Woolf, (Adeline) Virginia

Woolf, (Adeline) Virginia (1882–1941), daughter of Leslie Stephen and Julia Duck-worth (1847–95), was born at Hyde Park Gate, where she lived with her sister Vanessa (later Vanessa Bell) and her brothers until her father's death in 1904. The Stephen children then moved to Bloomsbury, where they formed the nucleus of the Bloomsbury Group. In 1905 she began to write for the Times Literary Supplement, a connection which lasted almost until her death. In 1912 she married Leonard Woolf; she was already working on her first novel, The Voyage Out (1915). She had meanwhile experienced one of the bouts of acute mental disturbance from which she had suffered since her mother's death, and it was partly as therapy for her that she and Leonard founded, in 1917, the Hogarth Press; its first production was Two Stories, one by each of them. Her second novel, Night and Day (1919), set in London, centres on Katherine Hilbery, daughter of a famous literary family (modelled on Vanessa), whose pursuits are contrasted with her friend Mary's involvement with women's suffrage. Jacob's Room (1922), a novel evoking the life and death (in the First World War) of Jacob Flanders (clearly related to the death of her brother Thoby in 1906) was recognized as a new development in the art of fiction, in its indirect narration and poetic impressionism. Shortly afterwards she published one of her important statements on modern fiction, ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’, in the Nation and Athenaeum, 1 Dec. 1923, which attacked the realism of Arnold Bennett and advocated a more fluid, internal approach to the problem of characterization, etc. From this time onwards she was regarded as one of the principal exponents of Modernism, and her subsequent major novels, Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), and The Waves (1931), established her reputation securely. Orlando (1928) is a fantastic biography inspired by her friend V. Sackville-West, which traces the history of the youthful, beautiful, and aristocratic Orlando through four centuries and both male and female manifestations; Flush (1933), a slighter work, is the ‘biography’ of E. B. Browning's spaniel. The Years (1937) is in form a more conventional novel, whereas her last work, Between the Acts (1941), is highly experimental. Shortly after finishing it she drowned herself in the Ouse, near her home at Rodmell, Sussex.

Virginia Woolf is now acclaimed as one of the great innovative novelists of the 20th cent., many of whose experimental techniques (such as the use of the stream of consciousness) have been absorbed into the mainstream of fiction; her novels have been particularly highly regarded from the 1970s onwards by the new school of feminist criticism. She was also a literary critic and journalist of distinction. A Room of One's Own (1929) is a classic of the feminist movement; a sequel, Three Guineas (1938), articulates Woolf's view that tyranny at home, within patriarchy, is connected to tyranny abroad. Her critical essays were published in several collections, including The Common Reader (1925; 2nd Series, 1932), The Death of the Moth (1942), The Captain's Death Bed (1950), and Granite and Rainbow (1958). A volume of short stories, A Haunted House (1943), collects earlier stories and some not previously published. Her letters (ed. Nigel Nicolson and J. Trautmann, 6 vols, 1975–80) are a dazzling, at times malicious evocation of a world of literary and social friendships and intrigues, with a cast list that includes Strachey, the Sitwells, Ottoline Morrell, R. Fry, and many others; her diaries (5 vols, ed. Anne Olivier Bell and A. McNeillie, 1977–84) are a unique record of the joys and pains of the creative process.