Virginia Woolf Biography

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) hyperlink to the [extended biography]

Virginia Woolf, born in London on January 25, 1882, was the daughter of Julia Jackson Duckworth, a member of the Duckworth publishing family, and Leslie Stephen, a literary critic and founder of the Dictionary of National Biography . Woolf, growing up at the family estate at Hyde Park Gate, was educated at home by her father. Despite her protected childhood, Woolf had a life infused with tragedy. Her mother died when she was in her early teens. Stella Duckworth, Woolf's half sister, died two years later. Leslie Stephen, her father, suffered a slow death from cancer. When Woolf's 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 laster become central to the activities of the Bloomsbury Group, an elite, influential society that helped place Woolf at the center of literary society.

Virginia Woolf A Room of Ones Own

Virginia Woolf Modernist English writer hyperlink.

Virginia Woolf, one of the founders of the movement known as Modernism, is one of the most important woman writers in English. Her "stream-of-consciousness" essays and novels provide an invaluable insight into both her own life experiences and those of women at the beginning of the twentieth century. Her most famous works include Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), Orlando: A Biography (1928), The Waves (1931), and her most recognized work, A Room of One's Own (1929).

A Room of One's Own is an extended essay, based on Woolf's lectures at a women's college at Cambridge University in 1928. In it, Woolf addresses her thoughts on "the question of women and fiction," interpreted by Woolf as many questions. In A Room of One's Own, Woolf ponders the significant question of whether or not a woman could produce art of the high quality of Shakespeare. In doing so, she examines women's historical experience as well as the distinctive struggle of the woman artist.