virginia woolf brief biography

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 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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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.

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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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‘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 Biography

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

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

Early years and marriage

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

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

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

As critic and essayist

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

Achievement as novelist

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

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

Last years and other books

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

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

For More Information

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

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

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

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

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Forms and Contexts of Literary Studies

Senior Seminar 2021-2022

Virginia Woolf: a Brief Biography

After some initial biographical research on the life of Virginia Woolf, who is one of my options for primary texts, it became clear that she had grown up with a fascination for natural history and the taxonomic ecology of the time. In his biography of her, Nigel Nicholson mentions that, “ Virginia Woolf was a keen hunter of butterflies and moths. With her brothers and sister she would smear tree trunks with treacle to attract and capture the insects, and then pin their lifelike corpses to cork boards, their wings outspread.” Later, with the transition in scientific thought, Woolf’s eco-consciousness shifted as well to reflect a culture turning away from taxonomic classification to holistic ecology (Alt). This consciousness of the natural world comes through in her writings, as well as an emphasis on space/place as a whole. The historical context in which Woolf was writing also contributes to her feminist writings, with the growing suffrage movement and her interactions with “radical” feminists throughout her education at King’s College. 

Woolf’s childhood also greatly informs her passion for the natural world. She grew up summering in natural locations in England, when her family wanted to get away from Kensington. For example, since she was born in 1895, her family would summer in St. Ives in Cornwall, a retreat from city life and the blooming industrialization and modernization of the turn of the century (“Virginia Woolf”). These early memories of the pastoral escape and summers by the sea informed her later novel To the Lighthouse . Woolf experienced a long list of childhood traumatic events, from losing a parent, dealing with deadly infectious diseases, and sexual assault from her two half-brothers. These tragedies within the home and struggles with mental health may also contribute to her interest in writing and the outside/natural world as a place of literary imagination and perhaps safety. 

Alt, Christina. Virginia Woolf and the Study of Nature. Cambridge University Press, 2010, doi:10.1017/CBO9780511762178. https://dickinson.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/permalink/01DICKINSON_INST/1d86qtd/cdi_proquest_ebookcentral_EBC554749   

Nicolson, Nigel. “Virginia Woolf.” The New York Times: on the Web , The New York Times, 2000, archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/first/n/nicolson-woolf.html?scp=4&sq=virginia%2520woolf&st=cse .  

“Virginia Woolf.” Biography.com , A&E Networks Television, 27 Mar. 2020, www.biography.com/writer/virginia-woolf. 

3 thoughts on “Virginia Woolf: a Brief Biography”

Thank you for this biographical piece, Jackie; a different vantage point to read Virginia Woolf. There are many facts and suppositions and claims that are happening here. I love that “summer” functions as a verb: do this more. Is writing about nature (and thus, identify with nature, be one with nature) a coping mechanism for Woolf against human violence and trauma? You did mention the word “safety;” do taxonomized butterflies, which can be read as a living death, signify safety for her? Nigel uses the word “keen hunter;” is nature prey and that Woolf skews the power dynamic? What are the patterns in her writing of nature (how do you define nature?)? Or how nature manifests generally in her body of work? Good luck!

As someone who has read only a few of her works, I found this information to be very insightful, just as I found the information we learned about the Feilds to be insightful in Beneath the Bough. Perhaps you could spend some time looking into how the dynamics between her characters and how they relate to her own life. I think there is a balance to be found in the analysis of the influence of an author’s experiences and their works.

Jackie, I loved how you opened this post with a quote about young Woolf and butterflies. I appreciated how you shared what the town she grew up in was industrial, and why there was an importance to get away during the summers to the country. I am slightly familiar with some of Woolf’s writing and I was sadden to read about her traumas. I had no idea her childhood was so difficult, and that is interesting to research how that contributed to her writing.

