runs the risk of pigeonholing Woolf as a “women’s writer” and, as a frequent subject of literary theory, the author of books meant to be studied rather than enjoyed. But, in her prose, Woolf is one of the great pleasure-givers of modern literature, and her appeal transcends gender. Just ask Michael Cunningham, author of  The Hours , the popular and critically acclaimed novel inspired by Woolf’s classic fictional work,  Mrs. Dalloway .

“I read  Mrs. Dalloway  for the first time when I was a sophomore in high school,” Cunningham told readers of the  Guardian  newspaper in 2011. “I was a bit of a slacker, not at all the sort of kid who’d pick up a book like that on my own (it was not, I assure you, part of the curriculum at my slacker-ish school in Los Angeles). I read it in a desperate attempt to impress a girl who was reading it at the time. I hoped, for strictly amorous purposes, to appear more literate than I was.”

Cunningham didn’t really understand all of the themes of  Dalloway  when he first read it, and he didn’t, alas, get the girl who had inspired him to pick up Woolf’s novel. But he fell in love with Woolf’s style. “I could see, even as an untutored and rather lazy child, the density and symmetry and muscularity of Woolf’s sentences,” Cunningham recalled. “I thought, wow, she was doing with language something like what Jimi Hendrix does with a guitar. By which I meant she walked a line between chaos and order, she riffed, and just when it seemed that a sentence was veering off into randomness, she brought it back and united it with the melody.”

Woolf’s example helped drive Cunningham to become a writer himself. His novel  The Hours  essentially retells  Dalloway  as a story within a story, alternating between a variation of Woolf’s original narrative and a fictional speculation on Woolf herself. Cunningham’s 1998 novel won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, then was adapted into a 2002 film of the same name, starring Nicole Kidman as Woolf.

“I feel certain she’d have disliked the book—she was a ferocious critic,” Cunningham said of Woolf, who died in 1941. “She’d probably have had reservations about the film as well, though I like to think that it would have pleased her to see herself played by a beautiful Hollywood movie star.”

Kidman created a buzz for the movie by donning a false nose to mute her matinee-perfect face, evoking Woolf as a woman whom family friend Nigel Nicolson once described as “always beautiful but never pretty.”

Woolf, a seminal figure in feminist thought, would probably not have been surprised that a big-screen treatment of her life would spark so much talk about how she  looked  rather than what she  did . But she was also keenly intent on grounding her literary themes within the world of sensation and physicality, so maybe there’s some value, while considering her ideas, in also remembering what it was like to see and hear her.

We know her best in profile. Many pictures of Woolf show her glancing off to the side, like the figure on a coin. The most notable exception is a 1939 photograph by Gisele Freund in which Woolf peers directly into the camera. Woolf hated the photograph—perhaps because, on some level, she knew how deftly Freund had captured her subject. “I loathe being hoisted about on top of a stick for anyone to stare at,” lamented Woolf, who complained that Freund had broken her promise not to circulate the picture.

The most striking aspect of the photo is the intensity of Woolf’s gaze. In both her conversation and her writing, Woolf had a genius for not only looking at a subject, but looking  through  it, teasing out inferences and implications at multiple levels. It’s perhaps why the sea figures so prominently in her fiction, as a metaphor for a world in which the bright currents we see at the surface of reality reveal, upon closer inspection, a depth that goes downward for miles.

Take, for example, Woolf’s widely anthologized essay, “The Death of the Moth,” in which she notices a moth’s last moments of life, then records the experience as a window into the fragility of all existence. “The insignificant little creature now knew death,” Woolf reports.

As I looked at the dead moth, this minute wayside triumph of so great a force over so mean an antagonist filled me with wonder. . . . The moth having righted himself now lay most decently and uncomplainingly composed. Oh yes, he seemed to say, death is stronger than I am.

Woolf takes an equally miniaturist tack in “The Mark on the Wall,” a sketch in which the narrator studies a mark on the wall ultimately revealed as a snail. Although the premise sounds militantly boring—the literary equivalent of watching paint dry—the mark on the wall works as a locus of concentration, like a hypnotist’s watch, allowing the narrator to consider everything from Shakespeare to World War I. In its subtle tracking of how the mind free-associates and its ample use of interior monolog, the sketch serves as a keynote of sorts for the modernist literary movement that Woolf worked so tirelessly to advance.

Woolf’s penetrating sensibility took some getting used to, since she expected those around her to look at the world just as unblinkingly. She didn’t seem to have much patience for small talk. Renowned scholar Hermione Lee wrote an exhaustive 1997 biography of Woolf, yet confesses some anxiety about the prospect, were it possible, of greeting Woolf in person. “I think I would have been afraid of meeting her,” Lee wrote. “I am afraid of not being intelligent enough for her.”

Nicolson, the son of Woolf’s close friend and onetime lover, Vita Sackville-West, had fond memories of hunting butterflies with Woolf when he was a boy—an outing that allowed Woolf to indulge a pastime she’d enjoyed in childhood. “Virginia could tolerate children for short periods, but fled from babies,” he recalled. Nicolson also remembered Woolf’s distaste for bland generalities, even when uttered by youngsters. She once asked the young Nicolson for a detailed report on his morning, including the quality of the sun that had awakened him, and whether he had first put on his right or left sock while dressing.

“It was a lesson in observation, but it was also a hint,” he wrote many years later. “‘Unless you catch ideas on the wing and nail them down, you will soon cease to have any.’ It was advice that I was to remember all my life.”

Thanks to a commentary Woolf did for the BBC, we don’t have to guess what she sounded like. In the 1937 recording, widely available online, Woolf reflects on how the English language pollinates and blooms into new forms. “Royal words mate with commoners,” she tells listeners in a subversive reference to the recent abdication of King Edward VIII, who had forfeited his throne to marry American Wallis Simpson. Woolf’s voice is plummy and patrician, like an English version of Eleanor Roosevelt. Not surprising, perhaps, given Woolf’s origin in one of England’s most prominent families.

She was born Adeline Virginia Stephen on January 25, 1882, the daughter of Sir Leslie Stephen, a celebrated essayist, editor, and public intellectual, and Julia Prinsep Duckworth Stephen. Julia was, according to Woolf biographer Panthea Reid, “revered for her beauty and wit, her self-sacrifice in nursing the ill, and her bravery in facing early widowhood.” Here’s how Woolf scholar Mark Hussey describes the blended household of Virginia’s childhood:

Her parents, Leslie and Julia Stephen, both previously widowed, began their marriage in 1878 with four young children: Laura (1870–1945), the daughter of Leslie Stephen and his first wife, Harriet Thackery (1840–1875); and George (1868–1934), Gerald (1870–1937), and Stella Duckworth (1869–1897), the children of Julia Prinsep (1846–1895) and Herbert Duckworth (1833–1870).

Together, Leslie and Julia had four more children: Virginia, Vanessa (1879–1961), and brothers Thoby (1880–1906) and Adrian (1883–1948). They all lived at 22 Hyde Park Gate in London.

Although Virginia’s brothers and half-brothers got university educations, Woolf was taught mostly at home—a slight that informed her thinking about how society treated women. Woolf’s family background, though, brought her within the highest circles of British cultural life.

