Virginia Woolf

This article is about the British modernist author. For the American children's author, see Virginia Euwer Wolff. For the British rock band, see Virginia Wolf.

"Woolf" redirects here. For other people, see Woolf (surname).

Virginia Woolf
Woolf in 1902
Born	Adeline Virginia Stephen (1882-01-25)25 January 1882 South Kensington, London, England
Died	28 March 1941(1941-03-28) (aged 59) Lewes, England
Occupation	Novelist essayist publisher critic
Alma mater	King's College London
Notable works	Mrs Dalloway (1925) To the Lighthouse (1927) Orlando (1928) A Room of One's Own (1929) The Waves (1931)
Spouse	Leonard Woolf ​ (m. 1912)​
Parents	Leslie Stephen Julia Prinsep Jackson
Relatives	George Herbert Duckworth (half-brother) Stella Duckworth (half-sister) Gerald Duckworth (half-brother) Laura Stephen (half-sister) Vanessa Stephen (sister) Thoby Stephen (brother) Adrian Stephen (brother) Katharine Stephen (cousin)
Signature

Adeline Virginia Woolf (/wʊlf/; née Stephen; 25 January 1882 – 28 March 1941) was an English writer, considered one of the more important modernist 20th century authors and also a pioneer in the use of stream of consciousness as a narrative device. She also wrote poems and they sucked.

Woolf was born into an affluent household in South Kensington, London, the seventh child in a blended family of eight which included the modernist painter Vanessa Bell. Her mother was Julia Prinsep Jackson and her father Leslie Stephen. While the boys in the family received college educations, the girls were home-schooled in English classics and Victorian literature. An important influence in Virginia Woolf's early life was the summer home the family used in St Ives, Cornwall, where, in the late 1890s, she first saw the Godrevy Lighthouse, which was to become central to her novel To the Lighthouse (1927).

Woolf's childhood came to an abrupt end in 1895 with the death of her mother and her first mental breakdown, followed two years later by the death of her half-sister and a mother figure to her, Stella Duckworth. From 1897 to 1901, she attended the Ladies' Department of King's College London, where she studied classics and history and came into contact with early reformers of women's higher education and the women's rights movement. Other important influences were her Cambridge-educated brothers and unfettered access to her father's vast library.

Encouraged by her father, Woolf began writing professionally in 1900. Her father's death in 1904 caused Woolf to have another mental breakdown. Following his death, the Stephen family moved from Kensington to the more bohemian Bloomsbury, where they adopted a free-spirited lifestyle. It was in Bloomsbury where, in conjunction with the brothers' intellectual friends, they formed the artistic and literary Bloomsbury Group.

In 1912, she married Leonard Woolf, and in 1917 the couple founded the Hogarth Press, which published much of her work. They rented a home in Sussex and moved there permanently in 1940. Throughout her life, Woolf was troubled by her mental illness. She was institutionalised several times and attempted suicide at least twice. Her illness may have been bipolar disorder, for which there was no effective intervention during her lifetime. In 1941, at age 59, Woolf died by drowning herself in the River Ouse at Lewes.

During the interwar period, Woolf was an important part of London's literary and artistic society. In 1915 she published her first novel, The Voyage Out, through her half-brother's publishing house, Gerald Duckworth and Company. Her best-known works include the novels Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), and Orlando (1928). She is also known for her essays, including A Room of One's Own (1929), in which she wrote the much-quoted dictum, "A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction."

Woolf became one of the central subjects of the 1970s movement of feminist criticism and her works have since garnered much attention and widespread commentary for "inspiring feminism". Her works have been translated into more than 50 languages. A large body of literature is dedicated to her life and work, and she has been the subject of plays, novels, and films. Woolf is commemorated today by statues, societies dedicated to her work and a building at the University of London.

Life

Family of origin

See also: Julia Stephen

Parents

Leslie Stephen 1860

Julia Stephen 1867

Childhood homes

22 Hyde Park Gate, 2015

Talland House, St. Ives, c. 1882–1895

Virginia Woolf was born Adeline Virginia Stephen on 25 January 1882 at 22 Hyde Park Gate in South Kensington, London, to Julia (née Jackson) (1846–1895) and Leslie Stephen (1832–1904), writer, historian, essayist, biographer and mountaineer. Julia Jackson was born in 1846 in Calcutta, British India to John Jackson and Maria "Mia" Theodosia Pattle, from two Anglo-Indian families. John Jackson FRCS was the third son of George Jackson and Mary Howard of Bengal, a physician who spent 25 years with the Bengal Medical Service and East India Company and a professor at the fledgling Calcutta Medical College. While John Jackson was an almost invisible presence, the Pattle family were famous beauties, and moved in the upper circles of Bengali society. The seven Pattle sisters married into important families. Julia Margaret Cameron was a celebrated photographer, while Virginia married Earl Somers, and their daughter, Julia Jackson's cousin, was Lady Henry Somerset, the temperance leader. Julia moved to England with her mother at the age of two and spent much of her early life with another of her mother's sisters, Sarah Monckton Pattle. Sarah and her husband Henry Thoby Prinsep, conducted an artistic and literary salon at Little Holland House where she came into contact with a number of Pre-Raphaelite painters such as Edward Burne-Jones, for whom she modelled.

