Birth in Kensington
Adeline Virginia Stephen was born in London to Leslie Stephen and Julia Prinsep Stephen.
Literary modernism · feminist essay · 1882–1941
Virginia Woolf
Free thought needs a room, an income and a tradition.
London · Sussex
Biography
The thread of a life.
Virginia Woolf was an English novelist, essayist and publisher who made the novel a means of following consciousness from moment to moment. In A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas she examined how money, education, property and exclusion decide who can write and think, and linked the authority of fathers at home to militarism and war. Her essays defend a free, unprofessional way of reading and judging.
Move to Bloomsbury
After her father’s death she moved to Gordon Square with her siblings and published her first review.
Marriage and the Hogarth Press
She married Leonard Woolf, published The Voyage Out and founded the Hogarth Press with him.
Essays and new novels
The Common Reader, Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse and Orlando appeared, and she lectured in Cambridge on women and fiction.
Women, money and war
A Room of One’s Own, The Waves and Three Guineas examined writing, consciousness and the roots of war.
Death at Rodmell
She took her own life in the River Ouse on 28 March; Between the Acts was published posthumously.
Understanding a life in depth
01Hyde Park Gate and an education at home
Adeline Virginia Stephen was born in London on 25 January 1882, the daughter of the critic and editor Leslie Stephen and of Julia Prinsep Stephen. Her brothers went to Cambridge; she was educated largely at home, through her father’s library and private lessons, with classes in Greek, Latin, German and history at the Ladies’ Department of King’s College London. Summers at St Ives in Cornwall later fed To the Lighthouse. Her mother’s death in 1895 and her father’s in 1904 were each followed by a severe breakdown. She later wrote of abuse by her half-brothers, and the unequal education of sons and daughters became a lasting theme of her essays.
02Bloomsbury, reviewing and the Hogarth Press
After 1904 the Stephen siblings settled in Gordon Square, Bloomsbury, where Thoby Stephen’s Cambridge friends gathered on Thursday evenings; the circle became known as the Bloomsbury Group. Virginia began reviewing for the Times Literary Supplement and taught evening classes for working people at Morley College. In 1912 she married Leonard Woolf, a writer who had served in the colonial administration of Ceylon. Her first novel, The Voyage Out, appeared in 1915 after a long illness. In 1917 the couple founded the Hogarth Press, which printed her experimental stories and later published T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and English translations of Freud.
03The novel transformed and the question of women and fiction
Jacob’s Room, Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse broke with the realist novel of plot and description in favour of shifting consciousness, memory and time. In The Common Reader, published in 1925, and in essays such as Modern Fiction, Woolf argued that fiction should record the ordinary mind rather than the furniture of social life. Orlando, written for Vita Sackville-West, played freely with history and gender. In 1928 she lectured at Newnham and Girton, the women’s colleges of Cambridge, on women and fiction; the lectures became A Room of One’s Own in 1929, which ties literary achievement to income, privacy and inheritance.
04War, Three Guineas and the last years
In the following years Woolf published The Waves, The Years and a biography of the critic Roger Fry, while fascism spread across Europe; her nephew Julian Bell was killed in the Spanish Civil War in 1937. Three Guineas, published in 1938, answers a man’s question about how to prevent war by tracing militarism back to the exclusion of women from education, the professions and public life. During the Blitz the Woolfs’ London houses were bombed. On 28 March 1941, fearing another breakdown, she drowned herself in the River Ouse near Rodmell. Between the Acts appeared posthumously, and her diaries, letters and essays were later published in scholarly editions.
Woolf’s novels and essays became central to literary modernism, feminist criticism and the philosophy of literature, and A Room of One’s Own remains one of the most widely read feminist essays. Later readers have also examined the class privilege and racial assumptions of some passages, so her work is read both as a founding argument and as a text to question.
Sources & reference points