biography of 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

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 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 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.

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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”  

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Virginia Woolf

Virginia woolf biography.

In 1882, Virginia Woolf was born into a world that was quickly evolving. Her family was split by the mores of the stifling Victorian era, with her half-siblings firmly on the side of "polite society" and her own brothers and sisters curious about what lie on the darker side of that society. Woolf's father, the eminent scholar and biographer Sir Leslie Stephen, was a man of letters and a man of vision, befriending and encouraging authors who were then unknown, including Henry James and Thomas Hardy. As much as he encouraged his own daughters to better their minds, higher education, even in the Stephen household, was reserved for the men of the family-Woolf's brothers Thoby and Adrian. This was a bitter lesson in inequality that Woolf could never forget, even when she was later offered honorary degrees from Cambridge and other British universities that, when she was growing up, didn't even admit women into their ranks.

When Woolf and her sister Vanessa moved out of their posh London neighborhood and into a slightly seedy neighborhood called Bloomsbury with their brothers, they were on the cusp of something entirely new. They could either fall backwards into the safe arms of the upper-middle class society in which they grew up, or they could push forth into the somewhat avant-garde, ultra-intellectual and suspect world of Thoby's Cambridge friends-Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell, Desmond MacCarthy, among others. The sisters plunged headfirst into the Bloomsbury Group.

The Bloomsbury Group started out as a weekly gathering of old college friends. However, as time passed, it became an intense salon of ideas, philosophy, and theories on art and politics. Woolf and Vanessa were both important members of the group. For the first time, Woolf was around people who didn't seem to care that she was a woman, and who expected her to contribute to the group both in conversation and in deed (as in her novels). Though her old friends were scandalized by the company she was keeping (the Bloomsbury Group was famous, even in its own time, and its members were considered rude, unkempt and depraved), Woolf felt at ease among her new friends, and flourished in their company.

With this encouragement, she began writing. First she began publishing short journalistic pieces, and then longer reviews. Before long she was a regular contributor to a number of London weeklies, and was privately trying her hand at fiction. After her first novel, The Voyage Out was published to good reviews, Woolf never looked back and began producing novel after successful and daring novel. Through her often difficult but nearly always brilliant novels, she became one of the most important Modernist writers, along with James Joyce and T.S. Eliot.

Modernism was a literary movement in which its practitioners discovered new ways to relate the human experience in an uncertain, somewhat hopeless time in history. World War One had just demoralized England and the Continent, and a whole generation of young men and women were, as Gertrude Stein would later put it, "lost." Changing times demanded different modes of expression. Woolf and James Joyce, for example, utilized stream-of-consciousness to convey a character's interior monologue and to capture the irregularities and meanderings of thought.

Despite her successes, Woolf battled mental illness for most of her life. Mental illness was still poorly understood in the first half of the Twentieth Century, and Woolf–who was likely suffering from manic-depression–had few tools at her disposal with which to battle her inner demons. She lost weeks of precious work time due to her bouts with mania or with depression, and she was plagued, during these times of madness, by voices in her head. However, her devoted husband Leonard shepherded her through these difficult periods in her life and she seemed to bounce back and produce another great work of literature.

However, on March 28, 1941, as World War II raged on, Woolf left her husband two suicide notes, walked to the River Ouse, filled her pockets with heavy stones, and drowned herself. With her death, the world lost one of its most gifted voices. She left a canon of experimental, stunning fiction and a collection of insightful and incisive nonfiction and criticism. Her belief that women writers face two hindrances-social inferiority and economic dependence-was a revolutionary stance to take in the twenties when A Room of One's Own was published. Even more so was her assertion that all women deserved equal opportunity in education and career. Despite having had no educational opportunity herself, Virginia Woolf became, through her own efforts, one of the best writers of the twentieth century.

Virginia Woolf Study Guides

Mrs. dalloway, a room of one's own, to the lighthouse, “kew gardens”, “a haunted house”, virginia woolf quotes.

The strange thing about life is that though the nature of it must have been apparent to every one for hundreds of years, no one has left any adequate account of it.

Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.

A light here required a shadow there.

There were the eternal problems: suffering; death; the poor.

What is the meaning of life? That was all — 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.

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.

The beauty of the world which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.

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

The extraordinary woman depends on the ordinary woman.

Fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners.

Virginia Woolf Novels

The voyage out, night and day, jacob's room, mrs dalloway, between the acts, virginia woolf short stories, kew gardens (short story), monday or tuesday, a haunted house and other short stories, mrs dalloway's party, the complete shorter fiction, carlyle's house and other sketches, take a study break.

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Virginia Woolf: A Literary Icon of Modernism

Virginia Woolf was a literary pioneer and arguably the greatest English writer of the modernist period.

Virginia Woolf is one of the great prose stylists of English literature and has become something of a literary icon. A society beauty in her youth, a prodigiously talented author, and a pioneer of the feminist movement, Virginia Woolf’s legacy is perhaps somewhat overshadowed by the bouts of mental illness she suffered throughout her life and her suicide in 1941. Though she struggled with depression at various points in her adult life, she also produced a remarkable body of work, ranging from fiction to non-fiction, and is rightly celebrated as not only one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century but of all time.

Virginia Woolf: The Early Years

Named after an unfortunate aunt on her mother’s side of the family, Adeline Virginia Stephen was born on January 25, 1882 to Julia Duckworth Stephen and Sir Leslie Stephen, founding editor of the Dictionary of National Biography. Both her parents had already been married previously. While her disabled half-sister, Laura, from her father’s first marriage would be institutionalized by the time Virginia was nine years old, her half-sister and half-brothers on her mother’s side (George, Stella, and Gerald) lived with the four Stephen children at 22 Hyde Park Gate, Kensington, London.

In many ways, her childhood was fairly standard for a young girl of her social class. She was educated at home by her parents while her brothers went off to school and university – a gender disparity which she came to resent. While he did not send his daughters to school, Leslie Stephen did allow all his children “free run of a large and quite unexpurgated library,” from which the young Virginia read voraciously (see Further Reading, Woolf, ‘Leslie Stephen’, p. 114). Recognizing her literary talents, her father cherished the hope that Virginia – rather than his two sons, Thoby and Adrian – would follow in his footsteps and become a writer.

Her childhood was also marred by tragedy, however. Her mother died in 1895, after falling ill with influenza. That summer, Virginia – aged just 13 – suffered her first mental breakdown. In addition, from the age of six, she was sexually assaulted by her half-brothers, George and Gerald Duckworth, throughout her childhood. Her sister, Vanessa, was also assaulted, and Hermione Lee suggests that her half-sister Laura most probably was, too. When their father became ill in 1902, Virginia and Vanessa were still more vulnerable and exposed to their half-brothers, and his death in 1904 led Virginia to suffer another mental breakdown.

Finding Freedom in Bloomsbury

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Though the death of her father deeply affected Virginia, it also freed her from the conventions imposed on women in middle-class society. No longer having to play hostess to Sir Leslie’s teatime guests, Virginia and her siblings (at Vanessa’s instigation) moved out of their childhood home in Kensington and into 46 Gordon Square in Bloomsbury. At the time, Bloomsbury was not seen as a desirable locale. This, however, was part of the attraction for the Stephen siblings, who were keen to cast off the strictures and limitations of their middle-class Victorian upbringing in bohemian Bloomsbury.

Here, Virginia began teaching evening classes at Morley College. And, along with her siblings, she held “at homes” for Thoby’s friends at Cambridge University, including Lytton Strachey, Saxon Sydney Turner, Clive Bell, and Leonard Woolf. This marked the beginning of what came to be known as the Bloomsbury Group. When her favorite brother, Thoby, contracted typhoid during a family holiday to Greece and died shortly after returning to London at their Bloomsbury home in 1906, the Bloomsbury Group could have fallen apart. Shortly after his death, however, Vanessa agreed to marry Clive Bell. And when Virginia married Leonard Woolf in 1912, the group was even further consolidated, with the two Stephen sisters centering the group as Thoby had done before them.

The First Three Novels: The Voyage Out, Night and Day, & Jacob’s Room

When Virginia Stephen married Leonard Woolf in 1912, she was thirty years old and, though she thought of herself as a writer, had yet to publish a novel. She was, however, working on what would be her first novel, The Voyage Out (1915). This, along with her next novel, Night and Day (1919), was published by Duckworth Press, established by her half-brother, Gerald. Not only did Virginia not want to be dependent on her abusive half-brother when publishing her books, she felt the pressure to write books that would be sufficiently popular to secure her further publishing deals for any future novels and thus secure her future career as a writer. Determined to revolutionize the novel, this state of affairs did not suit Virginia Woolf or her creative ambitions.

In 1915, however, Leonard and Virginia Woolf moved to Hogarth House on Paradise Road, also in London. It was here that the couple would set up the Hogarth Press, which not only went on to print all of Virginia’s later works but also work by T. S. Eliot, Katherine Mansfield, and the first English translations of the works of Sigmund Freud .

Though it did entail more work for the young couple, having their own printing press gave Virginia Woolf the freedom to write whatever she liked. Her third novel, Jacob’s Room , was published by the Hogarth Press in 1922 and it marks a significant turn in her writing style. Embracing a more experimental mode of writing with Jacob’s Room, Woolf found her voice as a writer and paved the way for her later works.

Continued Success: Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, & Orlando

The first novel published after Jacob’s Room was Mrs Dalloway (1925), which is widely considered to be among Woolf’s greatest works. While Katherine Mansfield had criticized Woolf for neglecting to mention the First World War in her earlier novel Night and Day , here, Woolf drew on her own experiences of illness to depict the inner lives of Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Warren Smith, a shell-shocked veteran struggling to cope with civilian life.

For her next novel, Woolf drew on her childhood holidays in St. Ives and attempted to exorcise the ghosts of her late parents. In To the Lighthouse (1927), Woolf depicts the lives (and deaths) of members of the Ramsay family both before and after the First World War and a series of deaths that devastate the family. In doing so, she focuses on the human cost of war and loss while meditating upon the struggles faced by female artists .

While writing To the Lighthouse , Virginia Woolf had fallen in love with the English aristocratic socialite and writer Vita Sackville-West. As both a break from her own more serious works of literary experimentation and a love letter to Vita, she published Orlando just one year after the release of To the Lighthouse . In Orlando , Virginia Woolf draws on and fictionalizes Vita’s aristocratic ancestry to create the novel’s eponymous protagonist, who lives for centuries and transitions from a man to a woman. Not only did Virginia Woolf give Vita a fictionalized version of her beloved childhood home, Knole, to keep, she also wrote a feminist classic and an important text for the field of transgender studies .

Politics and Polemic

As well as writing some of the twentieth century’s most important novels, Virginia Woolf was also a celebrated essayist and writer of non-fiction. Her essays were collected into two volumes of The Common Reader, and she was involved in the UK’s Labour Party through her husband.

Perhaps her most famous work of non-fiction, however, is A Room of One’s Own , which is now considered a foundational feminist text. While the main body of the text focuses on women’s issues, towards the end of A Room of One’s Own, she takes aim at Benito Mussolini’s fascist regime in Italy. And it was the rise of fascism that was to inspire her subsequent extended work of polemical non-fiction, Three Guineas . As a lifelong pacifist, she was horrified by fascist Italy and Germany , having visited both countries before the outbreak of the Second World War with Leonard. In Three Guineas , she seeks to draw parallels between fascism and anti-feminism in these regimes. Despite the seriousness of the topics she covered, both A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas maintain a lightness of tone and an impish irreverence for institutions and figures of authority.

Late Style: The Waves, The Years, & Between the Acts

The Waves was published in 1931 and is perhaps Woolf’s most formally audacious and experimental novel. The novel’s narration is split between six characters, whom we follow from childhood to adulthood, and the events of the novel are focalized and filtered through their various and often interweaving consciousnesses. Throughout her work, Woolf was concerned with exploring human interiority, though nowhere does she explore it so thoroughly as in The Waves .

The Years (1937), then, might seem to be something of a contrast. Originally conceived of as a hybrid of the essay and the novel, extricated the two halves, which came to be The Years and Three Guineas . However, shorn of its experimental hybridity, The Years may not initially seem to be a very experimental novel at all, but rather a return to the realist family sagas of the previous century. Here, however, Woolf sought to demonstrate how the wider currents of public and political life intersect with the privacy of her characters’ lives. Perhaps due to its outward conventionality, The Years was Woolf’s best-selling novel within her own lifetime.

Virginia Woolf would not live to see her final novel, Between the Acts (1941), published. Focusing on the lead-up to and performance of a pageant play as part of a festival in a small village in southern England shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War, Between the Acts captures a moment of calm before the storm. Virginia Woolf, however, did not live to see the end of the war.

Disappointed by the reception of her biography of Roger Fry and feeling unmoored and uncertain following the destruction of her London homes during the Blitz, she fell into a depression and suffered what was to be her final breakdown. On 28 March 1941, she weighed her pockets down with stones and waded into the River Ouse, where she drowned. She was 59 years old.

Virginia Woolf’s life was thus cut tragically short. Yet, in spite of her mental health struggles, she managed to produce a prodigious output of writing – and, more importantly, she did so on her own terms, according to her own artistic ambitions. A lifelong advocate for pacifism and feminism and a scathing critic of the rise of fascism in the early twentieth century, she was as fearless when it came to speaking her mind in her non-fictional works as she was when charting new artistic territories in her fiction. And it is for these achievements that Woolf deserves to be remembered and for which she has become a literary icon.

Further Reading:

Lee, Hermione, Virginia Woolf (London: Vintage, 1997).

Nadel, Ira, Virginia Woolf (London: Reaktion Books, 2016).

Spalding, Frances, The Bloomsbury Group (London: National Portrait Gallery Publications, 2021).

Woolf, Virginia, ‘Leslie Stephen’, in Selected Essays , ed. by David Bradshaw (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 111-15.

Woolf, Virginia, Moments of Being: Autobiographical Writings , ed. by Jeanne Schulkind (London: Pimlico, 2002).

Artist’s Homes: Creative Spaces and Art Studios of Famous Painters

By Catherine Dent MA 20th and 21st Century Literary Studies, BA English Literature Catherine holds a first-class BA from Durham University and an MA with distinction, also from Durham, where she specialized in the representation of glass objects in the work of Virginia Woolf. In her spare time, she enjoys writing fiction, reading, and spending time with her rescue dog, Finn.