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22.1: Biography

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Figure 1: Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf was born into late-Victorian London on January 25, 1882. Her mother was Julia Stephen (1846-1895), famous in the artistic and literary world for her beauty and in high demand for her skills as an informal nurse. Woolf’s father was Sir Leslie Stephen (1832-1904), a well-known literary critic and founder of the Dictionary of National Biography , who struggled with a sense of inadequacy in spite of his reputation. The family lived at 22 Hyde Park Gate in London and rented a summer house at St. Ives in Cornwall. The children grew up with governesses, and while the boys went on to school and university, the girls received much less formal education, a particularly sore point with Woolf, and a spur for her feminism. However, she read hugely from her father’s library, and developed a formidable and individual intellect. Her parents’ literary circle also helped to develop the foundations of her writing and thought.

Julia and Leslie had each been married previously. With his first wife, Minny Thackeray (1840-1875), Leslie had a daughter, Laura (1870-1884). He floundered at being widowed and left to bring up the young girl, who had increasing emotional and developmental problems. Julia, a friend of Minny’s, seemed a lifeline. She had had three children with Herbert Duckworth (1833-1870), whose sudden death gave her the sorrow that many friends saw as her main characteristic. George (1868-1934), Stella (1869-1897), and Gerald (1870-1937), along with Laura, were part of the new household when Julia and Leslie married in 1878.

Julia and Leslie had four more children together, of which Virginia was the third. Vanessa (1879-1961) was her childhood companion and fellow editor of the family newsletter, The Hyde Park Gate News ; the two remained close friends and sometimes rivals in adulthood, when Vanessa married Clive Bell, who was a friend of her brother Thoby, had three children, and worked as an artist. Thoby (1880-1906) was a popular and good-looking young man whose Cambridge friends formed the initial Bloomsbury Group of writers and artists, with which all the Stephen siblings were connected to some degree. Adrian (1883-1948) was his mother’s favourite, but he clashed with his father and siblings, and became a psychoanalyst. The house at 22 Hyde Park Gate was full of children and energy, but also of sadness. Woolf wrote of being sexually molested by both her Duckworth half-brothers, which powerfully affected her. Laura was institutionalized in the 1890s as her disorders worsened. Julia Stephen suddenly died of influenza when Virginia was 13, “the worst disaster that could happen,” as she put it, which led to her first mental breakdown. In his own grief, Leslie leaned heavily on the girls, causing immense resentment. Stella Duckworth took on most of the responsibility, but she married in 1897, to Leslie’s distress. She died a few months after the wedding of peritonitis connected with pregnancy, another heavy blow to the family. Virginia’s mental health remained very fragile, but she carried on studying, reading, and writing, while helping Vanessa with their father’s demands.

When Leslie died of cancer in 1904, Virginia was saddened but liberated. With his death, she saw the Victorian past falling away. She suffered another nervous breakdown, which led to a suicide attempt, that year, but improved when she and her siblings left Hyde Park Gate and moved to unfashionable Bloomsbury to begin their own lives. Virginia enjoyed teaching adult courses at Morley College and working on her writing, as well as meeting with Thoby’s friends, but Thoby died at 26 of typhoid after a European trip, and again the family was crushed. Virginia worked on her first novel, The Voyage Out , which describes a young woman’s journey into South America and illness. In 1912, she agreed to marry Thoby’s friend Leonard Woolf (1880-1969), a Jewish writer who worked for the Colonial Civil Service, in spite of her uncertainty about their compatibility. Leonard provided support when Virginia made another suicide attempt in 1913, and had another breakdown in 1915, when The Voyage Out was finally published. With him, she established the Hogarth Press, named after their London house, in 1917, which published works by both Leonard and Virginia, as well as by other contemporary writers. The happiness of the marriage has been debated, and Virginia had a long affair with the Hogarth writer Vita Sackville-West (1892-1962) beginning in 1923, but regardless, Virginia saw Leonard as one of her most important readers and supports. In different ways, they were both interested in new artistic forms and genres, and the changing political landscape.

