Virginia Woolf Biography

Virginia Woolf was born in a rich English family in 1882 and reared by free-thinking parents. She began writing when she was a little child, and her first novel, The Voyage Out, was published in 1915. Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and Orlando are modernist masterpieces, and A Room of One's Own and Three Guineas are pioneering feminist writings. She struggled with serious depression in her personal life. At the age of 59, she committed suicide in 1941.

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Early Life

Adeline Virginia Stephen was born on January 25, 1882, into a wonderful family. Sir Leslie Stephen, her father, was a historian and author, as well as one of the most famous individuals in mountaineering's golden period. Julia Prinsep Stephen (née Jackson), Woolf's mother, was born in India and later worked as a model for a number of Pre-Raphaelite painters. She worked as a nurse and wrote a book about it. Before marrying each other, both of her parents had been married and widowed. Woolf had four half-siblings: Laura Makepeace Stephen and George, Gerald and Stella Duckworth, and three full siblings: Thoby, Vanessa, and Adrian. The eight kids shared a house at 22 Hyde Park Gate in Kensington.

Woolf spent her summers in St. Ives, a seashore resort on England's southwestern tip, from the time she was born until 1895. Talland House, the Stephens' summer home, still stands today and overlooks the dramatic Porthminster Bay, with a view of the Godrevy Lighthouse, which inspired her work. Woolf reminisced fondly about St. Ives in her later memoirs. In fact, events from those early summers were interwoven into her modernist masterpiece, To the Lighthouse (1927).

Virginia was a curious, light-hearted, and playful young girl. She founded the Hyde Park Gate News, a family newspaper, to record her family's amusing experiences. Early tragedies, such as being sexually molested by her half-brothers George and Gerald Duckworth, darkened her youth, which she wrote about in her writings A Sketch of the Past and 22 Hyde Park Gate. 

Education

Although two of Woolf's brothers were educated at Cambridge, the girls were all tutored at home and benefited from the family's magnificent Victorian library. Furthermore, both socially and artistically, Woolf's parents were exceptionally well connected. Her father was friends with several notable philosophers, including William Thackeray, the father of his first wife, who died unexpectedly, and George Henry Lewes. Julia Margaret Cameron, a prominent 19th-century photographer, was her mother's aunt. She also had to deal with the abrupt death of her mother from rheumatic illness when she was 13 years old, which led to her first mental breakdown, and the death of her half-sister Stella, who had become the household's head, two years later.

Woolf resumed her studies in German, Greek, and Latin at King's College London's Ladies' Department while dealing with her personal losses. During her four years of studies, she met a group of radical feminists who were leading educational reforms. Her father died of stomach cancer in 1904, causing another mental setback that resulted in Woolf being institutionalised for a short time. For the remainder of her life, Virginia Woolf would dance between creative expressiveness and personal misery. She began her professional writing career in 1905 as a contributor to The Times Literary Supplement. Woolf's 26-year-old brother Thoby died of typhoid illness a year later.

Marriage

Vanessa and Adrian Woolf sold the family home in Hyde Park Gate after their father died and bought a residence in London's Bloomsbury neighbourhood. Virginia met several Bloomsbury Group members during this time, including art critic Clive Bell, who married Virginia's sister Vanessa, author E.M. Forster, painter Duncan Grant, biographer Lytton Strachey, economist John Maynard Keynes, and essayist Leonard Woolf. The Dreadnought Hoax, in which members of the group dressed up as a delegation of Ethiopian royals, including Virginia disguised as a bearded man, and successfully persuaded the English Royal Navy to show them their cruiser, the HMS Dreadnought, became renowned in 1910. Following the shocking incident, Leonard Woolf and Virginia grew closer, and on August 10, 1912, they married. For the remainder of their lives, the two had a strong love for one another.

Virginia Woolf Works

Virginia Woolf Novels 

Virginia had started writing her first novel several years before she married Leonard. Melymbrosia was the original title. It was published in 1915 as The Voyage Out, after nine years and countless draughts. Woolf experimented with a variety of literary techniques throughout the work, including captivating and unusual narrative perspectives, dream-states, and free association prose. Two years later, the Woolfs purchased a used printing press and founded Hogarth Press, their own publishing house based at Hogarth House. Author Virginia and Leonard, as well as Sigmund Freud, Katharine Mansfield, and T.S. Eliot, published some of their work.

