short biography of 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.

‘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

A short biography of virginia woolf, virginia woolf’s writing style, stream of consciousness technique.

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

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

 Poetic Style of Virginia Woolf

Feminism in virginia woolf’s writings, works of virginia woolf, short stories.

Virginia Woolf

Table of content

• Short stories

Virginia Woolf was an English author, feminist, essayist, publisher, and critic, considered as one of the foremost modernists of the twentieth century along with T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, and Gertrude Stein. Her parents were Sir Leslie Stephen (1832–1904), who was a notable historian, author, critic and mountaineer, and Julia Prinsep Duckworth (1846–1895), a renowned beauty. According to Woolf’s memoirs, her most vivid childhood memories were not of London but of St. Ives in Cornwall, where the family spent every summer until 1895. This place inspired her to write one of her masterpieces, To the Lighthouse .

The sudden death of her mother in 1895, when Virginia was 13, and that of her half-sister Stella two years later, led to the first of Virginia’s several nervous breakdowns. but it was the death of her father in 1904 provoked her most alarming collapse and she was briefly institutionalised. Some scholars have suggested that her mental instability was also due to the sexual abuse to which she and her sister Vanessa were subjected by their half-brothers George and Gerald Duckworth.

Woolf came to know the founders of the the Bloomsbury Group. She became an active member of this literary circle. Later, Virginia Stephen married writer Leonard Woolf on 10 August 1912. Despite his low material status (Woolf referring to Leonard during their engagement as a “penniless Jew”) the couple shared a close bond.

Virginia’s most famous works include the novels Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927) and Orlando (1928), and the book-length essay A Room of One’s Own (1929), with its famous dictum, “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” In some of her novels she moves away from the use of plot and structure to employ stream-of-consciousness to emphasise the psychological aspects of her characters.

After completing the manuscript of her last (posthumously published) novel, Between the Acts , Woolf fell into a depression similar to that which she had earlier experienced. On 28 March 1941, Woolf put on her overcoat, filled its pockets with stones, and walked into the River Ouse near her home and drowned herself. Woolf’s body was not found until 18 April 1941. Her husband buried her cremated remains under an elm in the garden of Monk’s House, their home in Rodmell, Sussex.

Her final writing were these words addressed to her husband:

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

Rose, Phyllis (1986). Woman of Letters: A Life of Virginia Woolf. Routledge. p. 243. ISBN 0-86358-066-1. Retrieved 24 September 2008.

Essays by Virginia Woolf

• Women and Fiction

Short stories by Virginia Woolf

• A Haunted House
• An Unwritten Novel
• Blue & Green
• In the Orchard
• Kew Gardens
• Monday Or Tuesday
• Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown
• Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street
• The Mark On The Wall
• The String Quartet

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Virginia Woolf Was More Than Just a Women’s Writer

She was a great observer of everyday life..

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

HIP / Art Resource, NY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Funding information

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

May/June 2015

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Encyclopedia of Humanities

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Virginia Woolf

We explore the life of Virginia Woolf, her main contributions to Anglo-Saxon literature, and her tragic end.

Who was Virginia Woolf?

Virginia Woolf was an English writer renowned for her contribution to contemporary fiction and for being one of the central figures in Anglo-Saxon literary modernism , which reached its height between 1900 and 1940. Although she mainly wrote novels, she was also the author of short stories, essays, and biographies.

Alongside her husband Leonard Woolf, Virginia was part of the so-called Bloomsbury Group , comprised of several British intellectuals of the interwar period , such as John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946) and E. M. Forster (1879-1970), among others.

Her work stands as a literary touchstone for contemporary feminism , most notably her celebrated essay A Room of One's Own , where she reflects on the challenges faced by a woman aspiring to an intellectual life.

Finally, her lifelong struggle with bipolar affective disorder, as well as her tragic suicide in the River Ouse , near Lewes, have served as inspiration for novels, films, and plays by various authors.

• See also: Edgar Allan Poe

Birth and early years of Virginia Woolf

Adeline Virginia Stephen was born in London on January 25, 1882, into a wealthy family in the Borough of Kensington . Her father was historian, essayist and biographer Leslie Stephen, and her mother, Julia Jackson, was a model for the Pre-Raphaelite painters. Virginia was the second of the couple's four children, with siblings Vanessa, Thoby and Adrian. The family household also included children from their parents' previous marriages: a daughter from Leslie's first wife, and three from Julia and her first husband.