“Woolf’s parents knew many of the intellectual luminaries of the late Victorian era well,” Hussey notes, “counting among their close friends novelists such as George Meredith, Thomas Hardy, and Henry James. Woolf’s great-aunt Julia Margaret Cameron was a pioneering photographer who made portraits of the poets Alfred Tennyson and Robert Browning, of the naturalist Charles Darwin, and of the philosopher and historian Thomas Carlyle, among many others.”

Woolf also had free range over her father’s mammoth library and made the most of it. Reading was her passion—and an act, like any passion, to be engaged actively, not sampled passively. In an essay about her father, Woolf recalled his habit of reciting poetry as he walked or climbed the stairs, and the lesson she took from it seems inescapable. Early on, she learned to pair literature with vitality and movement, and that sensibility runs throughout her lively critical essays, gathered in numerous volumes, including her seminal 1925 collection,  The Common Reader . The title takes its cue from Woolf’s appeal to the kind of reader who, like her, was essentially self-educated rather than a professional scholar.

In a 1931 essay, “The Love of Reading,” Woolf describes what it’s like to encounter a literary masterpiece:

The great writers thus often require us to make heroic efforts in order to read them rightly. They bend us and break us. To go from Defoe to Jane Austen, from Hardy to Peacock, from Trollope to Meredith, from Richardson to Rudyard Kipling is to be wrenched and distorted, to be thrown violently this way and that.

As Woolf saw it, reading was a mythic act, not simply a cozy fireside pastime. John Sparrow, reviewing Woolf’s work in the  Spectator , connected her view of reading with her broader literary life: “She writes vividly because she reads vividly.”

The Stephen family’s summers in coastal Cornwall also shaped Woolf indelibly, exposing her to the ocean as a source of literary inspiration—and creating memories she would fictionalize for her acclaimed novel,  To the Lighthouse .

Darker experiences shadowed Woolf’s youth. In writings not widely known until after her death, she described being sexually abused by her older stepbrothers, George and Gerald Duckworth. Scholars have often discussed how this trauma might have complicated her mental health, which challenged her through much of her life. She had periodic nervous breakdowns, and depression ultimately claimed her life.

“Virginia was a manic-depressive, but at that time the illness had not yet been identified and so could not be treated,” notes biographer Reid. “For her, a normal mood of excitement or depression would become inexplicably magnified so that she could no longer find her sane, balanced self.”

The writing desk became her refuge. “The only way I keep afloat is by working,” Woolf confessed. “Directly I stop working I feel that I am sinking down, down.”

Woolf’s mother died in 1895, and her father died in 1904. After her father’s death, Virginia and the other Stephen siblings, now grown, moved to London’s Bloomsbury neighborhood. “It was a district of London,” noted Nicolson, “that in spite of the elegance of its Georgian squares was considered . . . to be faintly decadent, the resort of raffish divorcées and indolent students, loose in its morals and behavior.”

Bloomsbury’s bohemian sensibility suited Woolf, who joined with other intellectuals in her newfound community to form the Bloomsbury Group, an informal social circle that included Woolf’s sister Vanessa, an artist; Vanessa’s husband, the art critic Clive Bell; artist Roger Fry; economist John Maynard Keynes; and writers Lytton Strachey and E. M. Forster. Through Bloomsbury, Virginia also met writer Leonard Woolf, and they married in 1912.

The Bloomsbury Group had no clear philosophy, although its members shared an enthusiasm for leftish politics and a general willingness to experiment with new kinds of visual and literary art.

The Voyage Out , Woolf’s debut novel published in 1915, follows a fairly conventional form, but its plot—a female protagonist exploring her inner life through an epic voyage—suggested that what women saw and felt and heard and experienced was worthy of fiction, independent of their connection to men. In a series of lectures published in 1929 as  A Room of One’s Own , Woolf pointed to the special challenges that women faced in finding the basic necessities for writing—a small income and a quiet place to think.  A Room of One’s Own  is a formative feminist document, but critic Robert Kanigel argues that men are cheating themselves if they don’t embrace the book, too. “Woolf’s is not a Spartan, clippity-clop style such as the one Ernest Hemingway was perfecting in Paris at about the same time,” Kanigel observes. “This is leisurely, ruminative, with long paragraphs that march up and down the page, long trains of thought, and rich digressions almost hypnotic in their effect. And once trapped within the sweet, sticky filament of her web of words, one is left with no wish whatever to be set free.”

During the Woolfs’ marriage, Virginia had flirtations with women and an affair with Sackville-West, a fellow author in her social circle. Even so, Leonard and Virginia remained close, buying a small printing press and starting a publishing house, Hogarth Press, in 1917. Leonard thought it might be a soothing diversion for Virginia—perhaps the first and only case of anyone entering book publishing to advance their sanity.

If Virginia Woolf had never published a single word of her own, her role in Hogarth would have secured her a place in literary history. Thanks to the Woolfs’ tiny press, the world got its first look at the early work of Katherine Mansfield, T. S. Eliot, and Forster. The press also published Virginia’s work, of course, including novels of increasingly daring scope. In  To the Lighthouse , a family summers along the coast, the lighthouse on the horizon suggesting an assuringly fixed universe. But, as the novel unfolds over a decade, we see the subtle working of time and how it shapes the perceptions of various characters.

A young Eudora Welty picked up  To the Lighthouse  and found her own world changed. “Blessed with luck and innocence, I fell upon the novel that once and forever opened the door of imaginative fiction for me, and read it cold, in all its wonder and magnitude,” Welty recalled.

The Woolfs divided their time between London, a city that Virginia loved and often wrote about, and Monk’s House, a modest country home in Sussex the couple was able to buy as Virginia’s career bloomed. Even as she welcomed literary experiment, Woolf grew wistful about the future of the traditional letter, which she saw being eclipsed by the speed of news-gathering and the telephone. Almost as if to disprove her own point, Woolf wrote as many as six letters a day.

“Virginia Woolf was a compulsive letter writer,” said English critic V. S. Pritchett. “She did not much care for the solitude she needed but lived for news, gossip, and the expectancy of talk.”

Her letters, published in several volumes, shimmer with brilliant detail. In a letter written during World War II, for example, Woolf interrupts her message to Benedict Nicolson to go outside and watch the German bombers flying over her house. “The raiders began emitting long trails of smoke,” she reports. “I wondered if a bomb was going to fall on top of me. . . . Then I dipped into your letter again.”

The war proved too much for her. Distraught by its destruction, sensing another nervous breakdown, and worried about the burden it would impose on Leonard, Virginia stuffed her pockets with stones and drowned herself in the River Ouse near Monk’s House on March 28, 1941.

But Cunningham says it would be a mistake to define Woolf by her death. “She did, of course, have her darker interludes,” he concedes. “But when not sunk in her periodic depressions, [she] was the person one most hoped would come to the party; the one who could speak amusingly on just about any subject; the one who glittered and charmed; who was interested in what other people had to say (though not, I admit, always encouraging about their opinions); who loved the idea of the future and all the wonders it might bring.”

Her influence on subsequent generations of writers has been deep. You can see flashes of her vivid sensitivity in the work of Annie Dillard, a bit of her wry critical eye in the recent essays of Rebecca Solnit. Novelist and essayist Daphne Merkin says that despite her edges, Woolf should be remembered as “luminous and tender and generous, the person you would most like to see coming down the path.” Woolf’s legacy marks Merkin’s work, too, although there’s never been anyone else quite like Virginia Woolf.

“The world of the arts was her native territory; she ranged freely under her own sky, speaking her mother tongue fearlessly,” novelist Katherine Anne Porter said of Woolf. “She was at home in that place as much as anyone ever was.”

