Virginia Woolf (1882-1941)
British author who made an original contribution to the form of the novel - also distinguished feminist essayist, critic in The Times Literary Supplement, and a central figure of Bloomsbury group. Woolf's books were published by Hogart Press, which she founded with her husband, critic and writer Leonard Woolf.
Virginia Woolf was born in London, as the daughter of Julia Jackson Duckworth, member of the Duckworth publishing family, and and Leslie Stephen, literary critic and the founder of the Dictionary of National Biography. She was educated at home by her father, and grew up at the family home at Hyde Park Gate. Her youth was shadowed by series of emotional shocks - her half-brother Gerald Duckworth sexually abused her and her mother died when she was in her early teens. When her brother Toby died in 1906 she suffered a prolonged mental breakdown.
Following the death of her father in 1904, Woolf moved with her sister Vanessa and two brothers to the house in Bloomsbury, which would become central to activities of the Bloomsbury group. From 1905 she began to write for the Times Literary Supplement. In 1912 she married the political theorist Leonard Woolf and published her first book, THE VOYAGE OUT, in 1915. In 1919 appeared NIGHT AND DAY, a realistic novel set in London, contrasting the lives of two friends, Katherine and Mary. JACOB'S ROOM (1922) was based upon the life and death of her brother Toby. With TO THE LIGHTHOUSE (1927) and THE WAVES (1931) Woolf established herself as one of the leading writers of modernism.
During the inter-war period Woolf was at the centre of literary society both in London and at her home in Rodmell, near Lewes, Sussex. She lived in Richmond from 1915 to 1924, in Bloomsbury from 1924 to 1939, and maintained the house in Romdell from 1919-41. The Bloomsbury group was initially based at the Gordon Square residence of Virginia and her sister Vanessa (Bell). The consolidation of the group's beliefs in unifying aesthetic concerns occured under the influence of the philosopher G.E. Moore (1873-1958). The group included among others E.M. Forster, Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell, Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, and Leonard Woolf. By the early 1930s the group ceased to exist in its original form.
After final attack of mental illness Woolf loaded her pockets with stones and drowned herself in the River Ouse near her Sussex home on March 28, 1941.
Virginia Woolf's concern with feminist thematics are dominant in A ROOM OF ONE'S OWN (1929), which deals with the obstacles and prejudices that have hindered women writers, and explores in the last chapter the possibility of an androgynous mind, THREE GUINEAS (1938), where Woolf argues the necessity for women to make a claim for their own history and literature, and ORLANDO (1928), a fantasy novel, which tracesthe career of the androgynous Orland from a masculine identity within the Elisabethan court to a feminine identity in 1928.
As an essayist Woolf was prolific, publishing some 500 essays in periodicals and collections, beginning 1905. Characteristic for Woolf's essays are dialogic nature of style and continual questioning of opinion - her reader is often directly addressed, in a conversational tone, and her rejection of an authoritative voice links her essays to the tradition of Montaigne.
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