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Virginia Woolf

By ellen gutoskey | dec 16, 2019.

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.”

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• English Literature, 20th cent. to the Present: Biographies

Woolf, Virginia

Virginia woolf.

BORN: 1882, London, England

DIED: 1941, Lewes, Sussex, England

NATIONALITY: British

GENRE: Fiction, nonfiction

MAJOR WORKS: Mrs. Dalloway (1925) To the Lighthouse (1927) Orlando (1928) A Room of One's Own (1929)

One of the most prominent literary figures of the twentieth century, Virginia Woolf is chiefly renowned as an innovative novelist. She also wrote book reviews, biographical and autobiographical sketches, social and literary criticism, personal essays, and commemorative articles treating a wide range of topics. Concerned primarily with depicting the life of the mind, Woolf revolted against traditional narrative structures and developed her own highly individualized style of writing.

Works in Biographical and Historical Context

Early Life in an Unconventional and Literary Atmosphere Born in London, Virginia Woolf was the third child of Julia and Leslie Stephen . Although her brothers, Thoby and Adrian, were sent to school, Virginia and her sister, Vanessa, were taught at home by their parents and by tutors. Theirs was a highly literary family. Woolf received no formal education, but she was raised in a cultured atmosphere, learning from her father's extensive library and from conversing with his friends, many of whom were prominent writers of the era.

Formation of the Bloomsbury Group Following the death of her father in 1904, Woolf settled in the Bloomsbury district of London with her sister and brothers. Their house became a gathering place where such friends as J. M. Keynes, Lytton Strachey , Roger Fry, and E. M. Forster congregated for lively discussions about philosophy, art, music, and literature. A complex network of friendships and love affairs developed, serving to increase the solidarity of what became known as the Bloomsbury Group. Here she met Leonard Woolf, the author, politician, and economist whom she married in 1912. Woolf flourished in the unconventional atmosphere that she and her siblings had cultivated.

Financial Need Catalyzes Literary Output The need to earn money led her to begin submitting book reviews and essays to various publications. Her first published works—mainly literary reviews—began appearing anonymously in 1904 in the Guardian , a weekly newspaper for Anglo-Catholic clergy. Woolf's letters and diaries reveal that journalism occupied much of her time and thought between 1904 and 1909. By the latter year, however, she was becoming absorbed in work on her first novel, eventually published in 1915 as The Voyage Out .

The Hogarth Press In 1914, World War I began, a devastating conflict that involved carnage on an unprecedented scale. It involved nearly every European country and, eventually, the United States . About twenty million people were killed as a direct result of the war. Nearly a million British soldiers died (similar losses were experienced by all the other warring nations). In 1917, while England was in the midst of fighting World War I , Woolf and her husband cofounded the Hogarth Press. They bought a small handpress, with a booklet of instructions, and set up shop on the dining room table in Hogarth House, their lodgings in Richmond. They planned to print only some of their own writings and that of their talented friends. Leonard hoped the manual work would provide Virginia a relaxing diversion from the stress of writing.

It is a tribute to their combined business acumen and critical judgment that this small independent venture became, as Mary Gaither recounts, “a self-supporting business and a significant publishing voice in England between the wars.” Certainly being her own publisher made it much easier for Virginia Woolf to pursue her experimental bent but also enabled her to gain greater financial independence from what was at that time a male-dominated industry. Like Woolf, many British women joined the professional work force in an increased capacity during World War I, capitalizing on England's need for heavy industry to support its armed forces.

Successful Experiments This philosophy of daring and experimental writing is shown in her self-published works. While the novel Night and Day (1919) is not astylistic experiment, it deals with the controversial issue of women's suffrage, or right to vote—a right championed by Woolf. At the time of its publication, English women over the age of thirty had just finally received voting rights; it would still be another decade before women held the exact same voting rights as men. Where Woolf might have had difficulty finding another publisher for a book dealing with such a subject, access to Hogarth Press left her free to deal with whatever subject matter she saw fit.

This freedom expressed itself more in stylistic terms in her following works. The novel Jacob's Room (1922), for example, tells the story of a character who is never directly introduced to the reader, but only revealed through the recollections of others. Mrs. Dalloway (1925) takes place over the course of a single day and presents the thoughts of characters in a free-flowing way meant to mimic actual consciousness. This description of her characters's “inner life” continued with To the Lighthouse (1927), and both novels earned Woolf the esteem of critics and readers. These novels, despite being experimental in style, directly reflect the author's own literate and well-heeled upbringing in their characters and settings.

Circumventing Censorship in Orlando Woolf drew upon her own relationships in Orlando (1928) a book characterized by Woolf as a biography but by most readers as a novel. The main character, who does not grow old and changes genders, is directly inspired by the female author Vita Sackville-West , a bisexual member of the Bloomsbury Group with whom Woolf had an intimate relationship. Many scholars and critics have viewed the main character's gender-switching as a clever device meant to suggest—but not directly depict—a lesbian relationship, since such topics were the subject of censorship at the time.

Depression and Suicide Woolf fought an ongoing battle against depression for most of her life. After her mother's death in 1895, she had a nervous breakdown , the first of four periods of depression and emotional trauma. Woolf had a second breakdown nine years later when her father died. A third episode of mental illness began early in 1912, became acute in September of 1913 (when she attempted suicide), and lasted into 1916.

LITERARY AND HISTORICAL CONTEMPORARIES

Woolf's famous contemporaries include:

Henry James (1843–1916): James was an American-born novelist who became a British citizen and was highly influential in both British and American literary circles. Sigmund Freud (1858–1939): Freud was an Austrian psychologist who founded the school of psychoanalysis and pioneered theories of the unconscious mind. James Joyce (1882–1941): Joyce was an Irish writer who is widely considered one of the literary giants of the twentieth century, particularly because of his master-work, Ulysses . Katherine Mansfield (1888–1923): Mansfield was a prominent New Zealand modernist short-fiction writer. T. S. Eliot (1888–1965): Eliot was an American-born poet and dramatist who became a British citizen at the age of thirty-nine. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948. William Faulkner (1897–1962): Faulkner was an American novelist widely regarded as one of the most influential authors of the twentieth century. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1949. Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986): De Beauvoir was a French author and philosopher best known for her 1949 treatise The Second Sex , an analysis of women's oppression and one of the most important texts of modern feminism.

In 1941 Woolf published her last novel, Between the Acts . She suffered another emotional breakdown in February of 1941, likely brought on by the escalation of World War II . After the horror of World War I, many people felt there could not possibly be another conflict of that type in Europe. That Europe could descend into violence once again so soon after World War I shocked and saddened Woolf deeply. Fearing that she lacked the stamina needed to weather further bouts of depression, Woolf drowned herself in a pond near Monks House, the Woolfs' home in Sussex, on March 28, 1941.

Works in Literary Context

Stream of Consciousness Woolf grew up in an environment rich in Victorian literary influences. Although she lacked the formal education afforded to men of her day, Woolf acquired extensive knowledge of the classics and English literature in the family's enormous home library. In addition, many influential literary figures visited her childhood house, including George Eliot , Henry James, George Lewes, Julia Cameron, and James Lowell, who was named Woolf's godfather. Proximity to influential writers of her day continued into her adulthood with the formation of the Bloomsbury group and creation of the Hogarth Press. With the freedom to create and publish her own work, Woolf largely avoided traditional narrative structures or plots. Her novels are noted for their subjective exploration of character and theme and their poetic prose. Woolf is chiefly renowned as an innovative novelist and in particular for her contribution to the development of the stream-of-consciousness narrative technique.

The stream-of-consciousness technique is found in much of Woolf's fiction. This technique, which emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, is meant to reflect the way in which a character's thoughts flow freely, often without formal sentence structure or punctuation. Famous writers that popularized this technique included James Joyce and Marcel Proust . Examples of Woolf's stream-of-consciousness style can be found in many of her works but are especially notable in Mrs. Dalloway (1925).

Writing for “the Common Reader” Woolf also wrote book reviews, biographical and autobiographical sketches, social and literary criticism, personal essays, and commemorative articles treating a wide range of topics. Her essays are commended for their perceptive observations on nearly the entire range of English literature , as well as many social and political concerns of the early twentieth century. She maintained that the purpose of writing an essay was to give pleasure to the reader, and she endeavored to do this with witty, supple prose, apt literary and cultural references, and a wide range of subjects. Aiming to identify closely with her audience, she adopted a persona she termed “the common reader”: an intelligent, educated person with the will and inclination to be challenged by what he or she reads.

Influence Because of her importance as an innovator in the modern novel form, and as a commentator on nearly the entire range of English literature and much European literature, Woolf's life and works have been the focus of extensive study. In addition to occupying the attention of scholars, Woolf has inspired experimental works in a variety of artistic genres including author Michael Cunningham's Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Hours (1998), in which Woolf appears as a character, and playwright Edward Albee 's work Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962) among many others.

Works in Critical Context

The writings of Virginia Woolf have always been admired by discriminating readers, but her work has suffered, as has that of many other major authors, periods of neglect by the literary establishment. She was, as she herself put it, always a hare a long way ahead of “those hounds my critics.” It was difficult to find copies of her books during the 1950s and 1960s, and they were rarely included on syllabi for literature classes. The extensive and serious treatment given Virginia Woolf's novel To the Lighthouse in Erich Auerbach's much-esteemed book Mimesis (translated into English in 1953), presaged and perhaps helped cause the turnaround.

The advantages of the recent critical and popular attention are manifold. Her novels are now in print again, in a variety of editions, often with introductions in homage by today's writers. They have been translated into more than fifty languages. Her essays, reviews, and short stories have been collected. And then there is the vast delight of the many volumes of letters and diaries, all scrupulously edited, copiously footnoted, and indexed. Even her reading notes are being published.

COMMON HUMAN EXPERIENCE

Woolf's fiction reveals an ongoing concern with subjective exploration of character and incident, which she accomplishes with frequent use of a stream-of-consciousness narrative style. Here are some other works that are constructed with a stream-of-consciousness style:

Ulysses (1922), a novel by James Joyce. This work, widely considered to be one of the most important works of modern literature, chronicles its main character's passage through Dublin during an ordinary day. Steppenwolf (1927), a novel by Hermann Hesse . This work explores the duality of human nature as exemplified by the inner and outer struggles of its main character. As I Lay Dying (1930), a novel by William Faulkner . This work tells the story of the death of Addie Bundren from the point of view of fifteen different narrators. On the Road (1957), a novel by Jack Kerouac . This highly autobiographical work is based on the author's recollections of spontaneous road trips across mid-twentieth-century America.

Mrs. Dalloway When Mrs. Dalloway was published in 1925, Woolf received the immediate critical attention her earlier fiction failed to find. In a review for the New York Times , John W. Crawford wrote that, despite the inventiveness of other contemporary authors, “Virginia Woolf is almost alone … in the intricate yet clear art of her composition.” Edwin Muir, in Transition: Essays on Contemporary Literature , compares the novel favorably to her earlier Night and Day , stating, “[I]t is infinitely more subtle in its means, and it has on all its pages, as Night and Day had not, the glow of an indisputable artistic triumph.”

To the Lighthouse The critical success Woolf achieved with Mrs. Dalloway raised expectations for the 1927 release of her next novel, To the Lighthouse . Critical opinion of the book was mixed, with many noting the author's obvious skill at turning a phrase and offering credit for the stylistic and structural difficulties she tackled with the work. Edwin Muir, in a review for Nation and Atheneum , states that the book is “difficult to judge” because of this, and he credits Woolf as “a writer of profound imagination.” Muir concedes, “Yet as a whole, though showing an advance on many sides, it produces a less congruous and powerful effect than Mrs. Dalloway .” In his review for the New York Times , Louis Kronenberger agrees: “It is inferior to Mrs. Dalloway in the degree to which its aims are achieved; it is superior in the magnitude of the aims themselves.” Orlo Williams, in a review for the Monthly Criterion , offers praise wrapped in criticism: “Her mastery increases with each book, but, I fear, it will always fall short of her vision.” Despite these reviews, modern scholars have devoted much attention to the novel as one of Woolf's most complex and masterful works.

Responses to Literature

• Because Woolf and her husband operated a press, she was free to write without worrying about rejection by a publisher. In today's world, the Internet allows nearly anyone to publish their views easily and cheaply. Does the Internet provide the same kind of freedom that Woolf enjoyed as a writer? Are there differences in the way that online writers make use of their freedom? Do readers today approach online writings differently than they approach printed texts?
• In Mrs. Dalloway , Woolf presents the suicidal character of Septimus Smith, a shell-shocked World War I veteran. Veterans of World War I commonly exhibited mental health problems, but they were largely misunderstood by doctors. Today, someone like Septimus Smith would probably be diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder . Using your library and the Internet, research the history of medical treatment for post-combat mental illnesses. Write an essay summarizing your findings.
• Woolf famously argued in her long essay A Room of One's Own that in order for women to succeed as writers of fiction, they needed to have a reliablemeans of income and a private space in which to work. Why do you think having “a room of one's own” would be important for women writers of the early twentieth century? In your opinion, are these still important factors for allowing women to succeed as writers? Why or why not? Do these same prerequisites also apply for male writers? Why or why not?
• Woolf frequently employed a stream-of-consciousness narrative style to explore the inner lives of her characters. Write a short story or essay using the stream-of-consciousness style.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature , translated by Willard R. Trask. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1953.

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

Bennett, Joan. Virginia Woolf: Her Art as a Novelist . Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1964.

Edel, Leon. Bloomsbury: A House of Lions . Philadelphia and New York: Lippincott, 1979.

Fleishman, Avrom. Virginia Woolf: A Critical Reading . Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975.

Freedman, Ralph, ed. Virginia Woolf: Revaluation and Continuity . Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980.

Gaither, Mary. “A Short History of the Press,” in A Checklist of the Hogarth Press , by J. Howard Woolmer. Andes, N.Y.: Woolmer / Brotherson, 1976.

Goldman, Mark. The Reader's Art: Virginia Woolf as Literary Critic . The Hague: Mouton, 1976.

Gorsky, Suan Rubinow. Virginia Woolf . Boston: Twayne, 1978.

Kirkpatrick, B. J. A Bibliography of Virginia Woolf , 3rd ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980.

Latham, Jacqueline E. M., ed. Critics on Virginia Woolf . London: Allen & Unwin, 1970.