Danny Heitman is the editor of Phi Kappa Phi’s Forum magazine and a columnist for the  Advocate newspaper in Louisiana. He writes frequently about arts and culture for national publications, including the Wall Street Journal and the  Christian Science Monitor.

Funding information

NEH has funded numerous projects related to Virginia Woolf, including  four  separate  r esearch  fellowships  since 1995 and  three education seminars for schoolteachers  on Woolf’s major novels. In 2010, Loyola University in Chicago, Illinois, received $175,000 to support  WoolfOnline , which documents the biographical, textual, and publication history of To the Lighthouse.

May/June 2015

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Virginia Woolf

by Jessica Svendsen and Pericles Lewis Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) was an English novelist, essayist, biographer, and feminist. Woolf was a prolific writer, whose modernist style changed with each new novel. [1] Her letters and memoirs reveal glimpses of Woolf at the center of English literary culture during the Bloomsbury era. Woolf represents a historical moment when art was integrated into society, as T.S. Eliot describes in his obituary for Virginia. “Without Virginia Woolf at the center of it, it would have remained formless or marginal…With the death of Virginia Woolf, a whole pattern of culture is broken.” [2] Virginia Adeline Stephen was the third child of Leslie Stephen, a Victorian man of letters, and Julia Duckworth. The Stephen family lived at Hyde Park Gate in Kensington, a respectable English middle class neighborhood. While her brothers Thoby and Adrian were sent to Cambridge, Virginia was educated by private tutors and copiously read from her father’s vast library of literary classics. She later resented the degradation of women in a patriarchal society, rebuking her own father for automatically sending her brothers to schools and university, while she was never offered a formal education. [3] Woolf’s Victorian upbringing would later influence her decision to participate in the Bloomsbury circle, noted for their original ideas and unorthodox relationships. As biographer Hermione Lee argues “Woolf was a ‘modern’. But she was also a late Victorian. The Victorian family past filled her fiction, shaped her political analyses of society and underlay the behaviour of her social group.” [4] Mental Illness In May 1895 , Virginia’s mother died from rheumatic fever. Her unexpected and tragic death caused Virginia to have a mental breakdown at age 13. A second severe breakdown followed the death of her father, Leslie Stephen, in 1904. During this time, Virginia first attempted suicide and was institutionalized. According to nephew and biographer Quentin Bell, “All that summer she was mad.” [5] The death of her close brother Thoby Stephen, from typhoid fever in November 1906 had a similar effect on Woolf, to such a degree that he would later be re-imagined as Jacob in her first experimental novel Jacob’s Room and later as Percival in The Waves . These were the first of her many mental collapses that would sporadically occur throughout her life, until her suicide in March 1941. Though Woolf’s mental illness was periodic and recurrent, as Lee explains, she “was a sane woman who had an illness.” [6] Her “madness” was provoked by life-altering events, notably family deaths, her marriage, or the publication of a novel. According to Lee, Woolf’s symptoms conform to the profile of a manic-depressive illness, or bipolar disorder. Leonard, her dedicated lifelong companion, documented her illness with scrupulousness. He categorized her breakdowns into two distinct stages: “In the manic stage she was extremely excited; the mind race; she talked volubly and, at the height of the attach, incoherently; she had delusions and heard voices…she was violent with her nurses. In her third attack, which began in 1914, this stage lasted for several months and ended by her falling into a coma for two days. During the depressive stage all her thoughts and emotions were the exact opposite of what they had been in the manic stage. She was in the depths of melancholia and despair; she scarcely spoke; refused to eat; refused to believe that she was ill and insisted that her condition was due to her own guilt; at the height of this stage she tried to commit suicide.” [7] During her life, Woolf consulted at least twelve doctors, and consequently experienced, from the Victorian era to the shell shock of World War I, the emerging medical trends for treating the insane. Woolf frequently heard the medical jargon used for a “nervous breakdown,” and incorporated the language of medicine, degeneracy, and eugenics into her novel Mrs. Dalloway . With the character Septimus Smith, Woolf combined her doctor’s terminology with her own unstable states of mind. When Woolf prepared to write Mrs. Dalloway , she envisioned the novel as a “study of insanity and suicide; the world seen by the sane and the insane side by side.” When she was editing the manuscript, she changed her depiction of Septimus from what read like a record of her own experience as a “mental patient” into a more abstracted character and narrative. However, she kept the “exasperation,” which she noted, should be the “dominant theme” of Septimus’s encounters with doctors. [8] In 1924 , during the heyday of literary modernism, Virginia Woolf tried to account for what was new about “modern” fiction. She wrote that while all fiction tried to express human character, modern fiction had to describe character in a new way because “on or about December, 1910, human character changed.” Her main example of this change in human character was the “character of one’s cook.” Whereas the “Victorian cook lived like a leviathan in the lower depths,” modern cooks were forever coming out of the kitchen to borrow the Daily Herald and ask “advice about a hat.” Woolf’s choice of December, 1910 as a watershed referred above all to the first Post-Impressionist Exhibition, organized by her friend Roger Fry in collaboration with her brother-in-law Clive Bell. The exhibition ran from November 8, 1910 to January 15, 1911 and introduced the English public to developments in the visual arts that had already been taking place in France for a generation. More broadly, however, Woolf was alluding to social and political changes that overtook England soon after the death of Edward VII in May, 1910, symbolized by the changing patterns of deference and class and gender relations implicit in the transformation of the Victorian cook. Henry James considered that the death of Edward’s mother Victoria meant the end of one age; Edward’s reign was short (1901-1910), but to those who lived through it, it seemed to stand at the border between the old world and the new. This sense of the radical difference between the “modern” world and the “Edwardian” one, or more broadly the world before and after the First World War, became a major theme of Woolf’s fiction. In 1911, the year after human character changed, Virginia decided to live in a house in the Bloomsbury neighborhood near the British Museum with several men, none of whom was her husband. Some of her relatives were shocked, and her father’s old friend Henry James found her lifestyle rather too Bohemian. Her housemates were her brother Adrian, John Maynard Keynes, Duncan Grant, and Leonard Woolf, whom she married a year later. Grant and Keynes were lovers, and the heterosexual members of the group too were known for their unconventional relationships. Virginia’s sister, the painter Vanessa Bell, lived for much of her life with Grant, who was also her artistic collaborator, and the two had a daughter. Throughout all this, Vanessa remained married to Clive Bell, who early in marriage had a flirtatious relationship with Virginia, while Duncan had a series of homosexual love affairs. Most of the men in the Bloomsbury group had gone to Cambridge, and many had belonged to an intellectual club called the Apostles, which, under the influence of the philosopher G. E. Moore, emphasized the importance of friendship and aesthetic experience, a more earnest form of Oscar Wilde’s aestheticism. A typical Bloomsbury figure, Lytton Strachey , wrote his best-known book, Eminent Victorians ( 1918 ), in a satirical vein, debunking the myths surrounding such revered figures as Florence Nightingale. Strachey was the most open homosexual of the group, and Woolf vividly recalled his destruction of all the Victorian proprieties when he noted a stain on Vanessa’s dress and remarked, “Semen”: “With that one word all barriers of reticence and reserve went down.” Feminist Critiques Woolf wrote extensively on the problem of women’s access to the learned professions, such as academia, the church, the law, and medicine, a problem that was exacerbated