Virginia's parents gave their children a privileged upbringing . The Stephen home, located at Hyde Park Gate, was a frequent gathering place for prominent artists and writers of Victorian society, like Henry James (1843-1916) and Thomas Hardy (1840-1928). Virginia and her sister Vanessa did not attend traditional schools; instead, their education was entrusted to private tutors and instructors.  

From an early age, the creative talent of both sisters became evident. Vanessa, who would eventually become a painter, began sketching her earliest drawings, while Virginia ran a family newspaper entitled Hyde Park Gate News . Although the elder sister was motherly and protective towards Virginia, competition between the two was not unfamiliar.

The family used to spend their summers on Cornwall’s coast , where they had a country house overlooking Porthminster Beach. It was there that Virginia lived her most cherished childhood moments between 1882 and 1894, and many of these landscapes, like the Godrevy Lighthouse, would appear in her literary works decades later.

The Bloomsbury Group

Family life was disrupted by the sudden death of her mother in 1895 , when she was only 49 years old, followed by that of her half-sister Stella, two years later. These events plunged Virginia into the first severe depression of her life. However, it was the death of her father in early 1904 that brought on a nervous breakdown for which she had to be hospitalized. She was 22 years old. 

From then on, Virginia's older sister, Vanessa, took charge of the household and the younger siblings, under the control of her older maternal half-brothers, George and Gerald Duckworth.

Those were years of suffering for the Stephen sisters , who, in addition to the death of their parents, they had to endure mistreatment and sexual abuse at the hands of their half-brothers. Years later, Virginia referred to this dark chapter of her youth in her autobiographical essays A Sketch of the Past and 22 Hyde Park Gate .

Eventually, the sale of their ancestral home and the move away from their maternal half-brothers allowed the Stephens to lead a more pleasant life . Vanessa and Adrian bought a house in the London neighborhood of Bloomsbury, where they could freely engage in their studies and artistic creation, and host guests from London’s intellectual and artistic circles.

In 1905, Virginia set up the "Friday Club", and her brother Thoby started the "Thursday Evenings" . With these names they humorously made reference to their gatherings with Thoby's fellow students, and Virginia herself, who in those years had joined King's College in London, to debate, converse, and share ideas.

Among the attendees was, in late 1904, the young Leonard Woolf, Virginia's future husband , who that same year left for Sri Lanka for a position in the colonial service. Another figure was art critic Clive Bell (1881-1964), who Vanessa would marry in 1907.

These gatherings evolved into the so-called "Bloomsbury Group", which brought together some of the most prominent English intellectuals and artists of the early 20th century , including John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946), Lytton Strachey (1880-1932), E. M. Forster (1879-1970), Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951), and Bertrand Russell (1872-1970), among other personalities from the exclusive society of the "Cambridge Apostles".

Although its members never explicitly recognized themselves as a group, they shared aesthetic, political, and humanistic principles , as well as a profound rejection of the rigid Victorian morality, religion, and realism of the 19th century. They championed individualism and freedom of thought, allowing for more liberal views on personal relationships and individual pleasure.

The group garnered public attention in England at the time, largely due to an incident that came to be known as the "Dreadnought hoax", a prank the young artists pulled on the British Navy in 1910 that captured the attention of the press. Virginia participated in the hoax, disguised as an African prince.

The Bloomsbury Group was deeply affected by World War I , though its members continued to develop their successful careers, which for most of them reached their height after 1920 and lasted until the late 1930s.

"The Dreadnought Hoax" was the name given to a satirical trick played by several members of the Bloomsbury Group along with Irish poet Horace de Vere Cole (1881-1936). On February 7, 1910, the poet convinced the British Navy to show its flagship, HMS Dreadnought, to an alleged Ethiopian delegation which actually consisted of several members of the group in disguise. The mockery caught the attention of the press, and the British Navy was ridiculed.

Marriage to Leonard Woolf

Virginia formally began writing in 1905 , when she published her earliest texts in the Times Literary Supplement . Her relationship with writing soon became her mainstay, especially after the death of her brother Thoby in 1906 and the "loss" of her sister Vanessa in 1907, the year of her marriage to Clive Bell.