Leaska, Mitchell A. The Novels of Virginia Woolf: From Beginning to End. New York: John Jay Press, 1977.

Lehmann, John. Virginia Woolf and Her World. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975.

Noble, Joan Russell, ed. Recollections of Virginia Woolf by Her Contemporaries . New York: Morrow, 1972.

Spater, George and Ian Parsons. A Marriage of True Minds . New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977.

Crawford, John W. “The Perfect Hostess (review of Mrs. Dalloway .” New York Times (May 10, 1925). Reprinted on the New York Times Web site at http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/06/08/reviews/woolf-dalloway.html . Accessed May 27, 2008.

Kronenberger, Louis. “Virginia Woolf Explores an English Country Home (review of To the Lighthouse .” New York Times , May 8, 1927. Reprinted on the New York Times Web site at http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/06/08/reviews/woolf-lighthouse.html . Accessed May 27, 2008.

University of Alabama in Huntsville Web site. Contemporary Reviews of To the Lighthouse. Retrieved May 27, 2008 from http://www.uah.edu/woolf/lighthousecontemprev.html .

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Virginia Stephen Woolf

The English novelist, critic, and essayist Virginia Stephen Woolf (1882-1941) ranks as one of England's most distinguished writers of the period between World War I and World War II . Her novels can perhaps best be described as impressionistic.

Dissatisfied with the novel based on familiar, factual, and external details, Virginia Woolf followed experimental clues to a more internal, subjective, and in a sense more personal rendering of experience than had been provided by Henry James, Marcel Proust , and James Joyce . In the works of these masters the reality of time and experience had formed the stream of consciousness , a concept that probably originated with William James . Virginia Woolf lived in and responded to a world in which certitudes were collapsing under the stresses of changing knowledge, the civilized savagery of war, and new manners and morals. She drew on her personal, sensitive, poetic awareness without rejecting altogether the heritage of literary culture she derived from her family.

Early Years and Marriage

Virginia Stephen was born in London on Jan. 25, 1882. She was the daughter of Sir Leslie Stephen , a famous scholar and agnostic philosopher 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. Virginia's mother died when the child was 12 or 13 years old, and she was educated at home in her father's library, where she also met his famous friends.

In 1912, eight years after her father's death, Virginia married Leonard Woolf, a brilliant young writer and critic from Cambridge whose interests in literature as well as in economics and the labor movement were well suited to hers. In 1917, for amusement, they originated 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 , then an unknown writer; Poems by T. S. Eliot; 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 obscure 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.

Quite early in her career Virginia Woolf's home in Tavistock Square, Bloomsbury, became a literary and art center, attracting such diverse intellectuals as E. M. Forster, Lytton Strachey , Arthur Waley, Victoria Sackville-West, John Maynard Keynes, and Roger Fry. 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 preeminent in life.

As Critic and Essayist

Virginia Woolf began writing essays for the Times Literary Supplement 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. One passage frequently studied occurs in "Modern Fiction" in the First Series: "Life is not a series of … big lamps symmetrically arranged; but a luminous halo, a semitransparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. Is it not the task of the novelist to convey this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit, whatever aberration or complexity it may display, with as little mixture of the alien and external as possible?"

Another essay frequently studied is "Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown," written in 1924, in which Virginia Woolf describes the manner in which the older-generation novelist Arnold Bennett would have portrayed Mrs. Brown, a lady casually met in a railway carriage, by giving her a house and furniture and a position in the world. She then contrasts this method with another: one that exhibits a new interest in the subjective Mrs. Brown, the mysteries of her person, her consciousness, and the consciousness of the observer responding to her.

Achievement as Novelist

Two of Virginia Woolf's novels in particular, Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927), follow successfully the latter approach. The first novels 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, or engraved with the sharpness of steel." To the Lighthouseis, in a sense, a family portrait and history rendered in subjective 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 equipoise and reconciliation. Part II: Time Passes, is a moving evocation 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 intricate and subjective 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. The novel is impressionistic, subjectively perceptive, and poignant.

Last Years and Other Books

Virginia Woolf was the author of about 15 books, the last, A Writer's Diary, posthumously published in 1953. Her death by drowning in Lewes, Sussex, on March 28, 1941, has often been regarded as a suicide brought on by the unbearable strains of life during World War II . The true explanation seems to be that she had felt symptoms of a recurrence of a mental breakdown and feared that it would be permanent.

Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and Jacob's Room (1922) constitute Virginia Woolf's major achievement. 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. Other experimental novels include Orlando (1928), The Years (1937), and Between the Acts (1941). Virginia Woolf's championship of woman's rights is reflected in the essays in A Room of One's Own (1929) and in Three Guineas (1938).

Further Reading

Virginia Woolf's diary was edited by her husband, Leonard Sidney Woolf, The Dairy of Virginia Woolf (1953). Leonard Woolf's five-volume autobiography not only deals in great detail with his life with Virginia Woolf but reveals much about English social and literary history since 1939: Sowing: An Autobiography of the Years, 1880-1904 (1960), Growing: An Autobiography of the Years, 1904-1911 (1962), Beginning Again: An Autobiography of the Years, 1911 to 1918 (1964), Downhill All the Way: An Autobiography of the Years, 1919-1939 (1967), and The Journey, Not the Arrival Matters: An Autobiography of the Years, 1939-1969 (1970).

Much has been written about Virginia Woolf. Her experimental technique as well as her psychological depth made her, in a sense, a critic's writer. Interesting and helpful studies include David Daiches, Virginia Woolf (1942; rev. ed. 1963); Joan Bennett, Virginia Woolf: Her Art as a Novelist (1945; 2d ed. 1964); Bernard Blackstone, Virginia Woolf: A Commentary (1949); James Hafley, The Glass Roof: Virginia Woolf as Novelist (1954); Aileen Pippett, The Moth and the Star: A Biography of Virginia Woolf (1955); Dorothy Brewster, Virginia Woolf (1962); Jean Guiguet, Virginia Woolf and Her Works (trans. 1966); Carl Woodring, Virginia Woolf (1966); and Jean O. Love, World of Consciousness: Mythopoetic Thought in the Novels of Virginia Woolf (1970). □

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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.

An essay frequently studied is "Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown," written in 1924, in which Virginia Woolf described the manner in which the older-generation novelist Arnold Bennett would have portrayed Mrs. Brown, a lady casually met in a railway carriage, by giving her a house and furniture and a position in the world. She then contrasted this method with another: one that exhibits a new interest in Mrs. Brown, the mysteries of her person, her consciousness (awareness), and the consciousness of the observer responding to her.

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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VIRGINIA WOOLF

(1882 - 1941)

English novelist, critic, essayist, short story writer, diarist, autobiographer, and biographer.

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NEARBY TERMS

‘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

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 Society of Great Britain

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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The best virginia woolf books, recommended by hermione lee.

Virginia Woolf by Hermione Lee

Virginia Woolf was long dismissed as a 'minor modernist' but now stands as one of the giants of 20th century literature. Her biographer, Hermione Lee , talks us through the novels, essays, and diaries of Virginia Woolf.

Interview by David Shackleton

To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

The Years by Virginia Woolf

Walter Sickert: A Conversation by Virginia Woolf

On Being Ill by Virginia Woolf

Selected Diaries by Virginia Woolf

1 To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

2 the years by virginia woolf, 3 walter sickert: a conversation by virginia woolf, 4 on being ill by virginia woolf, 5 selected diaries by virginia woolf.

B efore we get to the books, let’s start this discussion by looking at your biography of  Virginia Woolf. In it you mention that when you were studying English literature as an undergraduate at Oxford University, there weren’t any lectures on Woolf, and as a graduate student, you were told that Woolf was a ‘minor modernist’, not to be classed with the likes of James Joyce, T. S. Eliot or D. H. Lawrence. Why has so much changed since then?

It must have been really exciting writing her biography when so many of her writings, diaries and letters had only recently become available, or weren’t available at all to the public.

I was interested that you chose To the Lighthouse and The Years as your two favourite Virginia Woolf books. Why did you choose To the Lighthouse ?

It’s a very difficult thing to be asked to choose your favourite novels, especially if you’re a Virginia Woolf biographer. I could just as happily have chosen Jacob’s Room or Mrs Dalloway . I chose To the Lighthouse because, when all is said and done, I think it is her greatest novel. I find it still, every single time I read it—and I must have read it more than any other book in my reading life—very moving, tremendously impressive, extremely complicated and interesting in how it’s put together, and approachable in many different kinds of ways. It’s approachable as a love story, as a family story, as a ghost story, as an elegy for the nineteenth century, as a war novel—in an indirect and interesting way—and as an astonishingly ambitious experiment in a completely different way of writing fiction.

It certainly is radically experimental. The literary critic Erich Auerbach famously analysed one scene in the novel, in which Mrs Ramsay sits knitting a stocking for the lighthouse keeper’s boy, and he points out that it probably takes longer to read this description than it would have taken Mrs Ramsay to knit. Why should we, as readers in the twenty-first century, be excited to read such slow-paced descriptions of seemingly trivial incidents?

There’s a fashion for that now. There could be another life of Virginia Woolf in the context of books like Elena Ferrante ’s series on Naples, where you have a slow burn through the minute descriptions of the lives of her characters. Or Karl Knausgård’s autobiographies, where you spend fifty pages on slow processes of his life. John Updike is another example. The idea that you go minutely and slowly, in intense close-up, into moments in people’s lives, is something that people find interesting, perhaps because readers are fascinated by autobiography and memoir. What Woolf does in her narratives is to think about many kinds of different shapes and forms, like a painting, or abstract marks down the middle of a page, or the shape of a bowl of fruit, or the shape of a lighthouse in the bay. She tries to build a story almost like an abstract painting—and there’s a lot about painting in To the Lighthouse . It’s a novel that doesn’t just let you read the story, it makes you think about the shape and structure. She is interested in how to master the passing of time. She is obsessed with death and loss and elegy and memory. This is a kind of a ghost story. And you feel, at any moment, that the whole thing could fall apart into fragments if she didn’t keep on shaping it and shaping it. In the middle there’s an extraordinary section called ‘Time Passes’, where you see the house left on its own, beginning to decay, and then it’s brought back into life. You’re made to think about structure all the time. You don’t just read for the story—chapter 1, chapter 2, chapter 3. She’s making you think about how a narrative can shape the passing of time.

It’s an amazing middle section, ‘Time Passes’.

You don’t know who is speaking, there’s nobody there.

It’s very disconcerting.

I think these achievements are very modern and still fresh. Students who are now reading it for the first time are deeply interested in those kinds of experiments.

I remember being shocked by the way that Mrs Ramsay’s death is treated in ‘Time Passes’. Can you say a bit about that?

It’s a very bold thing to do. You get invested in the characters in the first part of the novel, even if you don’t like them much—and you’re not necessarily supposed to like them. There’s a rather tyrannical, eccentric father, Mr Ramsay, and the kind of mother who thinks that a woman’s life is about having children and bringing up families and matchmaking, and being attentive to the head of the family. She is not particularly interested in feminism or new ways for women to live their lives. There is the family with all the conflicts that go on inside the many children’s lives, and then there are the visitors, who are watching this family. Mrs Ramsay is a magnetic figure who pulls people towards her. It is partly a love story between the parents, and between the children and visitors who are all in love with her. And then she dies. She dies in brackets, in passing, in the middle section. The last section is about how they all live their lives after she has gone, and about their memory of her. The brutality with which she is chucked away in the middle section never fails to shock people when they read the book for the first time. Here is this woman you’re supposed to be minding about, then she’s killed off in brackets. That’s exactly what happens to people, and certainly happened a lot to Virginia Woolf. You’re living your life, and suddenly fate comes and wipes someone out—you don’t know why and you don’t know how. This brutal, fatal, sudden removal of people in whom you are deeply invested is something that she writes about over and over again.

So it’s almost more true-to-life than a prolonged death-bed scene?

Let’s talk more about your second choice of Virginia Woolf books, The Years . At least at first glance, it seems a lot less obviously experimental than To the Lighthouse , or The Waves . It tells the story of the Pargiter family over three generations, which, on the face of it, is a fairly conventional thing to be doing. Is it a more straightforward novel?

In some ways it is, and it had a kind of success that suggests that people were reading it as if it were, say, like Galsworthy’s Forsyte Saga . It was a big commercial success in her time. Now it’s the least favoured of all her books, which is partly why I chose it: because I wanted to give it an airing. That and Night and Day , I would think, are the two least read. It’s not a transfixingly experimental book in the way that Mrs Dalloway or To the Lighthouse are. She called it her ‘failure’. She had a terrible time writing it, and kept changing her mind about what she wanted to do with it. But the reason why I think it’s interesting and important is that it’s an extremely political book. In The Years , the Victorian family that is growing into the modern world—the novel goes from the 1880s until the present day, which is 1936—is dealing with issues of feminism, of attitudes to women and the abuse of women, issues of abortion and child abuse, and women’s rights, racism and class war. These things are implicit in novels like Jacob’s Room or Mrs Dalloway or To the Lighthouse —novels of the 1920s—but in the 1930s, when all around her Woolf sees the rise of fascism, she feels, like other writers of the time, the need to speak about politics. She is extremely engaged with the public world.

The Years is a deeply flawed book, but it’s brave about political issues. In her mind, the late nineteenth-century world in which she grew up had all kinds of conventions and hypocrisies and rather stultifying ways of treating family life—in which girls, for instance, didn’t go to school if they were from an upper-middle class family, and sex was never spoken about, and young women had chaperones. The people of her generation get out of that. They go and live in Bloomsbury, they become artists, they are outspoken about sex. But they’ve lost something as well. They’ve lost a sense of solidity and gravitas and rootedness, and she struggles with that. She feels that the quality of modern life is thinner, somehow, than the quality of the life of her parents. The Years is partly about that, but it is also about individual struggles to make a meaningful life, at a time which seemed to her not helpful to individual fruition or fulfillment. She felt that the times were dark. And they were.

It coincides with a lot of her most overtly political writings.

Moving away from Virginia Woolf’s books and on to her essays, why did you select ‘Walter Sickert: A Conversation’?

Writing about ‘On Being Ill’, you have distinguished between vertical and horizontal types of reading. Could you say briefly what the difference between the two is, and how this essay could be thought to be about horizontal reading?