by women’s exclusion from Oxford and Cambridge. Woolf herself never went to university, and she resented the fact that her brothers and male friends had had an opportunity that was denied to her. Even in the realm of literature, Woolf found, women in literary families like her own were expected to write memoirs of their fathers or to edit their correspondence. Woolf did in fact write a memoir of her father, Leslie Stephen, after his death, but she later wrote that if he had not died when she was relatively young (22), she never would have become a writer. Woolf also concerned herself with the question of women’s equality with men in marriage, and she brilliantly evoked the inequality of her parents’ marriage in her novel To the Lighthouse ( 1927 ). Woolf based the Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay on her parents. Vanessa Bell immediately decoded the novel, discovering that Mrs. Ramsay was based on their mother, Julia Duckworth Stephen. Vanessa felt that it was “almost painful to have her so raised from the dead.” [10] Woolf’s mother was always eager to fulfill the Victorian ideal that Woolf later described, in a figure borrowed from a pious Victorian poem, as that of the “Angel in the House.” Woolf spoke of her partly successful attempts to kill off the “Angel in the House,” and to describe the possibilities for emancipated women independently of her mother’s sense of the proprieties. The disparity Woolf saw in her parents’ marriage made her determined that “the man she married would be as worthy of her as she of him. They were to be equal partners.” [11] Despite numerous marriage proposals throughout her young adulthood, including offers by Lytton Strachey and Sydney Waterlow, Virginia only hesitated with Leonard Woolf, a cadet in the Ceylon Civil Service. Virginia wavered, partly due to her fear of marriage and the emotional and sexual involvement the partnership requires. She wrote to Leonard: “As I told you brutally the other day, I feel no physical attraction in you. There are moments—when you kissed me the other day was one—when I feel no more than a rock. And yet your caring for me as you do almost overwhelms me. It is so real, and so strange.” [12] Virginia eventually accepted him, and at age 30, she married Leonard Woolf in August 1912. For two or three years, they shared a bed, and for several more a bedroom. However, with Virginia’s unstable mental condition, they followed medical advice and did not have children. Related to the unequal status of marriage was the sexual double standard that treated lack of chastity in a woman as a serious social offense. Woolf herself was almost certainly the victim of some kind of sexual abuse at the hands of one of her half-brothers, as narrated in her memoir Moments of Being . More broadly, she was highly conscious of the ways that men had access to and knowledge of sex, whereas women of the middle and upper classes were expected to remain ignorant of it. She often puzzled about the possibility of a literature that would treat sexuality and especially the sexual life of women frankly, but her own works discuss sex rather indirectly. If much of Woolf’s feminist writing concerns the problem of equality of access to goods that have traditionally been monopolized by men, her literary criticism prefigures two other concerns of later feminism: the reclaiming of a female tradition of writing and the deconstruction of gender difference. In A Room of One’s Own ( 1929 ), Woolf imagines the fate of Shakespeare’s equally brilliant sister Judith (in fact, his sister’s name was Joan). Unable to gain access to the all-male stage of Elizabethan England, or to obtain any formal education, Judith would have been forced to marry and abandon her literary gifts or, if she had chosen to run away from home, would have been driven to prostitution. Woolf traces the rise of women writers, emphasizing in particular Jane Austen, the Brontës, and George Eliot, but alluding too to Sappho, one of the first lyric poets. Faced with the question of whether women’s writing is specifically feminine, she concludes that the great female authors “wrote as women write, not as men write.” She thus raises the possibility of a specifically feminine style, but at the same time she emphasizes (citing the authority of Coleridge) that the greatest writers, among whom she includes Shakespeare, Jane Austen, and Marcel Proust , are androgynous, able to see the world equally from a man’s and a woman’s perspective. The Effect of War The theme of how to make sense of the changes wrought in English society by the war, specifically from the perspective of a woman who had not seen battle, became central to Woolf’s work. In her short story “Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street” ( 1922 ), Woolf has her society hostess, Clarissa Dalloway, observe that since the war, “there are moments when it seems utterly futile…—simply one doesn’t believe, thought Clarissa, any more in God.” Although her first novel, The Voyage Out ( 1915 ) had tentatively embraced modernist techniques, her second, Night and Day ( 1919 ), returned to many Victorian conventions. The young modernist writer Katherine Mansfield thought that Night and Day contained “a lie in the soul” because it failed to refer to the war or recognize what it had meant for fiction. Mansfield, who had written a number of important early modernist stories, died at the age of 34 in 1923, and Woolf, who had published some of her work at the Hogarth Press , often measured herself against this friend and rival. Mansfield’s criticism of Night and Day as “Jane Austen up-to-date” stung Woolf, who, in three of her major modernist novels of the 1920s, grappled with the problem of how to represent the gap in historical experience presented by the war. The war is a central theme in her three major modernist novels of the 1920s: Jacob’s Room (1922), Mrs. Dalloway (1925), and To the Lighthouse (1927). Over the course of the decade, these novels trace the experience of incorporating the massive and incomprehensible experience of the war into a vision of recent history. Hogarth Press In 1915, Leonard and Virginia moved to Hogarth House, Richmond, and two years later, brought a printing press in order to establish a small, independent publishing house. Though the physical machining required by letterpress exhausted the Woolfs, the Hogarth Press flourished throughout their careers. Hogarth chiefly printed Bloomsbury authors who had little chance of being accepted at established publishing companies. The Woolfs were dedicated to publishing the most experimental prose and poetry and the emerging philosophical, political, and scientific ideas of the day. They published T.S. Eliot , E.M. Forster , Roger Fry , Katherine Mansfield , Clive Bell , Vita Sackville-West, and John Middleton Murry, among numerous others. Though they rejected publishing James Joyce ’s Ulysses , they printed T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and the first English translations of Sigmund Freud. Hogarth additionally published all of Woolf’s novels, providing her the editorial freedom to do as she wished as a woman writer, free from the criticism of a male editor. J.H. Willis explains that Woolf “could experiment boldly, remaking the form and herself each time she shaped a new fiction, responsible only to herself as writer-editor-publisher…She was, [Woolf] added triumphantly, ‘the only woman in England free to write what I like.’ The press, beyond doubt, had given Virginia a room of her own.” [13] Female Relations Woolf’s liberated writing parallels her relationships with women, who gave her warm companionship and literary stimulus. In her girlhood, there was Violet Dickinson; in her thirties, Katherine Mansfield; and in her fifties, there was Ethel Smyth. But none of these women emotionally aroused Virginia as did Vita Sackville-West. They met in 1922, and it developed into the deepest relationship that Virginia would ever have outside her family. [14] Virginia and Vita were more different than alike; but their differences in social class, sexual orientation, and politics, were all were part of the attraction. Vita was an outsider to Bloomsbury and disapproved of their literary gatherings. Though the two had different intellectual backgrounds, Virginia found Vita irresistible with her glamorous and aristocratic demeanor. Virginia felt that Vita was “a real woman. Then there is some voluptuousness about her; the grapes are ripe; & not reflective. No. In brain & insight she is not as highly organised as I am. But then she is aware of this, & so lavishes on me the maternal protection which, for some reason, is what I have always wished from everyone.” [15] Though Vita and Virginia shared intimate relations, they both avoided categorizing their relationship as lesbian. Vita