The daughter of the prominent Victorian scholar and critic Leslie Stephen and his second wife, Julia Duckworth, (Adeline) Virginia Stephen started her literary career at the age of nine, writing stories for her Hyde Park Gate News. Now Virginia Woolf is acknowledged as one of the great innovators of modern fiction, whose novels and essays are studied in schools, discussed in learned journals and enjoyed by readers a hundred years after she experimented with the representation of modern life in fiction.
...
After Leslie Stephen died in 1904, the family moved from Hyde Park Gate to Bloomsbury and became the nucleus of the literary and artistic circle that included Roger Fry, Duncan Grant, Lytton Strachey, EM Forster and Virginia’s future husband, Leonard Woolf. When they married in 1912, Virginia had started writing for the Times Literary Supplement, she was working on her first novel, The Voyage Out (1915), and she was already suffering the recurring episodes of mental instability that had begun after the death of her mother in 1895. To forestall those breakdowns by alleviating Virginia’s anxiety about publishing her own, experimental work, the Woolfs founded the Hogarth Press in 1917.
As well as novels, Virginia Woolf became a prominent critic and literary theorist, lecturing and publishing essays, including the influential discussion of the modern novel in Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown (1923), and her exploration of ‘women and what they are like’ in A Room of One’s Own (1929). Gender identity and sexuality, as well as interior monologue, metaphor, time and structure, were among the themes of Woolf’s criticism and fiction – and her life. While married to Leonard she had a long relationship with a woman, the writer Vita Sackville-West, who inspired the time-shifting Orlando (1928).
Despite the success and critical acclaim of works such as Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse and The Waves, in 1941, during another bout of depression, Virginia Woolf drowned herself in the River Ouse near her home, leaving behind some of the great modernist novels of last century.
