Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf, the daughter of Leslie Stephen and Julia Princep, was born in 1882. Julia had three children from a previous marriage and four more with her second husband. When Virginia was thirteen her mother died and this brought on the first of her several breakdowns.

Stephen held conventional views on education and unlike her two brothers, Virginia did not go to university. After her father's death in 1904, Virginia came under the control of her older stepbrother George Duckworth, who bullied and sexually abused her.

In 1904 Woolf started work as a tutor at Morley College. She also had reviews of books published in the Times Literary Supplement. In 1905 Virginia and several friends and relatives began meeting to discuss literary and artistic issues. The friends, who eventually became known as the Bloomsbury Group, included Virginia's sister, Vanessa Bell, Clive Bell, John Maynard Keynes, E. M. Forster, Leonard Woolf, Lytton Strachey, David Garnett, Roger Fry and Duncan Grant.

Woolf was active in the campaign for women's suffrage and was a member of the People's Suffrage Federation. However, her main political involvement was as a member of the Women's Co-operative Guild, a radical organisation led by Margaret Llewelyn Davies.

Virginia married the writer, Leonard Woolf in 1912. The following year she had a severe mental breakdown. Leonard nursed her back to recovery and in 1915 her first novel, The Voyage Out, was published. The couple shared a strong interest in literature and in 1917 founded the Hogarth Press.

Night and Day, a novel that deals with the subject of women's suffrage appeared in 1919. This was followed by Jacob's Room (1922), a novel that tells the story of Jacob Flanders, a soldier killed in the First World War.

Virginia wrote about literature for The Nation and in an article published in December, 1923, attacked the realism of Arnold Bennett and advocated a more "internal approach" to literature. This article was an important step in the development of what became known as Modernism. Woolf rejected the traditional framework of narrative, description and rational exposition in prose and made considerable use of the stream of consciousness technique (recording the flow of thoughts and feelings as they pass through the character's mind). This approach was explored in Virginia's novels: Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), and The Waves (1931).

In the 1920s Woolf became romantically involved with the writer, Vita Sackville-West. Virginia celebrated this love affair in her novel, Orlando, published in 1928. Dedicated to Sackville-West, the book traces the history of the youthful, beautiful, and aristocratic Orlando, and explores the themes of sexual ambiguity.

A highly respected journalist and literary critic, Virginia published a series of important non-fiction books including A Room of One's Own that appeared in 1929. An important book in the history of feminism, it argues the need for the economic independence of women and explores the consequences of a male-dominated society. Woolf returned to the theme of women's liberation in her book Three Guineas (1938).

Virginia Woolf had recurring bouts of depression. The outbreak of the Second World War increased her mental turmoil and on 28th March, 1941, she committed suicide by drowning herself in the Ouse, near her home in Rodmell, Sussex.

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