rejected the lesbian political identity and even Woolf’s feminism. Instead, Vita was well-known in her social circles as a “Sapphist.” Virginia, on the other hand, did not define herself as a Sapphist. She avoided all categories, particular those that categorized her in a group defined by sexual behavior. [16] Woolf’s relationship with Vita ultimately shaped the fictional biography Orlando , a narrative that spans from 1500 to the contemporary day. It follows the protagonist Orlando who is based on “Vita; only with a change about from one sex to another.” [17] For Virginia, Vita’s physical appearance embodied both the masculine and the feminine, and she wrote to Vita that Orlando is “all about you and the lusts of your flesh and the lure of your mind.” Though Virginia and Vita’s love affair only lasted intermittently for about three years, Woolf wrote Orlando as an “elaborate love-letter, rendering Vita androgynous and immortal, transforming her story into a myth.” [18] Indeed, Woolf’s ideal of the androgynous mind is extended in Orlando to an androgynous body. When it was published in October 1928, Orlando immediately became a bestseller and the novel’s success made Woolf one of the best-known contemporary writers. In the same month, Woolf gave the two lectures at Cambridge, later published as A Room of One’s Own (1929), and actively participated in the legal battles that censored Radclyffe Hall’s lesbian novel, The Well of Loneliness . Despite this concentrated period of reflection on gender and sexual identities, Woolf would wait until 1938 to publish Three Guineas , a text that expands her feminist critique on the patriarchy and militarism. Woolf clearly expressed her reasons for committing suicide in her last letter to her husband Leonard: “I feel certain that I am going mad again: I feel we cant go through another of those terrible times. And I shant recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and cant concentrate.” [20] On March 18, she may have attempted to drown herself. Over a week later on March 28, Virginia wrote the third of her suicide letters, and walked the half-mile to the River Ouse, filled her pockets with stones, and walked into the water. [21] Virginia’s body was found by some children, a short way down-stream, almost a month later on April 18. An inquest was held the next day and the verdict was “Suicide with the balance of her mind disturbed.” Her body was cremated on April 21 with only Leonard present, and her ashes were buried under a great elm tree just outside the garden at Monk’s House, with the concluding words of The Waves as her epitaph, “Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death!” [22] The last words Virginia Woolf wrote were “Will you destroy all my papers.” [23] Written in the margin of her second suicide letter to Leonard, it is unclear what “papers” he was supposed to destroy—the typescript of her latest novel Between the Acts ; the first chapter of Anon, a project on the history of English literature; or her prolific diaries and letters. If Woolf wished for all of these papers to be destroyed, Leonard disregarded her instructions. He published her novel, compiled significant diary entries into the volume The Writer’s Diary , and carefully kept all of her manuscripts, diaries, letters, thereby preserving Woolf’s unique voice and personality captured in each line. ↑ Spender, Stephen. “Virginia Woolf’s Obituary Notice.” Listener. 10 April 1941. ↑ Eliot, T.S. “Virginia Woolf’s Obituary.” Horizon. May 1941. ↑ Nicolson, Nigel. Introduction to The Letters of Virginia Woolf: Volume One: 1888-1912. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1975. ↑ Lee, Hermione. Virginia Woolf. New York: Vintage, 1990. 55 ↑ Bell, Quentin. Virginia Woolf: A Biography. London: Hogarth Press, 1990. ↑ Lee, Hermione. Virginia Woolf. New York: Vintage, 1990. 171. ↑ Ibid 174. ↑ Ibid 188. ↑ Nicolson, Nigel. The Letters of Virginia Woolf: Volume One: 1888-1912. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1975. 183. ↑ Ibid 572. ↑ Woolf, Virginia. The Letters of Virginia Woolf: Volume One: 1888-1912. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1975. 1 May 1912. ↑ Willis, J. H. Leonard and Virginia Woolf As Publishers: The Hogarth Press, 1917-41. Charlottesville, Virginia: University Press of Virginia, 1992. 400. ↑ Nicolson, Nigel. Introduction to The Letters of Virginia Woolf: Volume Three: 1923-1928. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1977. ↑ Woolf, Virginia. The Diary of Virginia Woolf: Volume 3: 1925-1930. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1980. 51. ↑ Lee, Hermione. Virginia Woolf. New York: Vintage, 1990. 484. ↑ Woolf, Virginia. The Diary of Virginia Woolf: Volume 3: 1925-1930. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1980. 428. ↑ Nicolson, Nigel. Introduction to The Letters of Virginia Woolf: Volume Six: 1936-1941. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1980. ↑ Ibid 486. ↑ Ibid 481. ↑ Ibid 487. Virginia Woolf Table of content Short stories Virginia Woolf was an English author, feminist, essayist, publisher, and critic, considered as one of the foremost modernists of the twentieth century along with T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, and Gertrude Stein. Her parents were Sir Leslie Stephen (1832–1904), who was a notable historian, author, critic and mountaineer, and Julia Prinsep Duckworth (1846–1895), a renowned beauty. According to Woolf’s memoirs, her most vivid childhood memories were not of London but of St. Ives in Cornwall, where the family spent every summer until 1895. This place inspired her to write one of her masterpieces, To the Lighthouse . The sudden death of her mother in 1895, when Virginia was 13, and that of her half-sister Stella two years later, led to the first of Virginia’s several nervous breakdowns. but it was the death of her father in 1904 provoked her most alarming collapse and she was briefly institutionalised. Some scholars have suggested that her mental instability was also due to the sexual abuse to which she and her sister Vanessa were subjected by their half-brothers George and Gerald Duckworth. Woolf came to know the founders of the the Bloomsbury Group. She became an active member of this literary circle. Later, Virginia Stephen married writer Leonard Woolf on 10 August 1912. Despite his low material status (Woolf referring to Leonard during their engagement as a “penniless Jew”) the couple shared a close bond. Virginia’s most famous works include the novels Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927) and Orlando (1928), and the book-length essay A Room of One’s Own (1929), with its famous dictum, “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” In some of her novels she moves away from the use of plot and structure to employ stream-of-consciousness to emphasise the psychological aspects of her characters. After completing the manuscript of her last (posthumously published) novel, Between the Acts , Woolf fell into a depression similar to that which she had earlier experienced. On 28 March 1941, Woolf put on her overcoat, filled its pockets with stones, and walked into the River Ouse near her home and drowned herself. Woolf’s body was not found until 18 April 1941. Her husband buried her cremated remains under an elm in the garden of Monk’s House, their home in Rodmell, Sussex. Her final writing were these words addressed to her husband: “I know that I am spoiling your life, that without me you could work. And you will I know. You see I can’t even write this properly. I can’t read. What I want to say is I owe all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good. I want to say that—everybody knows it. If anybody could have saved me it would have been you. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can’t go on spoiling your life any longer. I don’t think two people could have been happier than we have been.” Rose, Phyllis (1986). Woman of Letters: A Life of Virginia Woolf. Routledge. p. 243. ISBN 0-86358-066-1. Retrieved 24 September 2008. Essays by Virginia Woolf Women and Fiction Short stories by Virginia Woolf A Haunted House An Unwritten Novel Blue & Green In the Orchard Kew Gardens Monday Or Tuesday Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street The Mark On The Wall The String Quartet Biography of Virginia Woolf Reading comprehension about virginia woolf’s biography. “I know that I am spoiling your life, that without me you could work. And you will I know. You see I can’t even write this properly. I can’t read. What I want to say is I owe all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good. I want to say that everybody knows it. If anybody could have saved me it would have been you. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can’t go on spoiling your life any longer. I don’t think two people could have been happier than we have been.” Comprehension: Encyclopedia of Humanities The most comprehensive and reliable Encyclopedia of Humanities Virginia Woolf We explore the life of Virginia Woolf, her main contributions to Anglo-Saxon literature, and her tragic end. Who was Virginia Woolf? Virginia Woolf was an English writer renowned for her contribution to contemporary fiction and for being one of the central figures in Anglo-Saxon literary modernism , which reached its height between 1900 and 1940. Although she mainly wrote novels, she was also the author of short stories, essays, and biographies. Alongside her husband Leonard Woolf, Virginia was part of the so-called Bloomsbury Group , comprised of several British intellectuals of the interwar period , such as John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946) and E. M. Forster (1879-1970), among others. Her work stands as a literary touchstone for contemporary feminism , most notably her celebrated essay A Room of One's Own , where she reflects on the challenges faced by a woman aspiring to an intellectual life. Finally, her lifelong struggle with bipolar affective disorder, as well as her tragic suicide in the River Ouse , near Lewes, have served as inspiration for novels, films, and plays by various authors. See also: Edgar Allan Poe Birth and early years of Virginia Woolf Adeline Virginia Stephen was born in London on January 25, 1882, into a wealthy family in the Borough of Kensington . Her father was historian, essayist and biographer Leslie Stephen, and her mother, Julia Jackson, was a model for the Pre-Raphaelite painters. Virginia was the second of the couple's four children, with siblings Vanessa, Thoby and Adrian. The family household also included children from their parents' previous marriages: a daughter from Leslie's first wife, and three from Julia and her first husband. Virginia's parents gave their children a privileged upbringing . The Stephen home, located at Hyde Park Gate, was a frequent gathering place for prominent artists and writers of Victorian society, like Henry James (1843-1916) and Thomas Hardy (1840-1928). Virginia and her sister Vanessa did not attend traditional schools; instead, their education was entrusted to private tutors and instructors.   From an early age, the creative talent of both sisters became evident. Vanessa, who would eventually become a painter, began sketching her earliest drawings, while Virginia ran a family newspaper entitled Hyde Park Gate News . Although the elder sister was motherly and protective towards Virginia, competition between the two was not unfamiliar. The family used to spend their summers on Cornwall’s coast , where they had a country house overlooking Porthminster Beach. It was there that Virginia lived her most cherished childhood moments between 1882 and 1894, and many of these landscapes, like the Godrevy Lighthouse, would appear in her literary works decades later. The Bloomsbury Group Family life was disrupted by the sudden death of her mother in 1895 , when she was only 49 years old, followed by that of her half-sister Stella, two years later. These events plunged Virginia into the first severe depression of her life. However, it was the death of her father in early 1904 that brought on a nervous breakdown for which she had to be hospitalized. She was 22 years old.  From then on, Virginia's older sister, Vanessa, took charge of the household and the younger siblings, under the control of her older maternal half-brothers, George and Gerald Duckworth. Those were years of suffering for the Stephen sisters , who, in addition to the death of their parents, they had to endure mistreatment and sexual abuse at the hands of their half-brothers. Years later, Virginia referred to this dark chapter of her youth in her autobiographical essays A Sketch of the Past and 22 Hyde Park Gate . Eventually, the sale of their ancestral home and the move away from their maternal half-brothers allowed the Stephens to lead a more pleasant life . Vanessa and Adrian bought a house in the London neighborhood of Bloomsbury, where they could freely engage in their studies and artistic creation, and host guests from London’s intellectual and artistic circles. In 1905, Virginia set up the "Friday Club", and her brother Thoby started the "Thursday Evenings" . With these names they humorously made reference to their gatherings with Thoby's fellow students, and Virginia herself, who in those years had joined King's College in London, to debate, converse, and share ideas. Among the attendees was, in late 1904, the young Leonard Woolf, Virginia's future husband , who that same year left for Sri Lanka for a position in the colonial service. Another figure was art critic Clive Bell (1881-1964), who Vanessa would marry in 1907. These gatherings evolved into the so-called "Bloomsbury Group", which brought together some of the most prominent English intellectuals and artists of the early 20th century , including John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946), Lytton Strachey (1880-1932), E. M. Forster (1879-1970), Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951), and Bertrand Russell (1872-1970), among other personalities from the exclusive society of the "Cambridge Apostles". Although its members never explicitly recognized themselves as a group, they shared aesthetic, political, and humanistic principles , as well as a profound rejection of the rigid Victorian morality, religion, and realism of the 19th century. They championed individualism and freedom of thought, allowing for more liberal views on personal relationships and individual pleasure. The group garnered public attention in England at the time, largely due to an incident that came to be known as the "Dreadnought hoax", a prank the young artists pulled on the British Navy in 1910 that captured the attention of the press. Virginia participated in the hoax, disguised as an African prince. The Bloomsbury Group was deeply affected by World War I , though its members continued to develop their successful careers, which for most of them reached their height after 1920 and lasted until the late 1930s. "The Dreadnought Hoax" was the name given to a satirical trick played by several members of the Bloomsbury Group along with Irish poet Horace de Vere Cole (1881-1936). On February 7, 1910, the poet convinced the British Navy to show its flagship, HMS Dreadnought, to an alleged Ethiopian delegation which actually consisted of several members of the group in disguise. The mockery caught the attention of the press, and the British Navy was ridiculed. Marriage to Leonard Woolf Virginia formally began writing in 1905 , when she published her earliest texts in the Times Literary Supplement . Her relationship with writing soon became her mainstay, especially after the death of her brother Thoby in 1906 and the "loss" of her sister Vanessa in 1907, the year of her marriage to Clive Bell. Furthermore, the intellectual stimulus of the Bloomsbury Group called for new artistic forms. Thus, in 1908, Virginia set out to reshape the novel genre with a narrative project that would depart from the Victorian conventions of the time. This novel, entitled Melymbrosia , was not completed until 1912. Virginia became notably influenced by the work of post-impressionists Paul Cézanne (1839-1906) and Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) , which burst in on the London scene in 1910. At the time, Virginia's mental health was fragile, and writing served as her main lifeline. Until, in 1911, Leonard Woolf returned from the East and began to court her . Despite his precarious financial situation (Virginia refers to him in her diaries as a "penniless Jew"), they married in August 1912, when she was 30 years old. They spent their honeymoon in Spain. From the beginning, the couple shared a close bond, both romantically and professionally . Leonard himself was a writer and was also critical of the bourgeois lifestyle. In 1913, he published his anti-colonialist novel The Village in the Jungle , and after releasing another novel in 1914, he turned to political writing and social activism. Meanwhile, Virginia fully reworked her debut novel in 1913, published under the title The Voyage Out by her half-brother Gerald Duckworth’s publishing house. However, the book's release had to be postponed until 1915, as Virginia suffered another nervous breakdown. Convinced she was a failure as a woman and writer, feeling despised by her sister and undervalued by Leonard, Virginia unsuccessfully attempted to take her own life in September 1913 . In April 1915, Virginia experienced further bouts of mental distress and succumbed to delirium for quite some time. However, that same year, she significantly recovered from her "evil imaginations", which