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Virginia Woolf (1882-1941):
A Short Biography
In 1926 Virginia Woolf contributed an introduction to Victorian
Photographs of Famous Men & Fair Women by Julia Margaret Cameron.
This publication may be seen as a springboard from which to approach Woolf’s
life: Virginia saw herself as descending from a distinctive male and female
inheritance; Cameron was the famous Victorian photographer and Woolf’s
great-aunt; Woolf’s friend Roger Fry also contributed an introduction and
leads us to the Bloomsbury Group; and the book was published by the Hogarth
Press which Virginia had started with her husband Leonard in 1917.
Adeline Virginia Stephen was born on 25 January 1882 in London. Her father,
Leslie Stephen (1832-1904), was a man of letters (and first editor of the Dictionary
of National Biography) who came from a family distinguished for public
service (part of the ‘intellectual aristocracy' of Victorian England). Her
mother, Julia (1846-95), from whom Virginia inherited her looks, was the
daughter and niece of the six beautiful Pattle
sisters (Julia Margaret Cameron was the seventh: not beautiful but the only
one remembered today). Both parents had been married before: her father to
the daughter of the novelist, Thackeray, by whom he had a daughter Laura
(1870-1945) who was intellectually backward; and her mother to a barrister,
Herbert Duckworth (1833-70), by whom she had three children, George
(1868-1934), Stella (1869-97), and Gerald (1870-1937). Julia and Leslie
Stephen had four children: Vanessa (1879-1961), Thoby
(1880-1906), Virginia (1882-1941), and Adrian (1883-1948). All eight children
lived with the parents and a number of servants at 22 Hyde Park Gate,
Kensington.
Long summer holidays were spent at Talland House in
St Ives, Cornwall, and St Ives played a large part in Virginia’s imagination.
It was the setting for her novel To the Lighthouse, despite its
ostensibly being placed on the Isle of Skye. London and/or St Ives provided
the principal settings of most of her novels.
In 1895 her mother died unexpectedly, and Virginia suffered her first mental
breakdown. Her half-sister Stella took over the running of the household as
well as coping with Leslie’s demands for sympathy and emotional support.
Stella married Jack Hills in 1897, but she too died suddenly on her return
from her honeymoon. The household burden then fell upon Vanessa.
Virginia was allowed uncensored access to her father’s extensive library, and
from an early age determined to be a writer. Her education was sketchy and
she never went to school. Vanessa trained to become a painter. Their two
brothers were sent to preparatory and public schools, and then to Cambridge.
There Thoby made friends with Leonard Woolf, Clive
Bell, Saxon Sydney-Turner, Lytton Strachey and Maynard Keynes. This was the
nucleus of the Bloomsbury Group.
Leslie Stephen died in 1904, and Virginia had a second breakdown. While she
was sick, Vanessa arranged for the four siblings to move from 22 Hyde Park
Gate to 46 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury. At the end of the year Virginia started
reviewing with a clerical paper called the Guardian; in 1905 she
started reviewing in the Times Literary Supplement and continued
writing for that journal for many years. Following a trip to Greece in 1906, Thoby died of typhoid and in 1907 Vanessa married Clive
Bell. Thoby had started ‘Thursday evenings' for his
friends to visit, and this kind of arrangement was continued after his death
by Vanessa and then by Virginia and Adrian when they moved to 29 Fitzroy
Square. In 1911 Virginia moved to 38 Brunswick Square. Leonard Woolf had
joined the Ceylon Civil Service in 1904 and returned in 1911 on leave. He
soon decided that he wanted to marry Virginia, and she eventually agreed.
They were married in St Pancras Registry Office on
10 August 1912. They decided to earn money by writing and journalism.
Since about 1908 Virginia had been writing her first novel The Voyage Out
(originally to be called Melymbrosia). It
was finished by 1913 but, owing to another severe mental breakdown after her
marriage, it was not published until 1915 by Duckworth & Co. (Gerald’s
publishing house). The novel was fairly conventional in form. She then began
writing her second novel Night and Day - if anything even more
conventional - which was published in 1919, also by Duckworth.
From 1911 Virginia had rented small houses near Lewes in Sussex, most notably
Asheham House. Her sister Vanessa rented Charleston
Farmhouse nearby from 1916 onwards. In 1919 the Woolfs
bought Monks House in the village of Rodmell. This
was a small weather-boarded house (now owned by the National Trust) which
they used principally for summer holidays until they were bombed out of their
flat in Mecklenburgh Square in 1940 when it became
their home.
In 1917 the Woolfs had bought a small hand
printing-press in order to take up printing as a hobby and as therapy for
Virginia. By now they were living in Richmond (Surrey) and the Hogarth Press
was named after their house. Virginia wrote, printed and published a couple
of experimental short stories, 'The Mark on the Wall' and 'Kew Gardens'. The Woolfs continued handprinting
until 1932, but in the meantime they increasingly became publishers rather
than printers. By about 1922 the Hogarth Press had become a business. From
1921 Virginia always published with the Press, except for a few limited
editions.
Nineteen-twenty-one saw Virginia’s first collection of short stories Monday
or Tuesday, most of which were experimental in nature. In 1922 her first
experimental novel, Jacob’s Room, appeared. In 1924 the Woolfs moved back to London, to 52 Tavistock
Square. In 1925 Mrs. Dalloway was published, followed by To the
Lighthouse in 1927, and The Waves in
1931. These three novels are generally considered to be her greatest claim to
fame as a modernist writer. Her involvement with the aristocratic novelist
and poet Vita Sackville-West led to Orlando (1928), a roman à clef
inspired by Vita’s life and ancestors at Knole in
Kent. Two talks to women’s colleges at Cambridge in 1928 led to A Room of
One’s Own (1929), a discussion of women’s writing and its historical
economic and social underpinning.
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