The Woolfs bought Monk's House, a cottage in the village of Rodmell, in 1919, a year after World War I ended, and Virginia published Night and Day, a novel set in Edwardian England, the same year. Jacob's Room, her third novel, was published by Hogarth in 1922. With its modernist aspects, it was deemed a considerable change from her prior works, based on her brother Thoby. That year, she met Vita Sackville-West, a novelist, poet, and landscape gardener who was married to English diplomat Harold Nicolson. Virginia and Vita had a friendship that grew into a romantic one. Despite the fact that their affair ended, they remained friends until Virginia Woolf's death.

Mrs Dalloway, Woolf's fourth novel, was published in 1925 and earned excellent reviews. In post-World War I England, the captivating drama interweaved private monologues and highlighted problems of feminism, mental illness, and homosexuality. Mrs Dalloway was turned into a 1997 film starring Vanessa Redgrave. To the Lighthouse, published in 1928, was another critical success and was hailed as a game-changer for its stream-of-consciousness storytelling. Through the life of the Ramsay family, as they vacation on the Scottish Isle of Skye, the modernist classic explores the subtext of human relationships.

Sackville-West inspired Woolf's 1928 novel Orlando, which follows an English nobleman who unexpectedly transforms into a woman at the age of 30 and lives on for nearly three centuries in English history. The novel was a watershed moment for Woolf, who garnered critical acclaim as well as a surge in popularity as a result of it.

Woolf released A Room of One's Own in 1929, a feminist essay based on lectures she gave at women's colleges about women's roles in literature. She asserts in the piece that “if a woman is to create fiction, she must have money and a room of her own.” Woolf's next work, The Waves (1931), was a "play-poem" composed in the voices of six separate characters, which she defined as "a play-poem." Woolf's final novel, The Years, was released in 1937, and it was about a family's history over the course of a generation. The next year, she published Three Guineas, an essay that tackled Nazism and war while continuing the feminist ideas of A Room of One's Own.

Virginia Woolf Poems 

Some of the popular poems about Virginia Woolf are:

• Virginia Woolf Gert Strydom.

• I Gathered Fresh Gardenias; You Were Missing 

• To Virginia Woolf On The Voyage Out Mary Angela Douglas.

• Virginia Woolf Sheena Blackhall.

• Shiites Of Virginia Woolf Nassy Fesharaki.

Virginia Woolf Books 

Virginia Woolf is without a doubt one of the most well-known female writers in history. Virginia Woolf books and essays are defined by the modernist movement's stream of consciousness style, internal perspectives, and rejection of a linear narrative. Woolf was a brilliant writer who broke new ground in her field, and her works are essential reading for anybody interested in 20th-century literature. Here are a few of her best-known works.

Some of the essential books of Virginia are:

• Virginia Woolf novel [Mrs Dalloway (1925)]

• Orlando: A Biography (1928)

• To the Lighthouse (1927)

• A Room of One’s Own (1929)

• The Waves (1931)

• Between the Acts (1941)

Virginia Woolf Death

Woolf went into a melancholy similar to the one she had previously experienced after finishing the manuscript for her final novel, Between the Acts (1941), which was published posthumously. The start of World War II, the bombing of her London house during the Blitz, and the negative response to her biography of her late friend Roger Fry all contributed to her inability to work. Virginia was displeased when Leonard enlisted in the Home Guard. She maintained her pacifism and chastised her husband for wearing what she thought to be "the Home Guard's foolish outfit."

Woolf's diary after World War II began shows that she was concerned with death, which became more prominent as her mood sank. Woolf drowned herself on March 28, 1941, by stuffing her overcoat pockets with stones and walked into the River Ouse near her home. Her body was not discovered until April 18th. Her husband buried her cremated remains in the garden of Monk's House near Rodmell, Sussex, behind an elm tree.

Virginia Woolf, an English writer, is usually regarded as one of the most influential modernist and feminist writers. She was successful in her own right, both in her writing and in her efforts to reform education. She and her husband, Leonard, also founded Hogarth Press, a publishing firm. However, with the third wave of feminism in the 1970s, she became an icon. Since then, her name has been synonymous with the movement, and her work has been translated into over fifty languages, including her most renowned novel, Mrs Dalloway.