Over the next decades, Woolf produced many acclaimed modernist works, in spite of further troubles with mental health, often drawing on her own past and continually pushing the boundaries of form and perspective. Night and Day (1919) describes young people trying to find their own way in the new 20th century; Jacob’s Room (1922) memorializes Thoby and her family, as does The Waves (1931), with its fluid depiction of childhood’s effects, and also To the Lighthouse (1927), a resurrection of her parents and early life. Her essays collected in The Common Reader volumes (1925 and 1932) cover a broad variety of subjects, and Mrs. Dalloway (1925), set on a single day, depicts the way life attempts to carry on in spite of the shock of the World War I. An inventive biographer, Woolf wrote Orlando: A Biography (1928), a love letter to Vita Sackville-West, to equality, and to androgyny; Flush, A Biography (1933), a playful tour de force about the Brownings’ dog; and Roger Fry: A Biography (1940), which attempts truly to capture the life of her friend. A Room of One’s Own (1929), like the later Three Guineas (1938), is a seminal feminist text. The Years (1934) cost her a great effort, again returning to Victorian childhood’s effects on adulthood, and led to another depression. Fearing a German invasion of England, as well as another breakdown, she drowned herself in the River Ouse near her home in Sussex in 1941. She had completed her final novel, Between the Acts , the story of a historical pageant at a country house menaced by war. The end of the book has the central couple sitting alone in a kind of prehistoric dark, but finishes with the line, “They spoke.” Even in darkness and apparent meaninglessness, Woolf’s characters speak, and she is drawn to record them.

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Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf is a writer, novelist, essayist, and literary critic of the twentieth century. She is considered one of the most significant modernist authors. She is a pioneer of the use of the narrative technique of Stream of consciousness. Woolf was also an important member of the artistic and literary society of London.

She published her first novel, The Voyage , in 1915 in the publishing house of her half-brother. The best and celebrated works she wrote include novels such as To the Lighthouse , Orlando, and Mrs. Dalloway . She is also well-known for her critical essays A Room of One’s Own in which she advocates the female writers saying, “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” 

Virginia Woolf also gained a central position in the feminist movement of 1970. She inspired feminism through her works and gathered much attention and pervasive admiration for her works supporting feminist criticism.

Her works are not only read by English people but also by people with different languages as her works have been translated into more than fifty languages. She has been the focus of many novels, films, and plays, and a lot of literature is dedicated to her. In today’s world, people honored her with statues and dedicating different societies. At the University of London, there is a building dedicated to her.

A Short Biography of Virginia Woolf

Adeline Virginia Woolf was born on 25 January 1882 in South Kensington. She was born to Julia Prinsep and Leslie Stephen. She belonged to a rich family and was a seventh child of the eight siblings. She had a mixed family: her mother was a celebrated artist’s model of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, and had three children from her first husband, whereas her father was a man of letters, and had one daughter from his first marriage.

Including the famous painter of modernist movement Vanessa Bell, her parents gave birth to four more children. The brothers received their education from colleges, whereas the girls were given home-tuition in Victorian literature and English Classics. Her family would visit St Ives, Cornwall in summer, which had been a significant influence in the early life of Virginia Woolf. There she, for the first time, saw the Godrevy Lighthouse. This lighthouse became the main subject of her most celebrated novel, To the Lighthouse, published in 1927. 

In 1895, Woolf’s mother died, and her childhood ended abruptly. The death of her mother gave her a first mental breakdown. After two years of her mother’s death, her half-sister and a motherly figure, Stella Duckworth, died, giving her a second mental breakdown.

Virginia Woolf got admission in the Ladies’ Department of King’s College London from 1897 to 1901. Over there, she studied history and classics and became associated with the early campaigners of higher education for women and movements for Women’s rights. Other important influences in her life that inspired her works were the unrestrained access to the vast library of her father and her Cambridge-educated brothers.

In 1900, Virginia was encouraged by her father and started writing professionally. In 1905, her father died that gave her another mental breakdown. After the death of her father, the Stephen family shifted to Bohemian Bloomsbury. Over there, they adopted a free lifestyle. In Bloomsbury, the Stephens family in aggregation, the intellectual friends of Woolf’s brothers, they initiated the Bloomsbury Group of art and literature. 