Yes. Well, she’s horizontal because she’s ill and is lying on her back, and so the essay is about what it feels like to have given up the race to make your living and go out and live in the normal world. And so I suppose vertical reading would be orthodox reading where you are accountable and have to make sense of what you’re reading, and to be able to have an intelligent conversation about it once you have read it. Whereas horizontal reading is when you’re lying down with a raging temperature—perhaps you have got the flu—and you’re picking up books that happen to be lying around, as they would have been in her house, and you are biting off little bits of poetry, and little bits of stuff here and there, and you’re not even making sense of it. It’s almost like nonsense, but all kinds of unlikely and unexpected emotions are coming at you through the little fragments that you’re picking up here and there. Reading with a high temperature is a sort of illicit reading.

“What Woolf does in her narratives is to think about many kinds of different shapes and forms, like a painting.”

I was interested that you chose Virginia Woolf’s diaries. Compared to her novels or her essays, they might be overlooked, or if not overlooked, mined for insights about the novels. Are they worth reading in themselves?

Yes, completely. It’s a life’s work for her. It’s an astonishing thing to have decades of almost daily diary entries from a great writer, who tells you about her work in progress, about her innermost thoughts, about the people she knows, about everything she’s been doing. They’re written in a different way from the novels, and she often talks in the diaries about how she’s writing them. She invents what she calls a loose, quick, free style; she’s trying not to correct herself. When you read them, the actual physical things, sometimes she’s writing so fast, with very few crossings out or blots, that you can see the line of the handwriting dipping down towards the end of the line. This is her mind pouring out at you. Of course, there are times when you can see she’s thinking, ‘maybe I’ll write a really good description of Yeats or H. G. Wells now, and then when I’m dead, people will publish my diaries, and read it’. There’s a slight self-consciousness there. But the diary works on many levels. It works as a practice book: she’s practising certain kinds of sentences. It works as a therapeutic book: she says ‘I’m going to calm myself down now by writing this in the book’. And it is a commentary on work in progress: she tells you the first thought she has of To the Lighthouse , or Mrs Dalloway .

Just to give you an example, there are a couple of pages, over four days in October 1922, where she moves from a visit from ‘Tom Eliot’, as she calls him—who she thinks may be wearing lipstick, and is somewhat overbearing and threatening to her, but is someone in whom she is much interested—to anxiety because her novel,  Jacob’s Room, is about to come out, and then to a sense of great pleasure or freedom. She says: ‘At last, I like reading my own writing. . . . I have done my task here better than I expected’. She’s pleased for Jacob’s Room . ‘At forty I am beginning to learn the mechanism of my own brain—how to get the greatest amount of pleasure and work out of it. The secret is I think always so to contrive that work is pleasant’. Then somebody dies—an acquaintance called Kitty Maxse—and there’s a whole page on that, which has interrupted her train of thought. If you have read Mrs Dalloway , you can see that that death is somehow going to make its way into that novel. And then she jumps onto the fact that Jacob’s Room is coming out. She says to herself: ‘My sensations?—they remain calm’. It’s as if she’s telling herself: stay calm; how am I feeling? She’s monitoring herself in the diaries, taking her own temperature with a thermometer. Then she says she’s writing a chapter about Greek literature: ‘I must get on with my reading for the Greek literature’. She is reading ‘some Sophocles & Euripides & a Plato dialogue: also the lives of Bentley & Jebb’. All that is happening in two pages. Death, life, reading, publication, self-monitoring. Amazing.

If we are coming to the diaries for the first time, is this quite a good way of approaching them—just dipping in?

There are lots of different ways of doing it. If you want to start reading a particular Virginia Woolf book, say To the Lighthouse , what you can do is go to the index for the diaries, and look up To the Lighthouse . There’s a good index for the diaries in the five-volume edition. You can read all the entries of how she first thinks of the novel, how she’s working on it. You can read the diaries as a sourcebook for the writing. Or if you’re interested in how she reacts to, say, a visit to Thomas Hardy , you look up ‘Thomas Hardy’. Or you can just dip in. You can go to them for lots of different things. But you never go to them without feeling that you know this person, and that this voice is vividly coming at you off the page. We’re so privileged to have this. Thank god her husband Leonard didn’t do what she asked him to do, in the note that she left him when she went to drown herself, which was to destroy all her papers.

June 17, 2016

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Hermione Lee

Professor Dame Hermione Lee is a biographer and literary critic. Her biography of Virginia Woolf won the British Academy Rose Mary Crawshay prize, and was named as one of the New York Times Book Review’s best books of 1997. She has also written biographies of Willa Cather, Edith Wharton, and Penelope Fitzgerald, and critical studies on Elizabeth Bowen and Philip Roth. She is President of Wolfson College, Oxford.

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Virginia Woolf: The Stream of Modernist Creation

Today’s protagonist once wrote a poignant thought about the ‘Art of Biography’, wondering ‘[…] whether the lives of great men only should be recorded. Is not anyone who has lived a life, and left a record of that life, worthy of biography – the failures as well as the successes, the humble as well as the illustrious[?]’

Ironically, today we will make our best effort to capture at least some of the successes of her illustrious life.

On paper, she had a head start in life, being born in a family of wealthy intellectuals. But her existence was marred from the start by mental illness and sexual abuse.

Undeterred, the strength of her intellect ploughed on, and she became one of the leading innovators of modernist literature.

This is the life of Virginia Woolf.

A Crowded House

The baby who would become author Virginia Woolf was born Adeline Virginia Stephen on the 25th of January 1882, in Hyde Park Gate, London.

Her family background was rather illustrious.

Her grandfather, Sir James Stephen, had authored the bill to abolish slavery in 1833.

Her father, Leslie, was an author and editor, founder of the Dictionary of National Biography.

In 1867, Leslie had married ‘Minny’ Thackeray, daughter of novelist William Makepeace Thackeray. The two had a daughter, Laura, in 1870, but five years later Minny died of eclampsia.

After three years of grieving, Leslie remarried with Julia Duckworth, a model for pre-Raphaelite painters. Julia was also a widower, and brought her own three children into the new household, Stella, Gerald and George.

Leslie and Julia made it a point to overcrowd even more their home by having four further children together:

Vanessa, born in 1879, later to become a painter.

Thoby, in 1880, was a promising intellectual, but died aged just 26.

And Adrian, in 1883, who would become a psychoanalyst.  The four Stephen siblings were very close, and highly gifted from an early age. Virginia displayed a talent for writing stories since the age of five, penning long serials about evil spirits lurking in rubbish heaps.

As much as Virginia loved her crowded house in London, her favorite place was Talland House, the family’s summer getaway in St Ives, Cornwall.

From its windows, she admired the views of Godrevy lighthouse, towering above the sea. Or enjoyed the sounds of children playing in the terraced gardens. In the evenings, she would withdraw from the dining rooms, to compose short stories in the style of Nathaniel Hawthorne.

All those memories of St Ives stayed with Virginia well into adulthood. To the point that she later wrote how her entire life was ‘built on that, permeated by that: how much so I could never explain.’ Virginia’s love for writing and reading drew her very close to his father. The two would spend hours together, sharing books or making up stories.

Virginia and Leslie took long walks together, during which he taught her to dig into the more prosaic aspects of everyday life, and extract ‘fountains of poetic interest.’

Nonetheless, Leslie had an ambivalent attitude towards the role of women as intellectuals. While he encouraged his daughters to read, write and learn, he did not believe women could lead productive literary or artistic careers.

As Virginia grew older, she resented this patriarchal attitude, but she had other, more problematic, male figures in her life: Gerald Duckworth, one of her much older half-brothers had once touched her inappropriately, while on holidays at St Ives.

He was 18 at the time, Virginia only six. The incident left her prone to sexual fear and instilled in her a resistance to aggressive masculine authority. This event surely clouded the idyll of her childhood, but the worse was to come when Virginia entered her teens.

In May 1895, her mother Julia died of heart failure.

Julia’s daughter, Stella Duckworth, took on the mantle of surrogate mother. But two years later, she, too, died, due to the complications of pregnancy.

With Julia and Stella gone, there was no one left to keep under tabs Virginia’s other half-brother George.

According to Virginia’s own memoirs, George would ‘visit’ her at night, forcing himself on her and calling her ‘beloved’. But by day, he would ridicule her looks and called her ‘the poor goat’.

It was too much for a 15-year-old girl to take. In September of 1897, Virginia first recorded in her journal a wish to die.

‘This diary is lengthening indeed but death would be shorter and less painful.’

Seasons in the Abyss

Virginia soldiered on. But life kept treating her like a punch bag, delivering jabs and hooks of misery.

First, Leslie died in March 1904.

Understandably, the 22-year-old Virginia suffered a mental collapse, which led her to attempting suicide by jumping out of a window. She recovered thanks to Violet Dickinson, a friend of the late Stella. Violet was older, wise, and kind: just the type of motherly figure the young Virginia needed.

Violet nursed her back to health, physically and mentally. Along the way, the two developed a friendship which eventually became romantic.

During the same eventful year, Virginia and her sister Vanessa moved to Gordon Square, in the Bloomsbury area of London. This was the epicenter of bohemian life in London, an area rife with non-conformist intellectuals many of whom gravitated around the Stephen siblings.

Their friends included activist and author Leonard Woolf, biographer Lytton Strachey, artist Roger Fry, economist John Maynard Keynes and art critic Clive Bell, who would later marry Vanessa.

By moving into that milieu , Virginia and Vanessa were rejecting the habits and values expected from two young ladies in Edwardian England. They replaced polite small talk with discussions about politics and literature, or shopping trips with visits to art galleries.

And during the summer of 1905, Virginia ditched London’s high society events for long walks across Cornwall’s countryside.

During that period, she kept a diary, which became the origin of her later narrative experiments.

In her journal, Virginia described how she abandoned the well-trodden roads to venture into barely visible paths, ignoring the artificial barriers imposed by man on nature. These ramblings were an early metaphor for her later works, in which the narrative ignored the artificial signposts imposed by traditional plot lines: a character’s birth; a marriage; someone’s death.

Virginia would instead explore apparently insignificant moments in time, which nonetheless can shape someone’s life.

Virginia’s own life, however, was to be shaped by the tritest of plot points: the death of another character.

In 1906, older brother Thoby succumbed to typhoid while traveling in Greece.

This event appeared to ignite a steady decline in Virginia’s mental health, although initially she did her best to remain mentally active and productive. While working as a teacher in a night school for workers in south London, she composed her first short story, ‘Phyllis and Rosamond’.

The plot was inspired by Virginia and Vanessa’s own experiences in London’s upper-middle class milieu. Or better, it explored the question: what would have happened to two intelligent and ambitious sisters should they have not escaped from that environment?

The answer was: they would have been trapped in a lifeless limbo, like hazy figures in the background of a party. Two non-entities, little more than decorative props, waiting for someone to marry them.

And yet, Virginia felt that even this state of non-existence, so common, so typical of the era, was worth recording. Unlike her protagonists, Virginia pretty much stood out from the background, getting involved in the big political issues of the time, such as the campaign for women’s rights and suffrage.

But eventually, her mind deteriorated, and in July of 1910, Virginia was committed to Burley, a sanatorium in Twickenham.

She absolutely loathed the experience, writing to Vanessa that she saw jumping out of a window as her only way out. This extreme means of escape was not necessary, however, and Virginia was dismissed after less than two months.

Upon her release, Virginia moved into a new house in Brunswick Square, Bloomsbury, sharing lodgings with her brother Adrian, and other friends. Leonard Woolf was one of them, and he was interested in becoming more than just a friend. The two got engaged and eventually married on August 10, 1912.

Leonard was a positive presence in Virginia’s wife: he helped her cope with her bouts of mental illness, and coached her into writing her first novel, ‘The Voyage Out.’

But the relationship was not entirely a bed of roses. Leonard could not or would not consider Virginia’s sexual fears and history of abuse. He even considered her to be “a sexual failure”.

From her side, Virginia had no qualms in offending Leonard’s background, introducing him as  “a penniless Jew.”

The adjustment to married life, and tensions that came with it, may have pushed Woolf into a period of depression in 1913. Her doctor sent her back to Burley for another summer in the abyss. When Virginia walked out, she was suicidal.

On September 9, she consulted with two distinguished psychiatrists: Dr Maurice Wright and the aptly named Sir Henry Head. 

All they could advise was a third admission to Burley, something that Virginia could not swallow.

What she did swallow instead was a massive dose of barbiturates. She barely survived, thanks to Leonard and Dr Head, who arrived at the right time and pumped her stomach.

Whilst recovering, she threw herself into finalizing ‘The Voyage Out’, published in March of 1915.

The novel lays out some of the main themes that Woolf would explore in later works, such as the stifling condition of married women in early 20th Century Britain.

‘The Voyage Out’ was well received by critics, but it was not a bestseller. Moreover, the stress associated with its publication led Virginia to suffer another mental breakdown, a violent episode of incoherent screaming, followed by a comatose state.

This was followed by another admission at Burley.

The medical staff tried to persuade Leonard and her family that Virginia’s sanity had gone, worn out by neurasthenia, or nervous exhaustion. Contemporary psychiatrists tend to agree that she was beset by bipolar disorder, instead, driven by both nature and nurture.

Mental illness ran in her family.

Grandad James suffered from cyclothymia, which causes intense mood swings. He had been institutionalized after running naked through Cambridge and died in an asylum.

Her dad Leslie was also cyclothymic, while her mum Julia suffered from depression.

Her siblings and half-siblings were not immune either: Laura, Leslie’s daughter from his first marriage, suffered from an undefined psychosis. Vanessa and Adrian had cyclothymia, too and the unfortunate Thoby experienced hypo-manic episodes.

Virginia’s already fragile mental state was further compromised by the traumatic experiences suffered since childhood: the series of deaths in the family and the vile sexual abuse perpetrated by the Duckworth boys.

And yet, it would be reductive to identify Virginia Woolf with a mental health condition. Her vitality, resilience and sheer will power would not allow her to succumb to institutionalization.

She would not accept to lead a life defined by malaise, a life adrift driven by the storms of mania or the dead calm of depression.

Against all medical opinion, by November, 1915, Virginia had recovered and was ready to leave Burley.

After twenty years of half-light, she was ready to throw open the curtains and take on the most productive period of her life.

Pressing On!

After Virginia’s recovery, Leonard was still worried that the effort of writing would cause her to have another breakdown and looked for a distraction for her. As Virginia had an interest in printing and binding books by hand, he ordered a hand-printing machine.

