Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) was an English novelist and essayist, one of the leading figures of literary modernism. In Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse and The Waves she followed the stream of her characters' thoughts and perceptions, and in A Room of One's Own she asked why women had been kept from writing. With her husband Leonard she founded the Hogarth Press, and she was at the heart of the Bloomsbury Group.
Genres
novels and stories, essays
Works
Mrs Dalloway, A Room of One's Own
A literary family
Adeline Virginia Stephen was born in London on 25 January 1882. Her father, Sir Leslie Stephen, was a critic, mountaineer and the first editor of the Dictionary of National Biography; her mother, Julia, had been a model for Pre-Raphaelite painters. Virginia was educated at home, reading freely in her father's library, while her brothers went to Cambridge.
Her mother died in 1895, when she was thirteen, and her father in 1904. These losses brought on the first of the breakdowns that recurred throughout her life. Summers spent at Talland House in St Ives, Cornwall, gave her the memories from which she later made To the Lighthouse.
Bloomsbury
After their father's death the Stephen children moved to Gordon Square in Bloomsbury, then an unfashionable part of London. Thursday evening gatherings with her brother Thoby's Cambridge friends grew into the Bloomsbury Group, which included the economist John Maynard Keynes, the biographer Lytton Strachey, the critic Roger Fry and her sister, the painter Vanessa Bell.
In 1912 she married Leonard Woolf, a writer and political thinker. In 1917 they bought a small hand press and founded the Hogarth Press in their house in Richmond; it went on to publish T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, the first English translations of Freud and Virginia's own novels.
The novels
After two conventional novels, The Voyage Out and Night and Day, Woolf developed a new form. Mrs Dalloway (1925) follows a single June day in 1923 in the minds of a society hostess and a shell-shocked veteran; To the Lighthouse (1927) centres on the Ramsay family and a trip to a lighthouse postponed for ten years.
Orlando (1928), a playful biography of a hero who lives for centuries and changes sex, was inspired by her friend Vita Sackville-West. The Waves (1931) is made of the interior monologues of six friends. Her essays, collected in The Common Reader, and her diaries are also major works.
A Room of One's Own and the last years
A Room of One's Own (1929), based on lectures given at two Cambridge women's colleges, argues that a woman needs money and a room of her own to write fiction, and imagines the fate of Shakespeare's equally gifted sister. Three Guineas (1938) links patriarchy and war.
During the Second World War the Woolfs' London houses were damaged by bombs. Fearing another breakdown, Virginia drowned herself in the River Ouse near their house in Sussex on 28 March 1941. Her last novel, Between the Acts, was published that year.
Anecdotes
The Dreadnought hoax
In 1910 Virginia Stephen took part in a famous practical joke. Disguised with a false beard and dark make-up, she and five friends posed as the Emperor of Abyssinia and his entourage, and were given an official tour of the Royal Navy's flagship, HMS Dreadnought. The hoax embarrassed the navy when it was revealed in the press.
Standing at her desk
Like her sister Vanessa, who painted standing at an easel, Virginia Woolf for many years wrote standing up at a tall desk, about three and a half feet high, so that she would not feel inferior to her sister.
Frequently asked questions
What are Virginia Woolf's most famous books?
Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), Orlando (1928), The Waves (1931) and the essay A Room of One's Own (1929).
What is the Bloomsbury Group?
An informal circle of writers, artists and thinkers who met in the Bloomsbury district of London in the early twentieth century, including Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, John Maynard Keynes, Lytton Strachey and E. M. Forster.
What is stream of consciousness?
A narrative technique that follows the flow of a character's thoughts, sensations and memories as they occur. Woolf, like James Joyce, was one of its masters.