Woolf married in 1912 to Leonard Woolf. The couple established a Hogarth Press in 1917. Much of Woolf’s works were published in her own publishing house. In Sussex, they rented a home and then, in 1940, permanently shifted there. Her mental illness troubled her throughout her life. She was admitted to the mental hospitals for a long time and tried to kill herself at least twice. Her actual disease could not be diagnosed during her lifetime, but it is assumed that she might have bipolar disorder. On 28 March 1941, Woolf put rocks in her coat pockets and drowned herself in River Ouse at Lewes.

Virginia Woolf’s Writing Style

Virginia Woolf is recognized as one of the best novelists and short story writers of the twentieth century. She pioneered modernist writing in the use of the narrative device of Stream of consciousness.

The distinctive features of Woolf’s fiction have tended to obscure her essential strength: after Elizabeth Browning is another lyrical novelist in English Literature. She wrote a tentative novel: sometimes, a narrative is commonplace and uneventful, while sometimes it is dissolved in the receptive consciousness of the characters .

In her writings, visual and auditory impressions are created by the fusion of stylistic virtuosity and intense lyricism . The poetic vision of Virginia Woolf’s novels is so intense that it elevates the ordinary and commonplace settings, even the war-time setting in most of her novels.

She was highly aware of the mental and material realm of “reality. ” The material realm is the present outside in the shape of Nature and Society, whereas the mental realm is inside the consciousness that shores the impressions, and significant instances of existence.

In her writings, the two realms have meeting points. She captured the meeting or converging points in time in her narrative technique. She uses this technique in her novels To the Lighthouse , Mrs. Dalloway, and The waves . She started the novels from the convergence or meeting point and then hinted at the diverging points besides spatial planes.

Stream of Consciousness Technique

The narrative device of Stream of Consciousness echoes the amplification of methodical events . The narrative technique is developed from subjectivism . This technique exploits the elements of confusion in our conscious minds . A story novel written in the narrative of Stream of Consciousness is not set in chronological series . Along with Dorothy Richardson and James Joyce, Virginia Woolf uses this technique in her novels.

In her Stream of Consciousness novel, the writer describes the character’s inner life by combining memories, sensations, emotional condition, and feelings . In her essay, Modern Fiction Woolf detailed the double quality of life and argues that the job of modern writers is to talk about the “essential thing” in their works. For her, the essential thing is “an unknown and un-circumscribed spirit.”

In her novels, Virginia employed her thoughts about life, reality, and truth and made them synonyms with “spirit.” According to her, a writer must suggest mental impressions and external reality simultaneously. True reality can only be captured when both sides are well captured by the writer. She focuses on the fluidity of the personality of the individual than on its fixity. The subjective elements, for her, were more important than the objective one. The incoherent and confused soliloquies of characters mirror their Stream of Consciousness.

The novel Mrs. Dalloway is the best example of Stream of consciousness. The novel opens with a middle-aged woman who is walking in the street of London and having an interior monologue. She admires the pleasant morning and thinks about the party in the afternoon and its preparation; in a flashback, she starts thinking about her life twenty years ago in Dalton.  Her consciousness is determined by the medley of time and the free association of images and ideas. In her self-centered consciousness, the past, present, and future astonishingly amalgamate.

The lighthouse, the voyage, and the seacoast are the favorite symbols, Virginia Woolf. In her novel, Mrs. Dalloway, she also uses these symbols. When Peter recalls his past time in the company of Clarrisa in Bourton, he remembers the old aunt of Clarrisa as:

“She belonged to a different age, but being so entire,

So complete would always stand up on the horizon,

Stone-white, eminent, like a lighthouse marking some

Past stage on this adventurous, long, long voyage, …”

There is another symbol of flower in the novel Mrs. Dalloway. When the middle-aged woman is leisurely walking around the streets, she has to buy flowers for the party in the evening. On the way back to his home from the lady Bruton’s lunch, Richard Dalloway thinks of many types of gifts to buy for Clarrisa and finally bought a bouquet of red roses.  Moreover, in the novel, Walsh compared Elizabeth with the hyacinth flower, which is the symbol of youth.