Furthermore, the intellectual stimulus of the Bloomsbury Group called for new artistic forms. Thus, in 1908, Virginia set out to reshape the novel genre with a narrative project that would depart from the Victorian conventions of the time. This novel, entitled Melymbrosia , was not completed until 1912.

Virginia became notably influenced by the work of post-impressionists Paul Cézanne (1839-1906) and Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) , which burst in on the London scene in 1910. At the time, Virginia's mental health was fragile, and writing served as her main lifeline. Until, in 1911, Leonard Woolf returned from the East and began to court her . Despite his precarious financial situation (Virginia refers to him in her diaries as a "penniless Jew"), they married in August 1912, when she was 30 years old. They spent their honeymoon in Spain.

From the beginning, the couple shared a close bond, both romantically and professionally . Leonard himself was a writer and was also critical of the bourgeois lifestyle. In 1913, he published his anti-colonialist novel The Village in the Jungle , and after releasing another novel in 1914, he turned to political writing and social activism.

Meanwhile, Virginia fully reworked her debut novel in 1913, published under the title The Voyage Out by her half-brother Gerald Duckworth’s publishing house. However, the book's release had to be postponed until 1915, as Virginia suffered another nervous breakdown. Convinced she was a failure as a woman and writer, feeling despised by her sister and undervalued by Leonard, Virginia unsuccessfully attempted to take her own life in September 1913 .

In April 1915, Virginia experienced further bouts of mental distress and succumbed to delirium for quite some time. However, that same year, she significantly recovered from her "evil imaginations", which she managed to largely keep at bay until the end of her days.

Much has been written about Virginia and Leonard Woolf's marriage, and the complicated relationship they had. It is known that their sex life was not particularly active, partly due to Virginia's traumas with her half-brother, her continuous and sudden mood swings, and Leonard's lack of experience. Their relationship was more of an intellectual character and literary admiration. Furthermore, Virginia maintained a relationship with poet Vita Sackville-West for several years. Leonard, in turn, devoted himself tirelessly to Virginia, both as husband and editor, even following her death.

Hogarth Press

In 1917, the Woolfs purchased a handpress and started their own publishing venture : Hogarth Press, named after their suburban London residence, Hogarth House. They published their first joint work, Two Stories : a book featuring Three Jews by Leonard, and The Mark on the Wall , by Virginia, to great success. Of the 150 copies made, 134 were sold.

Being able to publish her own books allowed Virginia to dedicate herself fully to literary experimentation, without concerning for typical publisher preferences. Moreover, it enabled her to become acquainted with the works of contemporary writers , not always highly esteemed by Virginia, such as James Joyce (1882-1941), T.S. Eliot (1888-1965), and Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923), with whom she shared a relationship of both mutual admiration and dislike.

When Leonard's political activity took him away, Virginia would often retire to her sister's country house in Sussex. Vanessa had separated from her husband to live with British painter Duncan Grant (1885-1978), and their home often hosted numerous artists. During these years, Virginia resumed writing her diaries, which she had kept intermittently since 1897 .

Virginia's next novel was Night and Day (1919), a response to The Wise Virgins , a novel her husband had published in 1914 scandalizing members of his own family. That same year, her essay "Modern Fiction" came out, the result of the weekly readings she reviewed for the Times Literary Supplement , and her short story "Kew Gardens", set in London's botanical garden, and illustrated by her sister Vanessa.

That year, the Woolfs bought a small cottage in Rodmell, in the countryside, where Virginia could get away to write , take walks, cycle, and even visit her sister. In 1920, Virginia became part of the "Memoir Club", initiated by some of her fellow members of the Bloomsbury Group, where members gathered to read aloud excerpts from their own autobiographies.

In 1922, Jacob's Room , her third novel, was published, inspired by the death of her brother Thoby. It was an anti-war novel exploring loss through minimalism, sidelining plot and conflict . As she expressed at the time, a novel should be "an emotion felt".

Shortly after, Virginia met poet Vita Sackville-West (1892-1962), wife of Harold Nicholson, with whom she had a clandestine relationship that went on for much of the decade . Both authors dedicated works to each other and maintained intense correspondence. After their romance ended, they remained friends until Virginia's death in 1941.