This activity started as a hobby, but soon it became a business: Hogarth Press.

The Woolfs initially used Hogarth Press to publish their own works. This was a relief for Virginia, who dreaded submitting her manuscripts to the prying eyes of editors and publishers.

Soon they expanded their catalogue to include small and experimental works, likely to be rejected by commercial publishers. These included writings by their friends E.M. Forster, and John Maynard Keynes, but also by Sigmund Freud and T.S. Eliot.

In 1919, Virginia released her short story ‘Kew Gardens’ via Hogarth Press. The story contrasts the aimless meandering of eight characters against the purposeful march of a snail, and attracted the attention of the Times Literary Supplement.

The favorable review led to hundreds of orders and commercial success. So much so, that Leonard and Virginia had to forgo the hand printing press and hire a commercial printer. While Hogarth Press was taking off, Virginia was completing her second novel ‘Night and Day,’ published in October of 1919.

Woolf explores again the theme of women who struggle to achieve their full potential, locked in a society who accepts them only as wives and daughters.

The main character Katherine actively opposes her milieu of middle-upper class intellectuals: first, by embracing mathematics instead of poetry; and then by rejecting the courtship of a poet, as she pursues the love of an upstart solicitor.

‘Night and Day’ was the first in a series of writings in which Woolf shaped the defining characteristics of the modern novel.

She introduced the principle that writers did not need sensational events to propel a story or develop a character. An ordinary mind, on an ordinary day, was worthy of being narrated in a novel. She aimed to capture the ‘moments of being’ of these ordinary minds: climactic inward events or epiphanies that may strike her characters whilst they conduct the most mundane activities.

Woolf adopted these principles in her follow up novels, ‘Jacob’s Room’ of 1922 and ‘Mrs Dalloway’, published in 1925.

The latter novel takes place over a single day in June, a concept inspired by James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses.’

Mrs Clarissa Dalloway roams London, looking to buy flowers for a party she is throwing. She is renowned amongst London’s High Society as a bright and lively hostess, although she is not entirely satisfied with her own life.

Clarissa’s urban travels are mirrored by her internal meanderings, as she questions the meaning of her own existence and reminisces about her first love, Peter, and about her lone homosexual experience.

Woolf then introduces the second main character, Septimus Warren Smith. A WWI veteran afflicted by shell shock, Smith is plagued by hallucinations, by an inability to feel emotions and worst of all, by poor medical treatment.

The two never meet. But during the party, Clarissa overhears a guest telling how Septimus committed suicide earlier that day, by jumping out of a window. Despite this tragic revelation, the novel ends on an optimistic note. By reflecting on Septimus’ suicide, Clarissa finds a new interest in the beauty of life, and reconnects with former lover Peter.

Many contemporary critics and readers consider Mrs Dalloway as Woolf’s best novel, but it’s a close tie with her follow-up title, ‘To the Lighthouse’, published in May 1927.

The book is divided into three sections: ‘The Window’, ‘Time Passes’, and ‘The Lighthouse’.

The first section, ‘The Window’, takes place over a single day. The Ramsays are at their holiday home on the Isle of Skye, a stand in for the Stephens’ own retreat in Cornwall.

One of the children, James, is planning a boat trip to a lighthouse, but his father talks him out of it, claiming bad weather. The second, and shorter section, ‘Time Passes’, covers ten years of events, including WWI. During this period, the Ramsay house, a symbol for civilization, rots away, abandoned.

“The house was left; the house was deserted. It was left like a shell on a sandhill to fill with dry salt grains now that life had left it.”

In this section Woolf hastily introduces the death of important characters, as quick edits in between square brackets. My favorite example is “[A shell exploded. Twenty or thirty young men were blown up in France, among them Andrew Ramsay, whose death, mercifully, was instantaneous.]”

In the final section, ‘The Lighthouse’, James finally completes his trip to the lighthouse, ten years after originally planned.

As with many of Woolf’s novels, it is difficult to pinpoint a single key theme. The more evident ones are the nature of time, and how patterns of delay, repetition, and inaction can affect one’s life.

Despite its complexity, the novel was well received by critics and readers, much to the surprise of the author! On June 6, 1927 she noted in her diary: ‘They don’t laugh at me any longer … Possibly I shall be a celebrated writer.’

Virginia’s Room

This celebrated writer defied all expectations with her next work, ‘Orlando: A Biography,’ of 1928. Almost fantasy in tone, this novel features the titular character who switches gender at a whim, and lives through centuries of British history.

The novel defies the traditional, linear concept of time: as the protagonist accumulates memories, each one of them becomes a wormhole, transporting her, or him, back to a different period. But Orlando can also be read as a fictional biography of a real-life character: poet, novelist, and horticulturist Vita Sackville-West.

Vita and Virginia had first met in 1923, struck a friendship and took holidays together in France and Italy.

Virginia idolized Vita, and their friendship developed into a short romance, which became physical only on two occasions.

The unstoppable Woolf hit the bookshelves again the following year, with the essay ‘A Room of One’s Own’, one of her most celebrated feminist writings.

In this work Virginia addresses the pressures which deny the intellectual and professional development of women: the confinement to the domestic sphere; conformity to the patriarchy; but most of all, the inability for women to have their own income and privacy.

Hence the title: ‘A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write’.

The essay also looks at how history is written: as a succession of wars waged by powerful Kings and Generals. Woolf invites readers to consider a counter-historiography instead, one focused on those women excluded from historical records.

Generations of mothers and daughters who maintained domestic order and social peace– which were regularly destroyed by militaristic thugs.

The next effort was 1931’s ‘The Waves,’ Virginia’s most experimental work. The narrative is structured as six soliloquies, voiced by three men and three women over a single day – again! – as they cope with the death of a dear friend.

The characters do not show any external expression of grief, but the author reveals their personalities through their internal stream of consciousness.

In 1932, the writer launched into another ambitious project, which occupied her for the next five years. This was ‘The Years,’ a family chronicle which became Woolf’s best-selling work during her lifetime.

Here, Woolf follows the extended Pargiter family, heavily influenced by her own. Each section starts with a sweeping narration, describing the sky over Britain, or London in particular, before ‘zooming’ into the consciousness of a particular character.

Their seemingly random activities, dialogues, and thoughts, take the reader through fifty years of British history and institutions, analyzing how they have shaped the consciousness of individuals.

The initial draft included a running social commentary on the condition of women, which Virginia edited out, and then published in 1938 as ‘Three Guineas.’

This second feminist essay identifies the dominant issues for women of the 20th Century: lack of access to education and professional advancement. If women were so excluded from the public sphere, how could they prevent the world from slipping into another war?

According to Woolf, exclusion of women led to an unbridled patriarchal society. Which in turn had a direct link to the rise of fascism in Europe, and thus to the risk of international conflict.

That conflict, WWII, of course broke out eventually, in September of 1939.

Virginia had started working on what would be her final novel, ‘Between the Acts,’ which she continued writing under the Blitz. In September of 1940, the Woolf’s home in Bloomsbury was bombed by the Luftwaffe, and Virginia and Leonard moved to their country home, Monk’s House, in Rodmell, Sussex.

Rodmell lies little less than 5 km from Newhaven.

Unbeknownst to them, this was the intended landing port for Operation Sea Lion, the planned Nazi invasion of Britain. And little did they know that Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, had included their names in a list of intellectuals to be immediately arrested!

While he had no knowledge of these plans, Leonard feared a German landing and was aware of the dangers for a Jew and his wife. He devised contingency plans for him and Virginia to commit suicide together. An idea which the writer did not like one bit, as she was still busy with her novel!

But the hard work on ‘Between the Acts’ and the tension created by the war were taking a heavy toll on her. Virginia could feel that her mind was beginning to falter: she feared that her mental illness would resurface violently.

On the 27th of March, Virginia wrote to her publisher confiding that she was not satisfied with her current draft, and she aimed to revise it later in the year.

Did she really plan to continue working on her latest novel?

We only know that the following day she did pick up pen and paper, but to leave a note for Leonard:

“Dearest, I feel certain I am going mad again. I feel we can’t go through another of those terrible times. And I shan’t recover this time.”

Around 11:45am, Virginia Woolf filled her pockets with stones, walked into the fast current of the River Ouse and let herself drown. Her body was recovered only on the 18th of April. Leonard buried her ashes in their garden, under one of the two elms with interlaced branches.

They had called them Leonard and Virginia.

https://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-37018?rskey=8PSlYD&result=3#odnb-9780198614128-e-37018-div1-d1694252e179 https://mantex.co.uk/virginia-woolf-life-and-works/ https://www.bl.uk/people/virginia-woolf

Boeira MV, Berni GÁ, Passos IC, Kauer-Sant’Anna M, Kapczinski F. Virginia Woolf, neuroprogression, and bipolar disorder.  Braz J Psychiatry . 2017;39(1):69-71. doi:10.1590/1516-4446-2016-1962 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7112729/

Hogarth Press https://www.bl.uk/20th-century-literature/articles/the-hogarth-press

Vita Sackville-West https://mantex.co.uk/vita-sackville-west-biography/

Phyllis and Rosamond https://mantex.co.uk/phyllis-and-rosamond/

The Voyage Out https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/148905.The_Voyage_Out https://www.gutenberg.org/files/144/144-h/144-h.htm

Night and Day https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/116056.Night_and_Day

Mrs Dalloway https://interestingliterature.com/2015/05/interesting-facts-about-mrs-dalloway/ https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/14942.Mrs_Dalloway?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=hWj9GLYyuZ&rank=1

To the Lighthouse https://interestingliterature.com/2016/02/a-summary-and-analysis-of-woolfs-to-the-lighthouse/ https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/59716.To_the_Lighthouse https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks01/0100101.txt

Orlando https://interestingliterature.com/2015/06/the-best-virginia-woolf-books/ https://lithub.com/on-orlando-and-virginia-woolfs-defiance-of-time/

The Waves https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks02/0201091h.html https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/46114.The_Waves

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18852.The_Years?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=3kU5drVf8D&rank=1 https://campuspress.yale.edu/modernismlab/the-years/

Three Guineas https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/three-guineas-by-virginia-woolf

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• Biography / E4-Resources / Excellence in Literature: The Curriculum
• Virginia Woolf Biography

by EILeditor · Published March 19, 2024 · Updated November 26, 2023

Brief Biography: Adeline Virginia Woolf (25 January 1882 – 28 March 1941) was an English writer. She is considered one of the most important modernist 20th-century authors and a pioneer in the use of stream of consciousness as a narrative device.

Virginia Woolf, 1902, photograph by George Charles Beresford

Woolf was born into an affluent household in South Kensington, London, the seventh child of Julia Prinsep Jackson and Leslie Stephen in a blended family of eight children that included the modernist painter Vanessa Bell. She was home-schooled in English classics and Victorian literature from a young age. The family’s summer rental house in St. Ives, Cornwall, also formed a large part of her youth, education, and fond memories. From 1897 to 1901, she attended the Ladies’ Department of King’s College London, where she studied classics and history and came into contact with early reformers of women’s higher education and the women’s rights movement.

Encouraged by her father, Woolf began writing professionally in 1900. After her father’s death in 1904, the Stephen family moved from Kensington to the more bohemian Bloomsbury, where, in conjunction with the brothers’ intellectual friends, they formed the artistic and literary Bloomsbury Group. In 1912, she married Leonard Woolf, and in 1917, the couple founded the Hogarth Press, which published much of her work. They rented a home in Sussex and moved there permanently in 1940. 

During the inter-war period, Woolf was an important part of London’s literary and artistic society. In 1915, she published her first novel,  The Voyage Out , through her half-brother’s publishing house, Gerald Duckworth and Company. Her best-known works include the novels  Mrs. Dalloway  (1925),  To the Lighthouse  (1927) and  Orlando (1928). She is also known for her essays, such as “A Room of One’s Own” (1929).

Woolf became one of the central subjects of the 1970s movement of feminist criticism. Her works, translated into more than 50 languages, have attracted attention and widespread commentary for inspiring feminism. A large body of writing is dedicated to her life and work. She has been the subject of plays, novels and films. Woolf is commemorated by statues, societies dedicated to her work and a building at the University of London.

Throughout her life, Woolf was troubled by mental illness. According to Dalsimer (2004) , her illness was characterized by symptoms that would later be diagnosed as bipolar disorder, for which there was no effective treatment during her lifetime. Woolf passed away in 1941, at the age of 59.

Longer Biography:

Mother’s family.

Virginia Woolf was born Adeline Virginia Stephen on 25 January 1882 at 22 Hyde Park Gate in South Kensington, London, to Julia (née Jackson) (1846–1895) and Sir Leslie Stephen (1832–1904), writer, historian, essayist, biographer, and mountaineer. Julia Jackson was born in 1846 in Calcutta, British India, to John Jackson and Maria “Mia” Theodosia Pattle, from two Anglo-Indian families.

John Jackson FRCS was the third son of George Jackson and Mary Howard of Bengal, a physician who spent 25 years with the Bengal Medical Service and East India Company and a professor at the fledgling Calcutta Medical College. While John Jackson was an almost invisible presence, the Pattle family were famous beauties, and moved in the upper circles of Bengali society. The seven Pattle sisters married into important families. Julia Margaret Cameron was a celebrated photographer, while Virginia married Earl Somers, and their daughter, Julia Jackson’s cousin, was Lady Henry Somerset, the temperance leader.

Julia moved to England with her mother at the age of two and spent much of her early life with another of her mother’s sisters, Sarah Monckton Pattle. Sarah and her husband Henry Thoby Prinsep, conducted an artistic and literary salon at Little Holland House where she came into contact with a number of Pre-Raphaelite painters such as Edward Burne-Jones, for whom she modelled.