The novel, like The Waves , Virginia Woolf, uses the symbols that are derived from nature. For example, the sun rises slowly higher and higher until it is evening and it starts setting down. Moreover, there are “waves” whose rhythms change after every hour of the day. The waves transform from the slow and gentle in the morning to the fury and roar in the evening.

Similarly, in the novel To the Lighthouse, there is a tall dominating lighthouse which is standing on the submerged rock in the sea. For years and years, the waves are striking it days and nights. In the trip to the lighthouse by Prof. Ramsay, the family has lost Andrew, Mrs. Ramsay, and Prue. The narrator describes the fall of waves, just like the waves of the novel The waves:

“the monotonous fall of the waves on the beach, which for the most part beat a measured and soothing tattoo to her thoughts and seemed consolingly to repeat over and over again as she sat with the children the words of some old cradle song, murmured by nature, “I am guarding you –I am your support.”

The narrator continues to say that:

 “like a ghostly roll of drums remorselessly beat the measure of life, made one think of the destruction of the island and its engulfment in the sea, and warned her whose day had slipped past in one quick doing after another that it was all ephemeral as a rainbow…”

An interesting point to observe in the novels of Virginia Woolf is the difference between the rhythmic devices and the symbolic objects . For example, in the novel, To the Lighthouse , there is an extraordinary evocative meaning behind its literal appearance. A relationship between the Ramsay family and the material construction on the stony cliff beside the coast is drawn.

In the novel The Waves, there is the special significance of the birds flying over the sea like gulls and herons. In both novels, the sea is a common symbol and is present eternally to keep the rhythm in nature. Similarly N.S. Subramanyam points out that in Virginia Woolf’s novels, “the apparent ‘movements’ of the sun in the firmament has the most basic of all rhythms to a terrestrial existence.” 

 Poetic Style of Virginia Woolf

The style of Virginia Woolf is poetic . The experiences of characters are thawed into momentary glimpses, and these are so structured that they take the form of poetry. Virginia uses the words in a way that is considered poetic. She uses the metaphors once, and then it vanishes in the novel. The way she uses metaphors, such metaphors are more found in poetry than in the prose. For example, in the novel, Virginia Woolf writes: 

“a great brush swept across through his mind like the pulse of a perfect heart of life struck straight through the street; then for that moment, she had illumination: a match burning in a crocus, an inner meaning almost expressed.” 

Such types of metaphors are found in the poetry of John Donne and T.S. Eliot and are uncommon in prose. She drew her images and metaphors from the real world. These images, illusions, refrains, and metaphors join together to make her prose style poetic.

Feminism in Virginia Woolf’s Writings

Virginia Woolf also gained a central position in the feminist movement of 1970. She inspired feminism through her works and gathered much attention and pervasive admiration for her works supporting feminist criticism. Her works are not only read by English people but also by people with different languages as her works have been translated into more than fifty languages.

Woolf is observed as one of the leading feminist writers. She has been admired for her theoretical works and fictional works on feminism. It was her essays, including the most celebrated essay, A Room of One’s Own, that she was regarded as a feminist; however, her feminist perspectives can also be observed in her fiction. There is a symbiotic relationship between feminism and Virginia Woolf. Woolf’s works center around the lives and histories of women; nonetheless, our perception and reception about Virginia Woolf are also shaped by feminist criticism. When the field of Feminist criticism began, it was soon blasted by the works of Virginia Woolf. 

Works Of Virginia Woolf

• The Death of the Moth

Short Stories

• Kew Gardens

Biography of Virginia Woolf

Reading comprehension about virginia woolf’s biography.

Develop your reading skills. Read the following text and do the comprehension questions

A Comprehensive Biography of Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf, born Adeline Virginia Stephen on January 25, 1882, in London, England, emerged as one of the most influential literary figures of the twentieth century. Her multifaceted talents as an author, feminist, essayist, publisher, and critic left an indelible mark on the literary landscape, reshaping the way we perceive literature, gender, and society.

