In her innovative novels and short stories, Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) helped pioneer techniques for writing fiction that introduced new ways to explore time and consciousness and proved a major influence on a generation of writers.
Woolf ’s novels include Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), and Orlando (1928). She also published a famous book-length essay, A Room of One’s Own (1929), which contains her famous piece of advice for female authors: “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.”
Born Adeline Virginia Stephen, Woolf belonged to a prominent London family. Her father, Sir Leslie Stephen (1832–1904), was an author and mountaineer who climbed several peaks in the Swiss Alps. She grew up in her parents’ thriving literary circle, which included the American expatriate author Henry James (1843–1916).
After the death of her father in 1904, Woolf moved to the Bloomsbury neighborhood of London, where she became one of the leaders of an intellectual club called the Bloomsbury Group. Made up of authors, poets, and social scientists, the club was oriented around progressive politics and modernist approaches to literature. She married fellow Bloomsbury Group member, Leonard Woolf (1880–1969), in 1912.
Five years later, the couple founded a publishing house, Hogarth Press, which published much of Woolf’s fiction. In her fiction, Woolf sought to express the discontinuous nature of time and the way characters often experience the past and the present at the same moment. She used a stream-of-consciousness style of narration to convey the jumble of emotions and observations experienced by her characters.
Woolf experienced several bouts of depression and was devastated by the destruction of her home in a Nazi bombing raid during World War II. She committed suicide by drowning at age fifty-nine.
ADDITIONAL FACTS
- The Woolfs originally used a hand-operated printing press in the basement of their house to print the works published by the Hogarth Press. They continued printing by hand until 1932.
- The Hogarth Press published the first complete English translation of the works of Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) in the 1920s and ’30s. Woolf did not actually meet the famous psychoanalyst until 1939, and she described him as “a screwed up shrunk very old man.”
- Woolf ’s name was memorably appropriated by playwright Edward Albee (1928–) in the title of his Tony Award–winning play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962). Albee claimed that he found the phrase scrawled on the mirror of a restaurant bathroom in New York City, could not get it out of his head, and used it as the inspiration for a climactic moment in the play.