Major novels of Virginia Woolf

In 1924, the Woolfs relocated once again in Bloomsbury , where they could lead a life less isolated from urban dynamics. Over the ensuing years, Virginia wrote what were to become her most notable works.

Many of these writings were part of an attempt by Virginia to create a new genre that emerged from the novel but departed from it to the point that she even considered presenting them as belonging to a new genre , but whose name she was never able to specify.

Thus, in 1925 she revisited a character that had previously appeared in several of her short stories , and created one of her most celebrated novels: Mrs Dalloway . It is an account of the events of a single day in London, narrated in the manner of a post-impressionist painting, shifting seamlessly from one character's consciousness to another's. This technique later became known as "stream of consciousness".

Virginia experimented with this technique once again in 1927 in her next novel, To the Lighthouse , which is divided into three parts , and does not follow a chronological logic. In it, the author's childhood memories are evoked. At the same time, the novel serves as an elegy mourning her mother's death.

That same year, her essays "The Art of Fiction" and "The New Biography" came out, in which she held that fiction writers should be more concerned with the language and design of the work than with the reality from which it originates.

In 1928, Virginia put theory into practice with Orlando: A Biography . This fantastical novel, inspired by anecdotes of Vita Sackville-West's life , features a protagonist who travels through five centuries of English history, often changing gender and perspective. This work stands as a tribute to her beloved Vita, with whom her relationship had cooled.

The following year witnessed the publication of "A Room of One's Own" , one of the most renowned essays by Virginia Woolf. It is an exploration of the absent role of women in history , which the author attributes not to their lack of genius, but rather of material resources. Hence her famous statement on what a woman needs in order to venture into the intellectual world: "money and a room of her own".

Inspired by her sister Vanessa's paintings exhibited in 1930, Virginia embarked on crafting a mystical, impersonal, and abstract novel: The Waves . Published in 1931, this novel gives voice to six characters as they recount their life stories, interspersed with poetic interludes that depict the heavens from dawn to dusk.

This important body of work, published almost entirely by Hogarth Press, solidified Virginia Woolf's stature in Anglo-Saxon modernism , alongside James Joyce and the American William Faulkner (1897-1962).

Death of Virginia Woolf

As the 1930s drew to a close, concerns over an impending Second World War spurred Virginia to hurry certain projects. Both Virginia and Leonard had been outspoken critics of Nazism , most notably in her essay Three Guineas (1938), and were on Adolf Hitler 's (1889-1945) blacklist.

Among these final undertakings was The Years (1937), a reworking of an earlier composition portraying three generations of the Pargiter family. Her last novel, Between the Acts , is a sort of memoir set during the staging and performance of a play at a festival in a small English village. It was published posthumously in 1941 .

The outbreak of the war in 1939 exposed the Woolfs, like many Londoners, to bombardments by German aircraft. Virginia's old childhood home was destroyed, which had a profound emotional impact on her . This devastation, coupled with the death of her friend Roger Fry in 1934 and the failure of the biography she later wrote about him, plunged her into depression.

By 1941, she found herself unable to continue her work. Overwhelmed by despair, on March 28, she wrote a note to Leonard and left their home. Weighing down her coat pockets with stones, she threw herself into the River Ouse, close to their residence . She was 59 years old.

Her body was not found until April 18 . Leonard gave burial to her cremated remains beneath a tree in the Rodmell countryside.

Virginia Woolf's final written words were her suicide note, addressed to her husband Leonard, left on a table before heading to the river. These poignant last words were:

" Dearest, I feel certain that I am going mad again. I feel we can't go through another of those terrible times. And I shan't recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can't concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do. You have given me the greatest possible happiness. You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I don't think two people could have been happier till this terrible disease came. I can't fight it any longer. I know that I am spoiling your life, that without me you could work. And you will, I know. You see, I can't even write this properly. I can't read. What I want to say is I owe all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good. I want to say that – everybody knows it. If anybody could have saved me, it would have been you. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can't go on spoiling your life any longer. I don't think two people could have been happier than we have been. " V.

