Woolf turned Bloomsbury talk into modernist interiors
Adeline Virginia Woolf (née Stephen; 25 January 1882 – 28 March 1941) helped invent modernist fiction’s stream of consciousness. After her father’s 1904 death she moved into bohemian Bloomsbury, married Leonard Woolf in 1912, and issued Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and Orlando between wars.
She was born at Hyde Park Gate into a crowded, blended household. Her father, Sir Leslie Stephen, was a historian, biographer and mountaineer whose first wife was Thackeray's daughter; her mother Julia, a philanthropist, brought three Duckworth children from her own first marriage. The photographer Julia Margaret Cameron was a great-aunt. Named Adeline after an aunt who had died the year before, she went by Virginia. By five she was writing letters, and at ten she launched the Hyde Park Gate News, an illustrated family paper modelled on Tit-Bits, which she ran until 1895.
Every summer for her first thirteen years the family rented Talland House in St Ives, looking across Porthminster Bay to the Godrevy Lighthouse, with guests such as Henry James and George Meredith. Those summers resurface in Jacob's Room, To the Lighthouse and The Waves. Her mother saw no need to school daughters formally, but her father gave her free run of his vast library, telling her to read what she liked, and tutors including Clara Pater taught her Greek and Latin; another, Janet Case, drew her toward the suffrage movement.
Grief came in waves. Her mother's death in 1895 brought what she later called her first breakdown; her half-sister Stella died in 1897, months after marrying; and her father's death in 1904 triggered a months-long crisis. She called the years from 1897 to 1904 the seven unhappy years. She wrote that society then was a ruthless machine against which a girl with ambitions to paint or write had no chance.
With Leonard she founded the Hogarth Press in 1917, and they divided their lives between London and Sussex. A Room of One's Own appeared in 1929 and Three Guineas, tracing fascism's roots in society, in 1938. Her work became central to feminist criticism in the 1970s and has been translated into more than 50 languages.
Source: Virginia Woolf