Julia was the youngest of three sisters. The Jacksons were a well educated, literary and artistic proconsular middle-class family. In 1867, Julia Jackson married Herbert Duckworth, a barrister, but within three years was left a widow with three infant children. She was devastated and entered a prolonged period of mourning, abandoning her faith and turning to nursing and philanthropy. Julia and Herbert Duckworth had three children:

• George (5 March 1868 – 27 April 1934), a senior civil servant, married Lady Margaret Herbert in 1904
• Stella (30 May 1869 – 19 July 1897), died aged 28
• Gerald (29 October 1870 – 28 September 1937), founder of Duckworth Publishing, married Cecil Alice Scott-Chad in 1921

Father’s Family

Leslie Stephen was born in 1832 in South Kensington to Sir James and Lady Jane Catherine Stephen (née Venn), daughter of John Venn, rector of Clapham. The Venns were the centre of the evangelical Clapham Sect. Sir James Stephen was the under secretary at the Colonial Office, and with another Clapham member, William Wilberforce, was responsible for the passage of the Slavery Abolition Bill in 1833. In 1849, Sir Stephen was appointed Regius Professor of Modern History at the University of Cambridge.

As a family of educators, lawyers, and writers the Stephens represented the elite intellectual aristocracy. While his family were distinguished and intellectual, they were less colorful and aristocratic than Julia Jackson’s. A graduate and fellow of Cambridge University, Leslie Stephen renounced his faith and position to move to London where he became a notable man of letters. In addition, he was a rambler and a mountaineer. In the same year as Julia Jackson’s marriage, he wed Harriet Marian (Minny) Thackeray (1840–1875), youngest daughter of William Makepeace Thackeray, who bore him a daughter, Laura (1870–1945). In 1875, Leslie’s first wife Minny died in childbirth. 

The widowed Julia Duckworth knew Leslie Stephen through her friendship with Minny’s elder sister Anne (Anny) Isabella Ritchie and had developed an interest in his agnostic writings. She was present the night Minny died and later, tended to Leslie Stephen and helped him move next door to her on Hyde Park Gate so Laura could have some companionship with her own children. Both were preoccupied with mourning and although they developed a close friendship and intense correspondence, agreed it would go no further.

Then, in 1877, Leslie Stephen proposed to her–an offer she initially declined, but when Anny married later that year she accepted him and they were married on 26 March 1878. He and Laura then moved next door into Julia’s house, where they lived till his death in 1904. 

Their first child, Vanessa, was born on 30 May 1879. They had three more children together over the next four years, including Virginia.  Adeline Virginia was named after her mother’s eldest sister Adeline Maria Jackson (1837–1881) and her mother’s aunt Virginia Pattle. Because of the tragedy of aunt Adeline’s death the previous year, the family never used Virginia’s first name.

22 Hyde Park Gate (1882–1904)

Virginia Woolf provides insight into her early life in her autobiographical essays, including Reminiscences (1908), 22 Hyde Park Gate (1921), and A Sketch of the Past (1940). Other essays that provide insight into this period include Leslie Stephen (1932). She also alludes to her childhood in her fictional writing. In To the Lighthouse (1927), her depiction of the life of the Ramsays in the Hebrides is an only thinly disguised account of the Stephens in Cornwall and the Godrevy Lighthouse they would visit there. However, Woolf’s understanding of her mother and family evolved considerably between 1907 and 1940, in which the somewhat distant, yet revered figure of her mother becomes more nuanced and filled in.

In February 1891, with her older sister Vanessa, Woolf began the Hyde Park Gate News, chronicling life and events within the Stephen family, and modelled on the popular magazine Tit-Bits. Initially, this was mainly Vanessa’s and Thoby’s articles, but very soon Virginia became the main contributor, with Vanessa as editor. Their mother’s response when it first appeared was “Rather clever I think.” Virginia would run the Hyde Park Gate News until 1895, the time of her mother’s death.

Julia and Leslie Stephen reading in the library, with their daughter Virginia in the background. Photo by Vanessa (Stephen) Bell, 1892.

The Stephen sisters also used photography to supplement their insights, as did Stella Duckworth. Vanessa (Stephen) Bell’s 1892 portrait of her sister and parents in the library at Talland House (see image at left) was one of the family’s favorites and was written about lovingly in Leslie Stephen’s memoir. In 1897 (“the first really lived year of my life)” Virginia began her first diary, which she kept for the next twelve years.

Virginia was, as she describes it, “born into a large connection, born not of rich parents, but of well-to-do parents, born into a very communicative, literate, letter writing, visiting, articulate, late nineteenth century world.” It was a well-connected family consisting of two half brothers and a half sister (the Duckworths, from her mother’s first marriage); another half sister, Laura (from her father’s first marriage); an older full sister, Vanessa; and an older brother Thoby. The year after Virginia was born, another brother Adrian followed. The disabled Laura Stephen lived with the family until she was institutionalized in 1891. Julia and Leslie had four children together:

Vanessa “Nessa” (30 May 1879 – 1961), married Clive Bell in 1907 Thoby (9 September 1880 – 1906), founded Bloomsbury Group Virginia “Jinny”/”Ginia” (25 January 1882 – 1941), married Leonard Woolf in 1912 Adrian (27 October 1883 – 1948), married Karin Costelloe in 1914

Virginia was born at 22 Hyde Park Gate and lived there until her father’s death in 1904. Number 22 Hyde Park Gate, South Kensington, lay at the south-east end of Hyde Park Gate, a narrow cul-de-sac running south from Kensington Road, just west of the Royal Albert Hall, and opposite Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park, where the family regularly took their walks.

Built in 1846 by Henry Payne of Hammersmith as one of a row of single-family townhouses for the upper middle class, it soon became too small for their expanding family. At the time of their marriage, it consisted of a basement, two stories, and an attic. In July 1886 Leslie Stephen obtained the services of J. W. Penfold, an architect, to add additional living space above and behind the existing structure. The substantial renovations added a new top floor, with three bedrooms and a study for himself, converted the original attic into rooms, and added the first bathroom.

It was a tall but narrow townhouse, that at that time had no running water. Virginia would later describe it as “a very tall house on the left-hand side near the bottom which begins by being stucco and ends by being red brick; which is so high and yet—as I can say now that we have sold it—so rickety that it seems as if a very high wind would topple it over.”

The servants worked “downstairs” in the basement. The ground floor had a drawing room, separated by a curtain from the servant’s pantry and a library. Above this on the first floor were Julia and Leslie’s bedrooms. On the next floor were the Duckworth children’s rooms, and above them, the day and night nurseries of the Stephen children occupied two further floors. Finally, in the attic, under the eaves, were the servants’ bedrooms, accessed by a back staircase.

Life at 22 Hyde Park Gate was also divided symbolically; as Virginia put it, “The division in our lives was curious. Downstairs there was pure convention: upstairs pure intellect. But there was no connection between them,” the worlds typified by George Duckworth and Leslie Stephen. Their mother, it seems, was the only one who could span this divide.

The house was described as dimly lit and crowded with furniture and paintings. Within it, the younger Stephens formed a close-knit group. Despite this, the children still held their grievances. Virginia envied Adrian for being their mother’s favorite. Virginia and Vanessa’s status as creatives (writing and art respectively) caused a rivalry between them at times.

Life in London differed sharply from their summers in Cornwall. In London, their outdoor activities consisted mainly of walks in nearby Kensington Gardens, where they would play hide-and-seek and sail their boats on the Round Pond, while indoors, it revolved around their lessons.

Leslie Stephen’s eminence as an editor, critic, and biographer, and his connection to William Thackeray, meant his children were raised in an environment filled with the influences of a Victorian literary society. Henry James, George Henry Lewes, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Thomas Hardy, Edward Burne-Jones, and Virginia’s honorary godfather,  James Russell Lowell , were among the visitors to the house.

Photograph by Julia Margaret Cameron: Sir Galahad and the Pale Nun, 1874, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, David Hunter McAlpin Fund, 1952 (52.524.3.8) Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art; used with permission. www.metmuseum.org

Julia Stephen was equally well connected. Her aunt was a pioneering early photographer, Julia Margaret Cameron [see example image at left; more of her photos are featured in Idylls of the King ], who was also a visitor to the Stephen household.

The two Stephen sisters, Vanessa and Virginia, were almost three years apart in age. Virginia christened her older sister “the saint” and was far more inclined to exhibit her cleverness than her more reserved sister. Virginia resented the domesticity Victorian tradition forced on them far more than her sister. They also competed for Thoby’s affections. Virginia would later confess her ambivalence over this rivalry to Duncan Grant in 1917: “indeed one of the concealed worms of my life has been a sister’s jealousy – of a sister I mean; and to feed this I have invented such a myth about her that I scarce know one from t’other.”

Virginia showed an early affinity for writing. Although both parents disapproved of formal education for females, writing was considered a respectable profession for women, and her father encouraged her in this respect. Later, she would describe this as “ever since I was a little creature, scribbling a story in the manner of Hawthorne on the green plush sofa in the drawing room at St. Ives while the grown-ups dined”.

By the age of five, she was writing letters and could tell her father a story every night. Later, she, Vanessa, and Adrian would develop the tradition of inventing a serial about their next-door neighbors, every night in the nursery, or in the case of St. Ives, of spirits that resided in the garden.

It was her fascination with books that formed the strongest bond between her and her father. For her tenth birthday, she received an ink-stand, a blotter, drawing book, and a box of writing implements.

Talland House (1882–1894)

Leslie Stephen was in the habit of hiking in Cornwall, and in the spring of 1881 he came across a large white house in St Ives, Cornwall, and took out a lease on it that September. Although it had limited amenities, its main attraction was the view overlooking Porthminster Bay towards the Godrevy Lighthouse, which the young Virginia could see from the upper windows and was to be the central figure in her book To the Lighthouse (1927).

It was a large square house, with a terraced garden, divided by hedges, sloping down towards the sea. Each year between 1882 and 1894 from mid-July to mid-September the Stephen family leased Talland House as a summer residence.

Leslie Stephen, who referred to it thus: “a pocket-paradise”, described it as “The pleasantest of my memories… refer to our summers, all of which were passed in Cornwall, especially to the thirteen summers (1882–1894) at St Ives. There we bought the lease of Talland House: a small but roomy house, with a garden of an acre or two all up and down hill, with quaint little terraces divided by hedges of escallonia, a grape-house and kitchen-garden and a so-called ‘orchard’ beyond”. It was in Leslie’s words, a place of “intense domestic happiness”.

Virginia herself described the house in great detail:

“Our house was…outside the town; on the hill….a square house, like a child’s drawing of a house; remarkable only for its flat roof, and the railing with crossed bars of wood that ran around the roof. It had…a perfect view—right across the Bay to Godrevy Lighthouse. It had, running down the hill, little lawns, surrounded by thick escallonia bushes…it had so many corners and lawns that each was named…it was a large garden—two or three acres at most…You entered Talland House by a large wooden gate…up the carriage drive…to the Lookout place…From the Lookout place one had…a perfectly open view of the Bay….a large lap…flowing to the Lighthouse rocks…with the black and white Lighthouse tower” Reminiscences 1908, pp. 111–112

Activities at Talland In both London and Cornwall, Julia was perpetually entertaining, and was notorious for her manipulation of her guests’ lives, constantly matchmaking in the belief everyone should be married, the domestic equivalence of her philanthropy. As her husband observed, “My Julia was of course, though with all due reserve, a bit of a matchmaker.”

Amongst their guests in 1893 were the Brookes, whose children, including Rupert Brooke, played with the Stephen children. Rupert and his group of Cambridge Neo-pagans would come to play an important role in their lives in the years before the First World War.

While Cornwall was supposed to be a summer respite, Julia Stephen soon immersed herself in the work of caring for the sick and poor there, as well as in London. Both at Hyde Park Gate and Talland House, the family mingled with much of the country’s literary and artistic circles. Frequent guests included literary figures such as Henry James and George Meredith, as well as James Russell Lowell, and here the children were exposed to much more intellectual conversations, even when compared with the literary salon at their great aunt’s Little Holland House. 

For the children, it was the highlight of the year, and Virginia’s most vivid childhood memories were not of London but of Cornwall. In a diary entry of 22 March 1921, she described why she felt so connected to Talland House, looking back to a summer day in August 1890: “Why am I so incredibly and incurably romantic about Cornwall? One’s past, I suppose; I see children running in the garden … The sound of the sea at night … almost forty years of life, all built on that, permeated by that: so much I could never explain”. Cornwall inspired aspects of her work, in particular the “St Ives Trilogy” of Jacob’s Room (1922), To the Lighthouse (1927), and The Waves (1931).

After Julia Stephen’s death in May 1895, the family did not return to Cornwall.

1895–1904 Julia Stephen fell ill with influenza in February 1895, and never properly recovered, dying on 5 May, when Virginia was 13. It was a pivotal moment in her life and the beginning of her struggles with mental illness. Essentially, her life had fallen apart.

The Duckworths were travelling abroad at the time of Julia’s death, and Stella returned immediately to take charge and assume her new role as the woman of the household. That summer, rather than return to the memories of St Ives, the Stephens went to Freshwater, Isle of Wight, where some of their mother’s relatives lived.

It was there that Virginia had the first of her many nervous breakdowns, and Vanessa was forced to assume some of her mother’s role in caring for Virginia’s mental state. Stella became engaged to Jack Hills the following year and they were married on 10 April 1897, making Virginia even more dependent on her older sister.

George Duckworth also assumed some of their mother’s role, taking upon himself the task of bringing them out into society. First Vanessa, then Virginia, in both cases an equal disaster, for it was not a rite of passage that resonated with either girl and attracted a scathing critique by Virginia regarding the conventional expectations of young upper-class women:

“Society in those days was a perfectly competent, perfectly complacent, ruthless machine. A girl had no chance against its fangs. No other desires – say to paint, or to write – could be taken seriously.” In contrast, Virginia’s priorities were to escape from the Victorian conventionality of the downstairs drawing room to a “room of one’s own” to pursue her writing aspirations. 

The death of Stella Duckworth on 19 July 1897, after a long illness, was a further blow to Virginia’s sense of self and the family dynamics.  In April 1902, their father became ill, and although he underwent surgery later that year he never fully recovered, dying on 22 February 1904.

Woolf described the period following the death of both her half-sister, Stella, and her father as “1897–1904 – the seven unhappy years”, referring to “the lash of a random unheeding flail that pointlessly and brutally killed the two people who should, normally and naturally, have made those years, not perhaps happy but normal and natural”.

Later, Virginia would describe this time as one in which she was dealt successive blows as a “broken chrysalis” with wings still creased. Chrysalis occurs many times in Woolf’s writing but the “broken chrysalis” was an image that became a metaphor for those exploring the relationship between Woolf and grief.

Initial Education (Home Schooling)

In the late 19th century, education was sharply divided along gender lines, a tradition that Virginia would note and condemn in her writing. Boys were sent to school, and in upper-middle-class families such as the Stephens, it involved private boys schools, often boarding schools, and university.

