"She was extremely beautiful, with an austere intellectual beauty of bone and outline, with large melancholy eyes under carved lids, and the nose and lips, the long narrow cheeks of a Gothic madonna. Her voice, light, musical, with a throaty note in it, was one of her great charms. She was tall and thin, and her hands were exquisite. She used to spread them out to the fire, and they were so transparent one fancied one saw the fragile bones through the live skin."
G.C. Beresford's famous 1903 portrait.
A charcoal drawing on blue-grey paper by Francis Dodd, 1908. From the collection of Mr. and Mrs. Benjamin Sonnenberg, New York.
With husband Leonard Woolf at Asheham House in 1912.
In her mother's dress for a Vogue photograph from 1927.
At 52 Tavistock Square, her 1939 home.
"Virginia was a very different kind of person beneath the strong family resemblances in the two sisters. When she was well, unworried, happy, amused, and excited, her face lit up with an intense almost ethereal beauty. She was also extremely beautiful when, unexcited and unworried, she sat reading or thinking. But the expression, even the shape of her face, changed with extraordinary rapidity as the winds of mental strain, illness or worry passed over its surface. It was still beautiful, but her anxiety and pain made the beauty itself painful."