Major works of Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf was, above all, a great Anglo-Saxon novelist and essayist. Her work, however, also encompasses notable short stories and a few biographies. Among her most important works are:

• Mrs Dalloway (1925)
• To the Lighthouse (1927)
• Orlando: A Biography (1928)
• The Waves (1931)
• Between the Acts (1941) (Posthumous)
• Modern Fiction (1919)
• A Room of One's Own (1929)
• Three Guineas (1938)
• The Death of the Moth and Other Essays (1942) (Posthumous)

Short stories

• " Kew Gardens " (1919)
• " The New Dress " (1924)
• " Mrs Dalloway's Party " (1922)
• Carrión Villalpando, G. (2017). “Lo que dejaron atrás: famosas notas suicidas”. Tlamatini . http://humanidades.uaemex.mx/  
• Chikiar Bauer, I. (2012). Virginia Woolf: la vida por escrito . Random House.
• Lee, H. (1997). Virginia Woolf . Random House.
• Ministerio de Cultura de Argentina. (2020). Virginia Woolf, una escritora de vanguardia. https://www.cultura.gob.ar/  
• Morató, Y. (2020). “Lo escrito escrito queda: los diarios de Virginia Woolf”. Jot Down Magazine . https://www.jotdown.es/  
• Reid, P. (2023). “Virginia Woolf (British writer)”. The Encyclopaedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/  

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• Joan of Arc
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Legacy of Virginia Woolf

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• Columbia College - The Core Curriculum - Virginia Woolf
• National Endowment for the Humanities - Biography of Virginia Woolf
• Humanities LibreTexts - Biography of Virginia Woolf
• Humanist Heritage - Virginia Woolf (1882-1941)
• Brooklyn Museum - Virginia Woolf
• Spartacus Educational - Biography of Virginia Woolf
• Virginia Woolf - Student Encyclopedia (Ages 11 and up)
• Table Of Contents

Woolf’s experiments with point of view confirm that, as Bernard thinks in The Waves , “we are not single.” Being neither single nor fixed, perception in her novels is fluid, as is the world she presents. While Joyce and Faulkner separate one character’s interior monologues from another’s, Woolf’s narratives move between inner and outer and between characters without clear demarcations. Furthermore, she avoids the self-absorption of many of her contemporaries and implies a brutal society without the explicit details some of her contemporaries felt obligatory. Her nonlinear forms invite reading not for neat solutions but for an aesthetic resolution of “shivering fragments,” as she wrote in 1908. While Woolf’s fragmented style is distinctly Modernist , her indeterminacy anticipates a postmodern awareness of the evanescence of boundaries and categories.

Woolf’s many essays about the art of writing and about reading itself today retain their appeal to a range of, in Samuel Johnson’s words, “common” (unspecialized) readers. Woolf’s collection of essays The Common Reader (1925) was followed by The Common Reader: Second Series (1932; also published as The Second Common Reader ). She continued writing essays on reading and writing, women and history, and class and politics for the rest of her life. Many were collected after her death in volumes edited by Leonard Woolf .

Virginia Woolf wrote far more fiction than Joyce and far more nonfiction than either Joyce or Faulkner. Six volumes of diaries (including her early journals), six volumes of letters, and numerous volumes of collected essays show her deep engagement with major 20th-century issues. Though many of her essays began as reviews, written anonymously to deadlines for money, and many include imaginative settings and whimsical speculations, they are serious inquiries into reading and writing, the novel and the arts, perception and essence, war and peace, class and politics, privilege and discrimination , and the need to reform society.

Woolf’s haunting language, her prescient insights into wide-ranging historical, political, feminist, and artistic issues, and her revisionist experiments with novelistic form during a remarkably productive career altered the course of Modernist and postmodernist letters.

Biography of Virginia Woolf

Reading comprehension about virginia woolf’s biography.

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

Comprehension:

• Corrections

7 of Virginia Woolf’s Most Notable Works

Best remembered for her novels, Virginia Woolf was an icon of literary modernism and one of the greatest writers of all time. Here are 7 of her most notable works.