Girls, if they were afforded the luxury of education, received it from their parents, governesses, and tutors. Virginia was educated by her parents who shared the duty. There was a small classroom off the back of the drawing room, with its many windows, which they found perfect for quiet writing and painting. Julia taught the children Latin, French, and history, while Leslie taught them mathematics. They also received piano lessons. Supplementing their lessons was the children’s unrestricted access to Leslie Stephen’s vast library, exposing them to much of the literary canon, resulting in a greater depth of reading than any of their Cambridge contemporaries, with Virginia’s reading being described as “greedy.” Later, she would recall:

Even today there may be parents who would doubt the wisdom of allowing a girl of fifteen the free run of a large and quite unexpurgated library. But my father allowed it. There were certain facts – very briefly, very shyly he referred to them. Yet “Read what you like”, he said, and all his books…were to be had without asking.

After public school, the boys in the family all attended the University of Cambridge. The girls derived some indirect benefit from this, as the boys introduced them to their friends. Another source was the conversation of their father’s friends, to whom they were exposed. Leslie Stephen described his circle as “most of the literary people of mark…clever young writers and barristers, chiefly of the radical persuasion…we used to meet on Wednesday and Sunday evenings, to […] discuss the universe and the reform movement”.

Higher Education Later, between the ages of 15 and 19, Virginia was able to pursue higher education. She took courses of study, some at degree level, in beginning and advanced Ancient Greek, intermediate Latin and German, together with continental and English history, at the Ladies’ Department of King’s College London at nearby 13 Kensington Square between 1897 and 1901.

She studied Greek under the eminent scholar George Charles Winter Warr, professor of Classical Literature at King’s. In addition, she had private tutoring in German, Greek, and Latin. One of her Greek tutors was Clara Pater, who taught at King’s. Another was Janet Case, who involved her in the women’s rights movement, and whose obituary Virginia would later write in 1937.

Her experiences led to her 1925 essay “On Not Knowing Greek.” Her time at King’s also brought her into contact with some of the early reformers of women’s higher education such as the principal of the Ladies’ Department, Lilian Faithfull (one of the so-called steamboat ladies), in addition to Pater. Her sister Vanessa also enrolled at the Ladies’ Department of King’s College.

Although the Stephen girls could not attend Cambridge, they were to be profoundly influenced by their brothers’ experiences there. When Thoby went to Trinity in 1899, he befriended a circle of young men, including Clive Bell, Lytton Strachey, Leonard Woolf (whom Virginia would later marry), and Saxon Sydney-Turner, whom he would soon introduce to his sisters at the Trinity May Ball in 1900. These men formed a reading group they named the Midnight Society.

Relationships with family

Although Virginia expressed the opinion that her father was her favorite parent, and although she had only turned thirteen when her mother died, she was profoundly influenced by her mother throughout her life. It was Virginia who famously stated that “for we think back through our mothers if we are women”, and invoked the image of her mother repeatedly throughout her life in her diaries, her letters, and a number of her autobiographical essays, including Reminiscences (1908), 22 Hyde Park Gate (1921) and A Sketch of the Past (1940), frequently evoking her memories with the words “I see her …”.

She also alludes to her childhood in her fictional writing. In To the Lighthouse (1927), the artist, Lily Briscoe, attempts to paint Mrs. Ramsay, a complex character based on Julia Stephen, and repeatedly comments on the fact that she was “astonishingly beautiful”. 

While her father painted Julia Stephen’s work in terms of reverence, Woolf drew a sharp distinction between her mother’s work and “the mischievous philanthropy which other women practice so complacently and often with such disastrous results.” She describes her degree of sympathy, engagement, judgement, and decisiveness, and her sense of both irony and the absurd.

She recalls trying to recapture “the clear round voice, or the sight of the beautiful figure, so upright and distinct, in its long shabby cloak, with the head held at a certain angle, so that the eye looked straight out at you.” Julia Stephen dealt with her husband’s depressions and his need for attention, which created resentment in her children, boosted his self-confidence, nursed her parents in their final illness, and had many commitments outside the home that would eventually wear her down.

Her frequent absences and the demands of her husband instilled a sense of insecurity in her children that had a lasting effect on her daughters. In considering the demands on her mother, Woolf described her father as “fifteen years her elder, difficult, exacting, dependent on her,” and reflected that it was at the expense of the amount of attention she could spare her young children: “a general presence rather than a particular person to a child.”

She reflected that she rarely ever spent a moment alone with her mother: “someone was always interrupting.” Woolf was ambivalent about it, yet eager to separate herself from this model of utter selflessness. In To the Lighthouse , she describes it as “boasting of her capacity to surround and protect, there was scarcely a shell of herself left for her to know herself by; all was so lavished and spent.”

At the same time, she admired the strengths of her mother’s womanly ideals. Given Julia’s frequent absences and commitments, the young Stephen children became increasingly dependent on Stella Duckworth, who emulated her mother’s selflessness; as Woolf wrote, “Stella was always the beautiful attendant handmaid … making it the central duty of her life.”

Julia Stephen greatly admired her husband’s intellect. As Woolf observed “she never belittled her own works, thinking them, if properly discharged, of equal, though other, importance with her husband’s.” She believed with certainty in her role as the center of her activities, and the person who held everything together, with a firm sense of what was important and valuing devotion. Of the two parents, Julia’s “nervous energy dominated the family”.

While Virginia identified most closely with her father, her sister Vanessa stated her mother was her favorite parent. Angelica Garnett recalls how Virginia asked Vanessa which parent she preferred, although Vanessa considered it a question that “one ought not to ask”, she was unequivocal in answering “Mother” yet the centrality of her mother to Virginia’s world too is expressed in this description of her “Certainly there she was, in the very centre of that great Cathedral space which was childhood; there she was from the very first”.

Virginia observed that her half-sister, Stella, the oldest daughter, led a life of total subservience to her mother, incorporating her ideals of love and service. Virginia, like her father, quickly learned that being ill was the only reliable way of gaining the attention of her mother, who prided herself on her sickroom nursing.

Another issue the children had to deal with was Leslie Stephen’s temper; Woolf described him as “the tyrant father”. Eventually, she became deeply ambivalent about him. He had given her his ring on her eighteenth birthday and she had a deep emotional attachment as his literary heir, writing about her “great devotion for him”.

Yet, like Vanessa, she also saw him as victimizer and tyrant. She had a lasting ambivalence towards him through her life, albeit one that evolved. Her adolescent image was of an “Eminent Victorian” and tyrant but as she grew older she began to realize how much of him was in her: “I have been dipping into old letters and father’s memoirs….so candid and reasonable and transparent—and had such a fastidious delicate mind, educated, and transparent,” she wrote on 22 December 1940.

She was in turn both fascinated and condemnatory of Leslie Stephen: “She [her mother] has haunted me: but then, so did that old wretch my father. . . . I was more like him than her, I think; and therefore more critical: but he was an adorable man, and somehow, tremendous.”

Bloomsbury (1904–1940)

Gordon Square (1904–1907) On their father’s death, the Stephens’ first instinct was to escape from the dark house of yet more mourning, and this they did immediately, accompanied by George, travelling to Manorbier, on the coast of Pembrokeshire on 27 February. There, they spent a month, and it was there that Virginia first came to realize her destiny was as a writer, as she recalls in her diary of 3 September 1922.

They then further pursued their newfound freedom by spending April in Italy and France, where they met up with Clive Bell again. Virginia then suffered her second nervous breakdown, and convalesced over the next three months.

Before their father died, the Stephens had discussed the need to leave South Kensington in the West End, with its tragic memories and their parents’ relations. George Duckworth was 35, his brother Gerald 33. The Stephen children were now between 24 and 20. Virginia was 22.

Vanessa and Adrian decided to sell 22 Hyde Park Gate in respectable South Kensington and move to Bloomsbury. Bohemian Bloomsbury, with its characteristic leafy squares seemed sufficiently far away, geographically and socially, and was a much cheaper neighborhood rent-wise. They had not inherited much and they were unsure about their finances. Also, Bloomsbury was close to the Slade School which Vanessa was then attending.

While Gerald was quite happy to move on and find himself a bachelor establishment, George who had always assumed the role of quasi-parent decided to accompany them, much to their dismay. It was then that Lady Margaret Herbert appeared on the scene; as a result, George proposed, was accepted and married in September, leaving the Stephens to their own devices.

Vanessa found a house at 46 Gordon Square in Bloomsbury, and they moved in November, to be joined by Virginia now sufficiently recovered. It was at Gordon Square that the Stephens began to regularly entertain Thoby’s intellectual friends in March 1905. The circle, which largely came from the Cambridge Apostles, included writers (Saxon Sydney-Turner, Lytton Strachey) and critics (Clive Bell, Desmond MacCarthy) with Thursday evening “At Homes” that became known as the Thursday Club, a vision of recreating Trinity College (“Cambridge in London”).

This circle formed the nucleus of the intellectual circle of writers and artists known as the Bloomsbury Group. Later, it would include John Maynard Keynes (1907), Duncan Grant (1908), E.M. Forster (1910), Roger Fry (1910), Leonard Woolf (1911), and David Garnett (1914).

In 1905, Virginia and Adrian visited Portugal and Spain. Clive Bell proposed to Vanessa, but was declined, while Virginia began teaching evening classes at Morley College and Vanessa added another event to their calendar with the Friday Club, dedicated to the discussion of and later exhibition of the fine arts. (The Friday Club continued until 1913.)

This club introduced some new people into their circle, including Vanessa’s friends from the Royal Academy and Slade, such as Henry Lamb and Gwen Darwin (who became secretary), but also the eighteen-year-old Katherine Laird (“Ka”) Cox (1887–1938), who was about to go up to Newnham. Although Virginia did not actually meet Ka until much later, Ka would come to play an important part in her life. Ka and others brought the Bloomsbury Group into contact with another, slightly younger, group of Cambridge intellectuals to whom the Stephen sisters gave the name “Neo-pagans”. 

The following year, 1906, Virginia suffered two further losses. Her cherished brother Thoby, who was only 26, died of typhoid, following a trip they had all taken to Greece, and immediately afterward Vanessa accepted Clive’s third proposal. Vanessa and Clive were married in February 1907 and as a couple, their interest in avant-garde art would have an important influence on Woolf’s further development as an author. With Vanessa’s marriage, Virginia and Adrian needed to find a new home.

Fitzroy Square (1907–1911)

Virginia moved into 29 Fitzroy Square in April 1907, a house on the west side of the street, formerly occupied by  George Bernard Shaw . It was in Fitzrovia, immediately to the west of Bloomsbury but still relatively close to her sister at Gordon Square. The two sisters continued to travel together, visiting Paris in March. Adrian was now to play a much larger part in Virginia’s life, and they resumed the Thursday Club in October at their new home, while Gordon Square became the venue for the Play Reading Society in December. 

Meanwhile, Virginia began work on her first novel, Melymbrosia, that eventually became  The Voyage Out  (1915). Vanessa’s first child, Julian, was born in February 1908, and in September Virginia accompanied the Bells to Italy and France. On 17 February 1909, Lytton Strachey proposed to Virginia and she accepted, but he then withdrew the offer.

It was while she was back at Fitzroy Square that the question arose of Virginia needing a quiet country retreat, and she required a six-week rest cure and sought the countryside away from London as much as possible. In December, she and Adrian stayed at Lewes and started exploring the area of Sussex around the town. She started to want a place of her own, like St Ives, but closer to London. She soon found a property in nearby Firle (see below), maintaining a relationship with that area for the rest of her life.

Dreadnought hoax, 1910 Several members of the group attained notoriety in 1910 with the Dreadnought hoax , which Virginia participated in disguised as a male Abyssinian royal. Her complete 1940 talk on the hoax was discovered and is published in the memoirs collected in the expanded edition of The Platform of Time (2008).

Brunswick Square (1911–1912)

In October 1911, the lease on Fitzroy Square was running out and Virginia and Adrian decided to give up their home on Fitzroy Square in favor of a different living arrangement, moving to a four-storied house at 38 Brunswick Square in Bloomsbury proper[y] in November. Virginia saw it as a new opportunity: “We are going to try all kinds of experiments,” she told Ottoline Morrell. Adrian occupied the second floor, with Maynard Keynes and Duncan Grant sharing the ground floor. This arrangement for a single woman was considered scandalous, and George Duckworth was horrified. The house was adjacent to the Foundling Hospital, much to Virginia’s amusement as an unchaperoned single woman. Originally, Ka Cox was supposed to share in the arrangements, but opposition came from Rupert Brooke, who was involved with her and pressured her to abandon the idea.

Marriage (1912–1941)

Leonard Woolf was one of Thoby Stephen’s friends at Trinity College, Cambridge, and noticed the Stephen sisters in Thoby’s rooms there on their visits to the May Ball in 1900 and 1901. He recalls them in “white dresses and large hats, with parasols in their hands, their beauty literally took one’s breath away”. To him, they were silent, “formidable and alarming”.

Woolf did not meet Virginia formally until 17 November 1904 when he dined with the Stephens at Gordon Square, to say goodbye before leaving to take up a position with the civil service in Ceylon, although she was aware of him through Thoby’s stories. At that visit he noted that she was perfectly silent throughout the meal, and looked ill. In 1909, Lytton Strachey suggested to Woolf he should make her an offer of marriage. He did so, but received no answer.

In June 1911, he returned to London on a one-year leave, but did not go back to Ceylon. While in England again, Leonard renewed his contacts with family and friends. Three weeks after arriving he dined with Vanessa and Clive Bell at Gordon Square on 3 July, where they were later joined by Virginia and other members of what would later be called “The Bloomsbury Group”, and Leonard dates the group’s formation to that night.

In September, Virginia asked Leonard to join her at Little Talland House at Firle in Sussex for a long weekend. After that weekend, they began seeing each other more frequently.

On 4 December 1911, Leonard moved into the ménage [household] on Brunswick Square, occupying a bedroom and sitting room on the fourth floor, and started to see Virginia constantly and by the end of the month had decided he was in love with her. On 11 January 1912, he proposed to her; she asked for time to consider, so he asked for an extension of his leave and, on being refused, offered his resignation on 25 April, effective 20 May.

