Virginia Woolf's Biography

Virginia Woolf (January 25, 1882 - march 28, 1941) was a
British author and feminist. Between the world wars, Woolf

I hear voices and cannot concentrate on my work. I have
fought against it but cannot fight any longer. I owe all my

was a significant figure in London literary society and a
member of the Bloomsbury group.

happiness to you but cannot go on and spoil your life."
Modern Scholarship Recently, studies of Virginia Woolf have

Table of contents

focused on feminist and lesbian themes in her work, such as
in the 1997 collection of critical essays, Virginia Woolf:

1 Life and Work
2 Modern Scholarship

Lesbian Readings, edited by Eileen Barrett and Patricia
Cramer. Her fiction is also studied for its insight into

3 Bibliography
3.1 Novels

shell shock, war, class, and modern British society. Her
best-known nonfiction work, notably A Room of One's Own and

3.2 Other Fiction
3.3 Essays

Three Guineas, discusses female education and the
possibility for female authors' entry into the Western

literary canon.

Born Adeline Virginia Stephen in London, Woolf was brought

In 2002, The Hours, a film based on Woolf's life and the
effect of her novel Mrs. Dalloway, was nominated for the

up and educated at home. In 1895, following the death of her
mother, she had the first of numerous nervous breakdowns.

Academy Award for Best Picture. It did not win, but Nicole
Kidman was awarded the Academy Award for Best Actress for

She later claimed to have been frequently molested by Gerald
Duckworth, her half-brother, and to have suffered

her portrayal of Woolf in the movie. The film was adapted
from Michael Cunningham's Pulitzer Prize-winning 1998 novel

psychologically from the experience. Following the death of
her father (Sir Leslie Stephen, an editor and literary

critic) in 1904, she moved with her sister, Vanessa, and two
brothers to a house in Bloomsbury.

Bibliography

She began writing professionally in 1905, initially for the

Times Literary Supplement. In 1912 she married Leonard
Woolf, a civil servant and political theorist. Her first

* The Voyage Out (1915)
* Night and Day (1919)

novel, The Voyage Out, was published in 1915. Her novels are
considered revolutionary as they pioneered literary

* Jacob's Room (1920)
* Mrs. Dalloway (1925)

modernism.

* To the Lighthouse (1927)
* The Waves (1931)

Virginia Woolf is considered a leading modernist, and one of
the greatest innovators in the English language. She has

* The Years (1937)
* Between the Acts (1941)

experimented with, in her works, stream-of-consciousness,
underlying psychological as well as emotional motives of

characters, and the various possibilities of fractured
narrative and chronology. She has, in the words of one

* Monday or Tuesday (1921)

critic, pushed the English language "a little further
against the dark", and her literary achievements and

* Orlando: a Biography (1928)
* Flush: a Biography (1933)

creativity are of influence even today.

* A Haunted House and Other Stories (1943)

Woolf committed suicide, by drowning herself. She filled her
pockets with stones, and jumped into the Ouse River, near

Essays

her home in Rodmell. She left a suicide note for her
husband: "I have a feeling I shall go mad. I cannot go on