Born into a privileged yet emotionally complex family, Woolf was the daughter of Sir Leslie Stephen, a distinguished historian, author, and mountaineer, and Julia Prinsep Duckworth, celebrated for her beauty and intellect. Despite the outward appearance of privilege, Woolf’s childhood was marked by tragedy and instability. The sudden death of her mother in 1895, when Woolf was just thirteen, followed by the loss of her half-sister Stella two years later, profoundly impacted her young psyche and foreshadowed the mental health struggles that would plague her throughout her life.

Woolf’s formative years were spent amidst the intellectual fervor of Victorian London, yet it was the family’s annual retreats to St. Ives in Cornwall that left an enduring impression on her. Surrounded by the rugged beauty of the coastal landscape, Woolf found solace and inspiration in the natural world, later immortalizing the setting in her seminal work, “To the Lighthouse.”

Tragically, Woolf’s early adulthood was marred by episodes of profound mental distress. The death of her father in 1904 precipitated a severe breakdown, leading to her brief institutionalization. Scholars have since speculated about the underlying causes of Woolf’s psychological struggles, with some attributing them to the alleged sexual abuse she and her sister Vanessa endured at the hands of their half-brothers, George and Gerald Duckworth.

Despite these challenges, Woolf’s literary prowess continued to flourish. In 1912, she married Leonard Woolf, a writer and political theorist, forging a partnership that would profoundly influence her personal and professional life. Together, the Woolfs became central figures in the intellectual circle known as the Bloomsbury Group, a collective of artists, writers, and thinkers who challenged conventional notions of art, sexuality, and society.

Throughout her career, Woolf defied literary conventions, pioneering innovative narrative techniques that pushed the boundaries of storytelling. In some of her novels, Virginia Woolf diverged from traditional plot structures, opting instead to employ stream-of-consciousness narration to delve into the intricate psychological depths of her characters. Her landmark novels, including “Mrs. Dalloway” (1925), “To the Lighthouse” (1927), and “Orlando” (1928), showcased her mastery of stream-of-consciousness narrative, offering readers a window into the inner lives of her characters.

In addition to her fiction, Woolf’s nonfiction writings cemented her reputation as a leading voice of the feminist movement. In “A Room of One’s Own” (1929), she eloquently argued for women’s intellectual and creative autonomy, famously declaring, “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” This seminal work remains a touchstone for feminist scholars and writers to this day, challenging readers to reconsider the role of gender in literature and society.

Despite her professional success, Woolf’s personal life continued to be marked by struggles with mental illness. In 1941, overwhelmed by depression and the ravages of World War II, she tragically took her own life by drowning herself in the River Ouse near her home in Sussex. Her body was not recovered until weeks later, leaving behind a legacy of literary brilliance and personal tragedy.

Her final words, addressed to her husband Leonard Woolf, encapsulate the depth of her despair and gratitude:

“I know that I am spoiling your life, that without me you could work. And you will I know. You see I can’t even write this properly. I can’t read. What I want to say is I owe all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good. I want to say that everybody knows it. If anybody could have saved me it would have been you. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can’t go on spoiling your life any longer. I don’t think two people could have been happier than we have been.”

References:

• Rose, Phyllis. “Woman of Letters: A Life of Virginia Woolf.” Routledge, 1986.
• Woolf, Virginia. “A Room of One’s Own.” Hogarth Press, 1929.

Source: Wikipedia

Comprehension:

• Virginia Woolf was only a novelist. a. True b. False
• In her novels, she always used a fixed structure and plot. a. True b. False
• Her husband was not Christian. a. True b. False
• Virginia Woolf hanged herself. a. True b. False

Related Pages:

• Virginia Woolf Biography
• Virginia Woolf Bibliography
• Virginia Woolf (Documentary)
• Virginia Woolf (ebooks)
• Quotes by Virginia Woolf

• 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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