On 29 May, Virginia told Leonard that she wished to marry him, and they were married on 10 August at the St Pancras Register Office. It was during this time that Leonard first became aware of Virginia’s precarious mental state. The Woolfs continued to live at Brunswick Square until October 1912, when they moved to a small flat at 13 Clifford’s Inn, further to the east (subsequently demolished).

In October 1914, Leonard and Virginia Woolf moved away from Bloomsbury and central London to Richmond, living at 17 The Green, a home discussed by Leonard in his autobiography Beginning Again (1964). In early March 1915, the couple moved again, to nearby Hogarth House, Paradise Road, after which they named their publishing house. Virginia’s first novel, The Voyage Out, was published in 1915. Despite the introduction of conscription in 1916 (calling up servicemen to fight in World War I), Leonard was exempted on medical grounds. 

Between 1924 and 1940 the Woolfs returned to Bloomsbury, taking out a ten-year lease at 52 Tavistock Square, from where they ran the Hogarth Press from the basement, where Virginia also had her writing room, and this is commemorated with a bust of her in the square. 1925 saw the publication of Mrs. Dalloway in May followed by her collapse while at Charleston in August.

In 1927, her next novel, To the Lighthouse , was published, and the following year she lectured on Women & Fiction at Cambridge University and published Orlando in October. Her two Cambridge lectures then became the basis for her major essay A Room of One’s Own in 1929. Virginia wrote only one drama, Freshwater, based on her great-aunt Julia Margaret Cameron, and produced at her sister’s studio on Fitzroy Street in 1935. 1936 saw another collapse of her health following the completion of The Years .

The Woolf’s final residence in London was at 37 Mecklenburgh Square (1939–1940), destroyed during the Blitz in September 1940; a month later their previous home on Tavistock Square was also destroyed. After that, they made Sussex their permanent home. For descriptions and illustrations of all Virginia Woolf’s London homes, see Jean Moorcroft Wilson’s book Virginia Woolf, Life and London: A Biography of Place (pub. Cecil Woolf, 1987).

Hogarth Press (1917–1938)

Virginia had taken up book-binding as a pastime in October 1901, at the age of 19, and the Woolfs had been discussing setting up a publishing house for some time, and at the end of 1916 started making plans. Having discovered that they were not eligible to enroll in the St Bride School of Printing, they started purchasing supplies after seeking advice from the Excelsior Printing Supply Company on Farringdon Road in March 1917, and soon they had a printing press set up on their dining room table at Hogarth House, and the Hogarth Press was born.

Their first publication was Two Stories in July 1917, inscribed Publication No. 1, and consisted of two short stories, “The Mark on the Wall” by Virginia Woolf and “Three Jews” by Leonard Woolf (who was Jewish himself). The work consisted of 32 pages, hand bound and sewn, and illustrated by woodcuts designed by Dora Carrington. The illustrations were a success, leading Virginia to remark that the press was “specially good at printing pictures, and we see that we must make a practice of always having pictures.” (13 July 1917)

The printing process took two and a half months with a production run of 150 copies. Other short short stories followed, including Kew Gardens (1919) with a woodblock by Vanessa Bell as frontispiece. Subsequently, Bell added further illustrations, adorning each page of the text.

The press subsequently published Virginia’s novels along with works by  T.S. Eliot , Laurens van der Post, and others. The Press also commissioned works by contemporary artists, including Dora Carrington and Vanessa Bell. Woolf believed that to break free of a patriarchal society women writers needed a “room of their own” to develop and often fantasized about an “Outsider’s Society” where women writers would create a virtual private space for themselves via their writings to develop a feminist critique of society.

Though Woolf never created the “Outsider’s society”, the Hogarth Press was the closest approximation as the Woolfs chose to publish books by writers that took unconventional points of view to form a reading community. Initially the press concentrated on small experimental publications, of little interest to large commercial publishers. Until 1930, Woolf often helped her husband print the Hogarth books as the money for employees was not there. Virginia relinquished her interest in 1938.

After it was bombed in September 1940, the press was moved to Letchworth for the remainder of the war. Both the Woolfs were internationalists and pacifists who believed that promoting understanding between peoples was the best way to avoid another world war and chose quite consciously to publish works by foreign authors of whom the British reading public were unaware. The first non-British author to be published was the Soviet writer Maxim Gorky, the book Reminiscences of Leo Nikolaiovich Tolstoy in 1920, dealing with his friendship with Count Leo Tolstoy.

Memoir Club (1920–1941) 1920 saw a postwar reconstitution of the Bloomsbury Group, under the title of the Memoir Club, which as the name suggests focused on self-writing, in the manner of Proust’s A La Recherche , and inspired some of the more influential books of the 20th century. The group, which had been scattered by the war, was reconvened by Mary (‘Molly’) MacCarthy who called them “Bloomsberries”, and operated under rules derived from the Cambridge Apostles, an elite university debating society that a number of them had been members of. These rules emphasized candor and openness. Among the 125 memoirs presented, Virginia contributed three that were published posthumously in 1976, in the autobiographical anthology Moments of Being . These were 22 Hyde Park Gate (1921), Old Bloomsbury (1922) and Am I a Snob? (1936).

Vita Sackville-West (1922–1941)

On 14 December 1922, Woolf met the writer and gardener Vita Sackville-West, wife of Harold Nicolson, while dining with Clive Bell. Writing in her diary the next day, she referred to meeting “the lovely gifted aristocratic Sackville West”. At the time, Sackville-West was the more successful writer as both poet and novelist, commercially and critically, and it was not until after Woolf’s death that she became considered the better writer.

Sackville-West worked tirelessly to lift Woolf’s self-esteem, encouraging her not to view herself as a quasi-reclusive inclined to sickness who should hide herself away from the world, but rather offered praise for her liveliness and wit, her health, her intelligence and achievements as a writer. Sackville-West led Woolf to reappraise herself, developing a more positive self-image, and the feeling that her writings were the products of her strengths rather than her weakness.

Starting at the age of 15, Woolf had believed the diagnosis by her father and his doctor that reading and writing were deleterious to her nervous condition, requiring a regime of physical labor such as gardening to prevent a total nervous collapse. This led Woolf to spend much time obsessively engaging in such physical labor.

Sackville-West was the first to argue to Woolf she had been misdiagnosed, and that it was far better to engage in reading and writing to calm her nerves—advice that was taken. Under the influence of Sackville-West, Woolf learned to deal with her nervous ailments by switching between various forms of intellectual activities such as reading, writing and book reviews, instead of spending her time in physical activities that sapped her strength and worsened her nerves.

Sackville-West chose the financially struggling Hogarth Press as her publisher to assist the Woolfs financially. Seducers in Ecuador , the first of the novels by Sackville-West published by Hogarth, was not a success, selling only 1500 copies in its first year, but the next Sackville-West novel they published, The Edwardians , was a best-seller that sold 30,000 copies in its first six months.

Sackville-West’s novels, though not typical of the Hogarth Press, saved Hogarth, taking them from the red into the black. However, Woolf was not always appreciative of the fact that it was Sackville-West’s books that kept the Hogarth Press profitable, writing dismissively in 1933 of her “servant girl” novels. But the financial security allowed by the good sales of Sackville-West’s novels in turn allowed Woolf to engage in more experimental work, such as The Waves; otherwise, Woolf had to be cautious when she depended upon Hogarth entirely for her income.

The two women remained friends until Woolf’s death in 1941. Virginia Woolf also remained close to her surviving siblings, Adrian and Vanessa; Thoby had died of typhoid fever at the age of 26.

Sussex (1911–1941)

Virginia was needing a country retreat to escape to, and on 24 December 1910, she found a house for rent in Firle, Sussex, near Lewes. She obtained a lease and took possession of the house the following month, naming it ‘Little Talland House’, after their childhood home in Cornwall, although it was actually a new red gabled villa on the main street opposite the village hall.

The lease was a short one, and in October, she and Leonard Woolf found Asham House at Asheham, a few miles to the west, while walking along the Ouse from Firle. The house, at the end of a tree-lined road was a strange beautiful Regency-Gothic house in a lonely location. She described it as “flat, pale, serene, yellow-washed”, without electricity or water and allegedly haunted. She took out a five-year lease jointly with Vanessa in the New Year, and they moved into it in February 1912, holding a house warming party on the 9th.

It was at Asham that the Woolfs spent their wedding night later that year. At Asham, she recorded the events of the weekends and holidays they spent there in her Asham Diary, part of which was later published as  A Writer’s Diary in 1953.

In terms of creative writing, The Voyage Out was completed there, and much of Night and Day . Asham provided Woolf with much-needed relief from the pace of London life and was where she found a happiness that she expressed in her diary of 5 May 1919 “Oh, but how happy we’ve been at Asheham! It was a most melodious time. Everything went so freely; – but I can’t analyse all the sources of my joy”.

Asham was also the inspiration for A Haunted House (1921–1944), and was painted by members of the Bloomsbury Group, including Vanessa Bell and Roger Fry. It was during these times at Asham that Ka Cox started to devote herself to Virginia and become very useful.

Life in Sussex While at Asham Leonard and Virginia found a farmhouse in 1916, that was to let, about four miles away, which they thought would be ideal for her sister. Eventually, Vanessa came down to inspect it, and moved in in October of that year, taking it as a summer home for her family. The Charleston Farmhouse was to become the summer gathering place for the literary and artistic circle of the Bloomsbury Group.

After the end of the war, in 1918, the Woolfs were given a year’s notice by the landlord, who needed the house. In mid-1919, “in despair”, they purchased “a very strange little house” for £300, the Round House in Pipe Passage, Lewes, a converted windmill. No sooner had they bought the Round House, than Monk’s House in nearby Rodmell, came up for auction, a weatherboarded house with oak beamed rooms, said to be 15th or 16th century.

The Woolfs favored the latter because of its orchard and garden, and sold the Round House, to purchase Monk’s House for £700. Monk’s House also lacked water and electricity, but came with an acre of garden, and had a view across the Ouse towards the hills of the South Downs. Leonard Woolf describes this view (and the amenities) as being unchanged since the days of Chaucer.

From 1940, it became their permanent home after their London home was bombed, and Virginia continued to live there until her death. Meanwhile, Vanessa made Charleston her permanent home in 1936. It was at Monk’s House that Virginia completed Between the Acts in early 1941, followed by a further breakdown directly resulting in her death, with the novel being published posthumously later that year.

More Virginia Woolf resources are available on our site .

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Virginia Woolf : a biography

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The New York Sun

Appropriately, sarah ruhl’s stage adaptation of virginia woolf’s ‘orlando’ extends into present day.

Part of what makes the play charming and affecting is that it explores the assumptions we often make based on gender, and upends them with the quirky, earthy humor and disarming tenderness that are hallmarks of Ruhl’s writing.

When Sarah Ruhl in 2010 first unveiled “Orlando,” her adaptation of the Virginia Woolf novel (subtitled “A Biography”), the subject of gender fluidity had not yet become a cultural obsession. Given Ms. Ruhl’s proclivity for forward-thinking wit and whimsy, though, it seemed logical that the playwright would be drawn to a story — famously inspired by Woolf’s aristocratic lover Vita Sackville-West — about a young man who wakes up one day as a woman.   

For the new revival of “Orlando” that just opened off-Broadway, Ms. Ruhl and director and choreographer Will Davis have enlisted the perfect maverick to play the title character: the celebrated performer and writer Taylor Mac, whose preferred pronoun is judy — though we’ll use they, respectfully, for purposes of this review.

Part of what makes the play charming and affecting is that it explores the assumptions we often make based on gender, and upends them with the quirky, earthy humor and disarming tenderness that are hallmarks of Ms. Ruhl’s writing. Because the play begins in the Elizabethan era, and takes its hero/heroine — whose life spans hundreds of years — into the 20th century and, briefly, the present, this strategy and these qualities are applied to a variety of experiences.

Mx. Mac serves the material with an appealing mix of delicacy and irreverence, at times affirming their perhaps not fully appreciated capacity for understatement. We meet Orlando as a teenager, an aspiring poet who endears himself to the aged queen but then leaves her to begin seducing other members of the opposite sex — women, at this point. 

Orlando becomes engaged, but then is distracted from his fiancée by a Russian princess. He eventually lands at Constantinople, where more debauched encounters pursue; after one, he sleeps for days, then rises to discover he is no longer a gentleman in any sense of that word.

Up until this point — the end of Act One — Mr. Davis keeps things fairly light, even as Orlando ponders death, as fledgling poets must. The six actors who accompany Mx. Mac onstage juggle a variety of roles; Ms. Ruhl provides them with a lot of narration (most of it taken from Woolf, by design), further reinforcing the notion that we are watching a troupe at play.

Janice Amaya’s puckish princess and Nathan Lee Graham’s flamboyant queen are standouts, as is Lisa Kron as a lustful duchess. Oana Botez’s fanciful costume design enhances the air of casual festivity; the shiny flashes of red, green, and gold that first catch the eye suggest a Christmas party.

As “Orlando” follows its protagonist through Victorian England and into the industrial age, the play becomes more poignant, and a bit more provocative. Orlando, who fancied himself a man of action as well as words, laments that as a woman, she “shall never be able to crack a man over the head … or lead an army. … All I can do is to pour out tea and ask my lords how they like it.”  

The female Orlando is courted by an archduke — Ms. Kron again — but feels lonely, until a mysterious man named Marmaduke (a strapping Rad Pereira) arrives on horseback. During their courtship, each of the fledgling partners questions the other’s gender. “You never take more than 10 minutes to dress,” Marmaduke notes of Orlando. “And you listen ,” Orlando quips, just as suspicious. 

While Mr. Davis sustains a playful tone overall — transitions between centuries are accompanied by dancing, with the company forming exuberant chorus lines — “Orlando” encourages more and more reflection. The central character’s thoughts turn back to death, but also to poetry, even if we get the impression that Orlando’s talent for the latter remains limited.

The play ends with Orlando professing a renewed vitality and budding clarity. Those may not be traits one associates with the elderly, male or female — let alone someone who has been alive for centuries — but in the fantastical, progressive world that Ms. Ruhl has crafted in Woolf’s honor, anything is possible. 

Ms. Gardner has written about theater and music for The New York Times, The Village Voice, Town & Country, Time Out New York, Entertainment Weekly and other publications. She is a board member of the Drama Desk and has served on the jury for the Pulitzer Prize for drama twice, most recently as chair.

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