Born Adeline Virginia Stephen in London in 1882, the writer who the world would come to know as Virginia Woolf came from a distinguished artistic and literary family. Her father was the respected Victorian man of letters Sir Leslie Stephen, and her mother, Julia, had been a model for the Pre-Raphaelites and for her aunt, the photographer Julia Margaret Cameron . As an adult, Virginia Woolf followed in her father’s footsteps by cleaving to the literary side of her heritage. However, she developed a distinctive writing style and voice that was entirely her own. From her debut to her last novel, here we explore just seven of her most notable novels…

1. The Voyage Out , 1915

The Voyage Out was Virginia Woolf’s debut novel, published in 1915, which, in itself, makes this one of her most notable novels. It tells the story of Rachel Vinrace, a young woman who has led a fairly sheltered life until she embarks on a journey to South America with her aunt and uncle. Her aunt, Helen, in particular, becomes a mentor figure for Rachel, helping her to explore more of life than she has hitherto seen from her father’s house. Together, Rachel and Helen meet more English tourists staying at a hotel. Among the guests is Terence Hewet, with whom Rachel falls in love.

The novel, therefore, seems conventional enough: a romantic novel constructed around the holiday abroad trope, such as fellow Bloomsbury member E.M. Forster uses in his novel A Room with a View (1908). However, unlike Forster, Woolf has chosen a more tropical destination for her heroine than the beauty spots of Europe. As Peter Fifield has argued, this allows Woolf to subvert our expectations of a seemingly conventional narrative by adding an element of danger. Will Rachel and Terence – and their burgeoning relationship – survive in this new climate?

Another notable feature of The Voyage Out is the cameo appearance made by Richard and Clarissa Dalloway at the start of the novel. These, of course, are characters Woolf would return to in her short fiction and in a later, more famous novel.

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Please check your inbox to activate your subscription, 2. jacob’s room , 1922.

Virginia Woolf followed up The Voyage Out with her second novel, Night and Day , in 1919. Stylistically, Night and Day has much in common with The Voyage Out ; both are fairly conventional realist novels. It was not until the publication of Jacob’s Room in 1922 – that seminal year for literary modernism, in which T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” and James Joyce’s Ulysses were also published – that Woolf found her own distinctive, experimental style of writing.

This was facilitated when, in 1917, Virginia and her husband, Leonard, set up the Hogarth Press. Previously, Virginia Woolf’s novels had been published by her half-brother Gerald Duckworth’s Duckworth Press. Woolf later revealed that, as a child and as an adolescent, she had been sexually abused by both Gerald and George Duckworth. And she also felt pressured to write novels that would be commercially successful in order to continue being published by Duckworth Press, preventing her from trying more experimental modes of writing. However, with the establishment of the Hogarth Press, she was free to write exactly as she chose – precisely what she did in writing Jacob’s Room .

Jacob’s Room might be considered an interrupted bildungsroman, cut short by the First World War . (One criticism of Night and Day that had particularly wounded Woolf was Katherine Mansfield’s observation that Woolf had failed to make any mention of the war. In Jacob’s Room , Woolf rights that wrong.) The reader follows the eponymous Jacob from childhood through to his studies at Cambridge and early adulthood, including trips to Italy and Greece. Despite the emphasis on Jacob, however, he is largely presented through the perspectives of other characters and often in an elegiac vein. The horrors of the Great War would recur throughout her later fiction, beginning with Jacob’s Room .

3. Mrs Dalloway , 1925

The next novel Woolf published after Jacob’s Room was Mrs Dalloway , and here she is in full stylistic command. Though Woolf famously (and conceivably with more than a hint of jealousy) thought James Joyce an overrated writer, she did take inspiration from his circadian novel Ulysses , set on 16th June 1904. Likewise, in writing Mrs Dalloway , Woolf chose to set the events of her novel on one day in June (possibly 13th June). And, also just as Ulysses has inspired the celebration of “Bloomsday” every year, so too is Mrs Dalloway celebrated every June.

Mrs Dalloway centers around the different yet strangely interconnected lives of Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Warren Smith. While Clarissa prepares for the party she is to hold that night and reminisces about old friendships, Septimus struggles with shellshock following his experiences as a soldier during the First World War. United by the city of London, their lives are at once separated by wealth and class, and yet Woolf draws them together into an interconnected narrative. Mrs Dalloway is a novel of great beauty and humanity and remains one of her most famous works the world over.

