Virginia Woolf
English novelist and essayist; daughter of Sir Leslie Stephen.
A successful innovator in the form of the novel, she is considered
a significant force in 20th-century fiction. She was educated at home
from the resources of her father's huge library. In 1912 she married
Leonard Woolf, a critic and writer on economics, with whom she set up
the Hogarth Press in 1917. Their home became a gathering place for a
circle of artists, critics, and writers known as the Bloomsbury group.
As a novelist Woolf's primary concern was to represent the flow of
ordinary experience. Her emphasis was not on plot or characterization
but on a character's consciousness, his thoughts and feelings, which
she brilliantly illuminated by the stream of consciousness technique.
She did not limit herself to one consciousness, however, but slipped
from mind to mind, particularly in The Waves, probably her most
experimental novel. Her prose style is poetic, heavily symbolic, and
filled with superb visual images. Woolf's early works, The Voyage Out
(1915) and Night and Day (1919), were traditional in method, but she
became increasingly innovative in Jacob's Room (1922), Mrs. Dalloway
(1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), and The Waves (1931). Other
experimental novels are Orlando (1928), The Years (1937), and Between
the Acts (1941). She was a master of the critical essay, and some of
her finest pieces are included in The Common Reader (1925), The
Second Common Reader (1933), The Death of the Moth and Other Essays
(1942), and The Moment and Other Essays (1948). A Room of One's Own
(1929) and Three Guineas (1938) are feminist tracts. Her biography
of Roger Fry (1940) is a careful study of a friend. Some of her shor
t stories from Monday or Tuesday (1921) appear with others in A
Haunted House (1944). Virginia Woolf suffered mental breakdowns in 1895
and 1915; she drowned herself in 1941 because she feared another
breakdown from which she might not recover. Most of her posthumously
published works were edited by her husband.