Virginia Woolf (1882 - 1941) was an English novelist, essayist, diarist and publisher, and one of the central figures of literary modernism. [1] Her novels Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse and The Waves developed an interior, associative narrative method, while her essay A Room of One's Own became a foundational text of feminist criticism. [2]
Early life
Woolf was born Adeline Virginia Stephen on 25 January 1882 at Hyde Park Gate in London, into a large blended literary family. [1] Her father, Leslie Stephen, was a critic and the editor of the Dictionary of National Biography, and the household received many of the leading writers of the day. She was educated at home from her father's extensive library and later took courses in classics and history at King's College London.
The deaths of her mother in 1895, her half-sister in 1897 and her father in 1904 were followed by severe episodes of mental illness that recurred throughout her life. After her father's death she and her siblings moved to Bloomsbury, whose circle of writers, artists and economists — including Lytton Strachey, Roger Fry and John Maynard Keynes — became known as the Bloomsbury Group. [2]
Writing and the Hogarth Press
She married the political writer Leonard Woolf in 1912 and published her first novel, The Voyage Out, in 1915. In 1917 the couple founded the Hogarth Press, initially operating a hand press at their home; it issued her own later books along with work by T. S. Eliot, Katherine Mansfield and the first English translations of Freud. [1]
Owning the press gave Woolf unusual freedom from commercial editorial pressure, allowing her to publish increasingly experimental work on her own terms. She also wrote extensively as a reviewer and essayist, notably for the Times Literary Supplement, and kept diaries and letters that are themselves regarded as major literary documents. [1]
Major novels
Jacob's Room (1922) broke with conventional plot, and Mrs Dalloway (1925) followed a single June day in London, moving between the consciousness of a society hostess and a shell-shocked veteran of the First World War. To the Lighthouse (1927) drew on her childhood holidays in Cornwall and is structured around the passage of time rather than incident. [2]
Orlando (1928), a playful fictional biography whose protagonist changes sex and lives for centuries, was written for her friend Vita Sackville-West. The Waves (1931) pushed her technique furthest, composed entirely of interior monologues by six characters. [3]
Essays and later life
A Room of One's Own (1929), developed from lectures given at women's colleges in Cambridge, argued that a woman needs money and private space to write, and examined the material conditions that had excluded women from literature. Three Guineas (1938) extended the argument to militarism and the exclusion of women from public professions. [2]
Woolf's mental health deteriorated during the Second World War, as the Blitz destroyed her London home and she feared a further breakdown. She drowned herself in the River Ouse near Lewes on 28 March 1941. [1] Her reputation, already substantial, grew considerably from the 1970s onward as feminist scholarship took up her essays, and her novels remain central to the study of modernism.