she managed to largely keep at bay until the end of her days. Much has been written about Virginia and Leonard Woolf's marriage, and the complicated relationship they had. It is known that their sex life was not particularly active, partly due to Virginia's traumas with her half-brother, her continuous and sudden mood swings, and Leonard's lack of experience. Their relationship was more of an intellectual character and literary admiration. Furthermore, Virginia maintained a relationship with poet Vita Sackville-West for several years. Leonard, in turn, devoted himself tirelessly to Virginia, both as husband and editor, even following her death. Hogarth Press In 1917, the Woolfs purchased a handpress and started their own publishing venture : Hogarth Press, named after their suburban London residence, Hogarth House. They published their first joint work, Two Stories : a book featuring Three Jews by Leonard, and The Mark on the Wall , by Virginia, to great success. Of the 150 copies made, 134 were sold. Being able to publish her own books allowed Virginia to dedicate herself fully to literary experimentation, without concerning for typical publisher preferences. Moreover, it enabled her to become acquainted with the works of contemporary writers , not always highly esteemed by Virginia, such as James Joyce (1882-1941), T.S. Eliot (1888-1965), and Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923), with whom she shared a relationship of both mutual admiration and dislike. When Leonard's political activity took him away, Virginia would often retire to her sister's country house in Sussex. Vanessa had separated from her husband to live with British painter Duncan Grant (1885-1978), and their home often hosted numerous artists. During these years, Virginia resumed writing her diaries, which she had kept intermittently since 1897 . Virginia's next novel was Night and Day (1919), a response to The Wise Virgins , a novel her husband had published in 1914 scandalizing members of his own family. That same year, her essay "Modern Fiction" came out, the result of the weekly readings she reviewed for the Times Literary Supplement , and her short story "Kew Gardens", set in London's botanical garden, and illustrated by her sister Vanessa. That year, the Woolfs bought a small cottage in Rodmell, in the countryside, where Virginia could get away to write , take walks, cycle, and even visit her sister. In 1920, Virginia became part of the "Memoir Club", initiated by some of her fellow members of the Bloomsbury Group, where members gathered to read aloud excerpts from their own autobiographies. In 1922, Jacob's Room , her third novel, was published, inspired by the death of her brother Thoby. It was an anti-war novel exploring loss through minimalism, sidelining plot and conflict . As she expressed at the time, a novel should be "an emotion felt". Shortly after, Virginia met poet Vita Sackville-West (1892-1962), wife of Harold Nicholson, with whom she had a clandestine relationship that went on for much of the decade . Both authors dedicated works to each other and maintained intense correspondence. After their romance ended, they remained friends until Virginia's death in 1941. Major novels of Virginia Woolf In 1924, the Woolfs relocated once again in Bloomsbury , where they could lead a life less isolated from urban dynamics. Over the ensuing years, Virginia wrote what were to become her most notable works. Many of these writings were part of an attempt by Virginia to create a new genre that emerged from the novel but departed from it to the point that she even considered presenting them as belonging to a new genre , but whose name she was never able to specify. Thus, in 1925 she revisited a character that had previously appeared in several of her short stories , and created one of her most celebrated novels: Mrs Dalloway . It is an account of the events of a single day in London, narrated in the manner of a post-impressionist painting, shifting seamlessly from one character's consciousness to another's. This technique later became known as "stream of consciousness". Virginia experimented with this technique once again in 1927 in her next novel, To the Lighthouse , which is divided into three parts , and does not follow a chronological logic. In it, the author's childhood memories are evoked. At the same time, the novel serves as an elegy mourning her mother's death. That same year, her essays "The Art of Fiction" and "The New Biography" came out, in which she held that fiction writers should be more concerned with the language and design of the work than with the reality from which it originates. In 1928, Virginia put theory into practice with Orlando: A Biography . This fantastical novel, inspired by anecdotes of Vita Sackville-West's life , features a protagonist who travels through five centuries of English history, often changing gender and perspective. This work stands as a tribute to her beloved Vita, with whom her relationship had cooled. The following year witnessed the publication of "A Room of One's Own" , one of the most renowned essays by Virginia Woolf. It is an exploration of the absent role of women in history , which the author attributes not to their lack of genius, but rather of material resources. Hence her famous statement on what a woman needs in order to venture into the intellectual world: "money and a room of her own". Inspired by her sister Vanessa's paintings exhibited in 1930, Virginia embarked on crafting a mystical, impersonal, and abstract novel: The Waves . Published in 1931, this novel gives voice to six characters as they recount their life stories, interspersed with poetic interludes that depict the heavens from dawn to dusk. This important body of work, published almost entirely by Hogarth Press, solidified Virginia Woolf's stature in Anglo-Saxon modernism , alongside James Joyce and the American William Faulkner (1897-1962). Death of Virginia Woolf As the 1930s drew to a close, concerns over an impending Second World War spurred Virginia to hurry certain projects. Both Virginia and Leonard had been outspoken critics of Nazism , most notably in her essay Three Guineas (1938), and were on Adolf Hitler 's (1889-1945) blacklist. Among these final undertakings was The Years (1937), a reworking of an earlier composition portraying three generations of the Pargiter family. Her last novel, Between the Acts , is a sort of memoir set during the staging and performance of a play at a festival in a small English village. It was published posthumously in 1941 . The outbreak of the war in 1939 exposed the Woolfs, like many Londoners, to bombardments by German aircraft. Virginia's old childhood home was destroyed, which had a profound emotional impact on her . This devastation, coupled with the death of her friend Roger Fry in 1934 and the failure of the biography she later wrote about him, plunged her into depression. By 1941, she found herself unable to continue her work. Overwhelmed by despair, on March 28, she wrote a note to Leonard and left their home. Weighing down her coat pockets with stones, she threw herself into the River Ouse, close to their residence . She was 59 years old. Her body was not found until April 18 . Leonard gave burial to her cremated remains beneath a tree in the Rodmell countryside. Virginia Woolf's final written words were her suicide note, addressed to her husband Leonard, left on a table before heading to the river. These poignant last words were: " 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. I begin to hear voices, and I can't concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do. You have given me the greatest possible happiness. You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I don't think two people could have been happier till this terrible disease came. I can't fight it any longer. I know that I am spoiling your life, that without me you could work. And you will, I know. You see, I can't even write this properly. I can't read. What I want to say is I owe all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good. I want to say that – everybody knows it. If anybody could have saved me, it would have been you. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can't go on spoiling your life any longer. I don't think two people could have been happier than we have been. " V. Major works of Virginia Woolf Virginia Woolf was, above all, a great Anglo-Saxon novelist and essayist. Her work, however, also encompasses notable short stories and a few biographies. Among her most important works are: Mrs Dalloway (1925) To the Lighthouse (1927) Orlando: A Biography (1928) The Waves (1931) Between the Acts (1941) (Posthumous) Modern Fiction (1919) A Room of One's Own (1929) Three Guineas (1938) The Death of the Moth and Other Essays (1942) (Posthumous) Short stories " Kew Gardens " (1919) " The New Dress " (1924) " Mrs Dalloway's Party " (1922) Carrión Villalpando, G. (2017). “Lo que dejaron atrás: famosas notas suicidas”. Tlamatini . http://humanidades.uaemex.mx/   Chikiar Bauer, I. (2012). Virginia Woolf: la vida por escrito . Random House. Lee, H. (1997). Virginia Woolf . Random House. Ministerio de Cultura de Argentina. (2020). Virginia Woolf, una escritora de vanguardia. https://www.cultura.gob.ar/   Morató, Y. (2020). “Lo escrito escrito queda: los diarios de Virginia Woolf”. Jot Down Magazine . https://www.jotdown.es/   Reid, P. (2023). “Virginia Woolf (British writer)”. The Encyclopaedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/   Explore next: Joan of Arc Victor Hugo ¿Te interesan nuestros contenidos? Puedes seguir nuestra cuenta de Instagram , donde publicamos contenidos exclusivos. Was this information useful to you? Updates? Omissions? Article suggestions? Send us your comments and suggestions Thank you for visiting us :) Virginia Woolf A short biography of virginia woolf, virginia woolf’s writing style, stream of consciousness technique. Past stage on this adventurous, long, long voyage, …” An interesting point to observe in the novels of Virginia Woolf is the difference between the rhythmic devices and the symbolic objects . For example, in the novel, To the Lighthouse , there is an extraordinary evocative meaning behind its literal appearance. A relationship between the Ramsay family and the material construction on the stony cliff beside the coast is drawn.  Poetic Style of Virginia Woolf Feminism in virginia woolf’s writings, works of virginia woolf, short stories. 336 IMAGES Virginia Woolf Biography: Her famous works, suicide note VIRGINIA WOOLF : A Biography Virginia Woolf (1882 Virginia Woolf Was More Than Just a Women’s Writer Virginia Woolf Virginia Woolf VIDEO Virginia Woolf Orlando A biography of Virginia woolf #english #virginia #youtubeshorts #shorts #history #story Exploring the mind of Virginia Woolf Virginia Woolf : Short Fiction 7 Important Facts about Virginia Woolf| Virginia Woolf Biography writing style of Virginia Woolf and Biography in Urdu/Hindi COMMENTS Virginia Woolf Virginia Woolf, English writer whose novels, through their nonlinear approaches to narrative, exerted a major influence on the genre. Best known for her novels Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, she also wrote pioneering essays on artistic theory, literary history, women's writing, and the politics of power. Virginia Woolf Virginia Woolf was a British novelist and essayist who explored modernism, feminism and mental health in her works. Virginia Woolf English author Virginia Woolf wrote modernist classics including 'Mrs. Dalloway' and 'To the Lighthouse,' as well as pioneering feminist texts, 'A Room of One's Own' and 'Three Guineas.' Virginia Woolf: A Short Biography Virginia Woolf: A Short Biography In 1926 Virginia Woolf contributed an introduction to Victorian Photographs of Famous Men & Fair Women by Julia Margaret Cameron. This publication may be seen as a springboard from which to approach Woolf's life: Virginia saw herself as descending from a distinctive male and female inheritance; Cameron was the famous Victorian photographer and Woolf's ... Virginia Woolf Biography Virginia Woolf Biography Virginia Woolf was a British modernist writer, best known for her novels Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927). These novels employed a new stream of consciousness style of writing which gave a freshness and interest to her writings. She was a prominent figure in inter-war literary circles and a member of the Bloomsbury Group. Virginia Woolf Biography Virginia Woolf Biography Born: January 25, 1882 London, England Died: March 28, 1941 Lewes, Sussex, England English novelist, critic, and essayist The English novelist, critic, and essayist Virginia Woolf ranks as one of England's most distinguished writers of the middle part of the twentieth century. Virginia Woolf Virginia Woolf - Modernist, Feminist, Novelist: At the beginning of 1924, the Woolfs moved their city residence from the suburbs back to Bloomsbury, where they were less isolated from London society. Soon the aristocratic Vita Sackville-West began to court Virginia, a relationship that would blossom into a lesbian affair. Having already written a story about a Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf thought of a ... Biographical Profile of Virginia Woolf Virginia Woolf was born Adeline Virginia Stephen on January 25, 1882, in London. Woolf was educated at home by her father, Sir Leslie Stephen, the author of the Dictionary of English Biography, and she read extensively. Her mother, Julia Duckworth Stephen, was a nurse, who published a book on nursing. Virginia Woolf Biography & Facts: Books, Quotes, and Death Find out more about Virginia Woolf's best books, quotes, and the fascinating life she led. What a New Virginia Woolf Biography Reveals About Her Life A new biography of Virginia Woolf looks at the impact of sexual abuse during her childhood and adolescence, and why this is relevant today Virginia Woolf Biography Virginia Woolf Biography. Virginia Woolf was a troubled writer who is as famous for her struggle with mental illness as for her writing. Though some critics have dismissed Woolf's oeuvre as ... Virginia Woolf Leonard Woolf. Signature. Adeline Virginia Woolf (/ˈwʊlf/; née Stephen; 25 January 1882 - 28 March 1941) was an English writer, and one of the foremost modernists of the twentieth century. During the interwar period, Woolf was a significant figure in London literary society and a central figure in the influential Bloomsbury Group of ... Virginia Woolf Was More Than Just a Women's Writer Virginia Woolf Was More Than Just a Women's Writer. She was a great observer of everyday life. Virginia Woolf, that great lover of language, would surely be amused to know that, some seven decades after her death, she endures most vividly in popular culture as a pun—within the title of Edward Albee's celebrated drama, Who's Afraid of ... Virginia Woolf Virginia Woolf. by Jessica Svendsen and Pericles Lewis. Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) was an English novelist, essayist, biographer, and feminist. Woolf was a prolific writer, whose modernist style changed with each new novel. [1] Her letters and memoirs reveal glimpses of Woolf at the center of English literary culture during the Bloomsbury era ... Orlando: A Biography Orlando: A Biography. Orlando: A Biography is a novel by Virginia Woolf, first published on 11 October 1928. Inspired by the tumultuous family history of the aristocratic poet and novelist Vita Sackville-West, Woolf's lover and close friend, it is arguably one of her most popular novels; Orlando is a history of English literature in satiric form. 8.5: Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) A Room of One's Own. In 1928, Virginia Woolf gave a series of lectures at Newnham and Girton Colleges, women's colleges at Cambridge University. A year later, she published a revision of her lectures as A Room of One's Own. Woolf's premise that a woman must have "money and a room of her own" if she is to become a writer applies ... Virginia Woolf : Biography and Literary Works Biography. Virginia Woolf was an English author, feminist, essayist, publisher, and critic, considered as one of the foremost modernists of the twentieth century along with T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, and Gertrude Stein. Her parents were Sir Leslie Stephen (1832-1904), who was a notable historian, author, critic and mountaineer, and ... Reading Comprehension About Virginia Woolf's Biography Reading Comprehension About Virginia Woolf's Biography: Uncover her life's intricacies and literary influence in this insightful journey. Virginia Woolf: life, works and death Who was Virginia Woolf? Virginia Woolf was an English writer renowned for her contribution to contemporary fiction and for being one of the central figures in Anglo-Saxon literary modernism, which reached its height between 1900 and 1940. Although she mainly wrote novels, she was also the author of short stories, essays, and biographies. Virginia Woolf, The Art of Biography (1939) For his three famous books, Eminent Victorians , Queen Victoria, and Elizabeth and Essex, are of a stature to show both what biography can do and what biography cannot do. Thus they suggest many possible answers to the question whether biography is an art, and if not why it fails. Lytton Strachey came to birth as an author at a lucky moment. Virginia Woolf's Writing Style and Short Biography Read our detailed notes on Virginia Woolf's writing style, as well as a brief biography of Virginia Woolf. essay homework paper phd project resume review speech study thesis