Virginia Woolf was born in 1882, the daughter of the literary criticand biographer, Sir Leslie Stephen, and his wife Julia Jackson Duckworth. The family was related to several distinguished scholarly families, among whom were the Darwins and the Stracheys.
Virginia's sister Vanessa married the distinguished literary and art critic Clive Bell.
Virginia Woolf was the central figure among the authors and painters known as the Bloomsbury Group, is numbered among the most original writers of the twentieth century, recognized especially for her beautifully crafted novels, including To the Lighthouse (1927), Orlando(1929) and The Waves (1931), and her influential feminist essays, in particular A Room of One's Own (1929).
Her work as both critic and novelist was exeptional and important: technically brilliant, she applied innovative literary methods and conveyed an intensity of feeling and particular insights into women's issues that remain relevant today.
In 1912 she married the author and social reformer Leonard Woolf, living with him partly in Sussex, to which she transplanted the Bloomsbury artistic and literary milieu.
In 1917 they founded the influential Hogarth Press, and for thirty years they worked in close collaboration, each supporting the other through her intermittent bouts of mental illness, until an acute attack of depression, exacerbated by the anxieties of the Second world war, led her to commit suicide by drowning.
Further reading
T.E. Apter:Virginia Woolf: A Study of her Novels 1979
A. Fleishman: Virginia Wools: A Critical Reading 1975
H.Lee: The Novels of Virginia Woolf 1977
V. Woolf: A Writer's Diary
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Works by Virginia Woolf
Novels
The Voyage Out (1915)
Night and Day (1919)
Jacob's Room (1922)
Mrs. Dalloway (1925)
To the Lighthouse (1927)
The Waves (1931)
The Years (1937)
Between the Acts (1941)
Other Fiction
Monday or Tuesday (1921)
Orlando: a Biography (1928)
Flush: a Biography (1933)
A Haunted House and Other Stories (1943)
Essays And Other Writings
The Common Reader: First Series (1925)
A Room of One's Own (1929)
The Common Reader: Second Series (1932)
Three Guineas (1938)
Roger Fry: a Biography (1940)
The Death of the Moth and Other Essays (1942)
The Moment and Other Essays (1947)
The Captain's Death Bed and Other Essays (1950)
Virginia Woolf and Lytton Strachey: Letters (1956)
(Edited by Leonard Woolf and James Strachey)
Quotes
"It is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top."
Virginia Woolf
"A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction."
Virginia Woolf
"Nothing has actually happened until it has been recorded."
Virginia Woolf
"Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death!"
Virginia Woolf
"It is enough for us to state the simple fact; Orlando was a man until the age of thirty; when he became a woman and has remained so ever since."
Virginia Woolf, from Orlando
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Updated on January 7, 2001.