4. To the Lighthouse , 1927

Published just two years after Mrs Dalloway , in 1927 , To the Lighthouse is perhaps Virginia Woolf’s most accomplished novel. The novel is comprised of a tripartite structure: the first section is titled “The Window,” the second “Time Passes,” and the third “The Lighthouse.” Following the Ramsey family across a period of ten years in which beloved family members are lost, and war breaks out across the world, the novel begins at the family’s holiday home on the Isle of Skye, modeled closely on Talland House, where Woolf herself spent many happy summers as a child, in St. Ives, Cornwall.

Set over a single day, “The Window” follows the Ramseys and their guests going about their day before Mrs. Ramsey holds a dinner party. The social cohesion achieved through this moment of commensality is, however, soon broken, as “Time Passes” charts the degradation of the holiday home (which has been left to stand unoccupied) over a period of roughly ten years, during which family members die, and the First World War breaks out. This middle section is a wildly experimental piece of writing. The human focus is removed, allowing Woolf to range among viewpoints and present human suffering within a wider non-human context, thus challenging our anthropocentric presumptions without ever minimizing the reality of human pain.

The novel’s final section shows a depleted Ramsey family returning to their holiday home on the Isle of Skye, along with their guest, the artist Lily Briscoe, from the novel’s beginning. While the Ramseys make the long-delayed trip over water to the nearby lighthouse, Lily Briscoe paints in the garden. A meditation on love, family, and female artistic vision , To the Lighthouse is a novel as elegant as it is heartfelt.

5. Orlando , 1928

Having finished To the Lighthouse , Woolf wrote that she felt “the need of an escapade after these serious poetic experimental books, […] to kick up my heels & be off.” The “escapade” she then went on was to write Orlando , a novel-cum-mock-biography in which the eponymous Orlando lives for centuries, during which time they transition from male to female.

The inspiration behind Orlando came from Vita Sackville-West, a fellow writer and Virginia’s friend and lover. Sackville-West came from an aristocratic family and grew up at Knole, a country house and former archbishop’s palace in Kent. As a woman, Sackville-West could not inherit the property, though she felt strongly attached to it throughout her life. By having Orlando transition from male to female, Woolf points out the ridiculous nature of outdated inheritance laws. At the same time, however, Woolf writes Knole into her novel and so gives Vita a literary version of her beloved childhood home. Both an intimate love letter to Vita Sackville-West and an important novel about gender fluidity and queer love, Orlando is at once whimsical, philosophical, and stylish.

6. The Waves , 1931

If Woolf felt the need for a break from writing “these serious poetic experimental books” before writing Orlando , it is interesting to note that the next novel she wrote was even more poetic and experimental than any she had written before.

The Waves centers around six friends: Bernard, Neville, Louis, Jinny, Susan, and Rhoda. Told via their interlinked consciousnesses, the reader follows them from childhood to adulthood and the individual struggles they face. Louis, for example, is the most intelligent of the group but is unable to attend university and feels out of place as an Australian in England, and Rhoda struggles with anxiety and her self-esteem. At the center is their mutual friend, Percival, who (crucially) never speaks. Throughout her work, Woolf explored human interiority, though nowhere does she explore it so thoroughly as in The Waves .

7. Between the Acts , 1941

Focusing on the lead-up to and performance of a pageant play as part of a festival in a small village in southern England shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War , Between the Acts captures a moment of calm before the storm. Like Mrs Dalloway before it, the novel is set over a single day, on which the village’s annual pageant play is to be performed. While the pageant plays typically depict and celebrate English history, Miss La Trobe (the writer and artistic director of this year’s play) has subverted this format, and the play ends with a scene titled “Ourselves,” in which the players direct mirrors and other reflective objects at the audience. This, however, does not go down well with the audience, and Miss La Trobe feels the play has been a failure, though she is also hopeful for next year’s play…

Virginia Woolf, however, did not live to see the end of the war, and Between the Acts had to be published posthumously. Disappointed by the reception of her biography of Roger Fry and feeling unmoored and uncertain following the destruction of her London homes during the Blitz, she fell into a depression and suffered what was to be her final breakdown.

On March 28th, 1941, she waded into the River Ouse, with her pockets weighed down with stones, and drowned herself. She was 59 years old. She had suffered mental breakdowns throughout her life since her mother’s death, and she feared that she would not be able to survive another. Though her life was thus cut tragically short, she created a remarkable body of work – as the seven novels listed here attest.

7 Pre-Raphaelites & Their Famous Artworks

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

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