Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf was a significant writer in the development and artistry of twentieth century literature. Born in 1882, Woolf was educated at home using her father’s extensive library. Her father was a well known scholar in England, as well as editor of the Dictionary of National Biography. She began her career writing essays for the Times Literary Supplement (TLS). In 1912 she married Leonard Woolf. Together they formed Hogarth Press, that would go on to publish Katherine Mansfield and T.S. Eliot, amongst others. Virginia and Leonard’s house in Gordon Square, Bloomsbury became the center of an active group of writers, artists, and thinkers who would help bring the modern age to British creativity. The informal “Bloomsbury Group” included E.M. Forster, Lytton Strachey, Via Sackville-West, John Maynard Keynes, and Roger Fry. Still, it was Woolf who led the artistic change through her novels that focused on the inner lives of characters, and essays that would help usher in a feminist movement. More than the others, she was completely experimental in the way she would change styles from one novel to the next, and explore new points of view for her characters and in her essays. In Orlando (1928), she created a historical fantasy of a character who sees England from Elizabethan times to the early twentieth century; in The Waves (1931), Woolf structures a novel around interior monologues. Her books also include Voyage Out (1915), Night and Day (1919), Jacob’s Room (1922), Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), A Room of One’s Own (1929), Three Guineas (1938), Flush (1933), The Years (1937), and Between the Acts (1941), along with publications of her diaries, letters, and other essays. Having suffered two nervous breakdowns in her life, in 1895 and in 1915, she drowned herself on March 24, 1941.