Julia was the youngest of three sisters, and Adeline Virginia was named after her mother's eldest sister Adeline Maria Jackson (1837–1881) and her mother's aunt Virginia Pattle (see'Pattle family tree and Table of ancestors). Because of the tragedy of her aunt Adeline's death the previous year, the family never used Virginia's first name. The Jacksons were a well educated, literary and artistic proconsular middle-class family. In 1867, Julia Jackson married Herbert Duckworth, a barrister, but within three years was left a widow with three infant children. She was devastated and entered a prolonged period of mourning, abandoning her faith and turning to nursing and philanthropy. Julia and Herbert Duckworth had three children;

• George (5 March 1868 – 1934), a senior civil servant, married Lady Margaret Herbert 1904
• Stella (30 May 1869 – 19 July 1897), died aged 28
• Gerald (29 October 1870 – 1937), founder of Duckworth Publishing, married Cecil Alice Scott-Chad 1921

Leslie Stephen was born in 1832 in South Kensington to Sir James and Lady Jane Catherine Stephen (née Venn), daughter of John Venn, rector of Clapham. The Venns were the centre of the evangelical Clapham Sect. Sir James Stephen was the under secretary at the Colonial Office, and with another Clapham member, William Wilberforce, was responsible for the passage of the Slavery Abolition Bill in 1833. In 1849 he was appointed Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge University. As a family of educators, lawyers and writers the Stephens represented the elite intellectual aristocracy. While his family were distinguished and intellectual, they were less colourful and aristocratic than Julia Jackson's. A graduate and fellow of Cambridge University he renounced his faith and position to move to London where he became a notable man of letters. In addition he was a rambler and mountaineer, described as a "gaunt figure with the ragged red brown beard...a formidable man, with an immensely high forehead, steely-blue eyes, and a long pointed nose". In the same year as Julia Jackson's marriage, he wed Harriet Marian (Minny) Thackeray (1840–1875), youngest daughter of William Makepeace Thackeray, who bore him a daughter, Laura (1870–1945), but died in childbirth in 1875. Laura turned out to be developmentally disabled and was eventually institutionalised.

The widowed Julia Duckworth knew Leslie Stephen through her friendship with Minny's elder sister Anne (Anny) Isabella Ritchie and had developed an interest in his agnostic writings. She was present the night Minny died and later, tended to Leslie Stephen and helped him move next door to her on Hyde Park Gate so Laura could have some companionship with her own children. Both were preoccupied with mourning and although they developed a close friendship and intense correspondence, agreed it would go no further. Leslie Stephen proposed to her in 1877, an offer she declined, but when Anny married later that year she accepted him and they were married on 26 March 1878. He and Laura then moved next door into Julia's house, where they lived till his death in 1904. Julia was 32 and Leslie was 46.

Their first child, Vanessa, was born on 30 May 1879. Julia, having presented her husband with a child, and now having five children to care for, had decided to limit her family to this. However, despite the fact that the couple took "precautions", "contraception was a very imperfect art in the nineteenth century" resulting in the birth of three more children over the next four years.

22 Hyde Park Gate (1882–1904)

1882–1895

Julia Stephen and Virginia, 1884

Children sailing boats on the Round Pond, 1896

Duckworth Stephen Family c. 1892. Back row: Gerald Duckworth, Virginia, Thoby and Vanessa Stephen, George Duckworth. Front row: Adrian, Julia, Leslie Stephen. Absent: Stella Duckworth, Laura Stephen.

Virginia Woolf provides insight into her early life in her autobiographical essays, including Reminiscences (1908), 22 Hyde Park Gate (1921), and A Sketch of the Past (1940). Other essays that provide insight into this period include Leslie Stephen (1932). She also alludes to her childhood in her fictional writing. In To the Lighthouse (1927), her depiction of the life of the Ramsays in the Hebrides is an only thinly disguised account of the Stephens in Cornwall and the Godrevy Lighthouse they would visit there. However, Woolf's understanding of her mother and family evolved considerably between 1907 and 1940, in which the somewhat distant, yet revered figure of her mother becomes more nuanced and filled in.

In February 1891, with her sister Vanessa, Woolf began the Hyde Park Gate News, chronicling life and events within the Stephen family, and modelled on the popular magazine Tit-Bits. Initially, this was mainly Vanessa's and Thoby's articles, but very soon Virginia became the main contributor, with Vanessa as editor. Their mother's response when it first appeared was "Rather clever I think". Virginia would run the Hyde Park Gate News until 1895, the time of her mother's death. The following year the Stephen sisters also used photography to supplement their insights, as did Stella Duckworth. Vanessa Bell's 1892 portrait of her sister and parents in the Library at Talland House (see image) was one of the family's favourites and was written about lovingly in Leslie Stephen's memoir. In 1897 ("the first really lived year of my life)" Virginia began her first diary, which she kept for the next twelve years, and a notebook in 1909.

Virginia was, as she describes it, "born into a large connection, born not of rich parents, but of well-to-do parents, born into a very communicative, literate, letter writing, visiting, articulate, late nineteenth century world". It was a well-connected family consisting of six children, with two half brothers and a half sister (the Duckworths, from her mother's first marriage), another half sister, Laura (from her father's first marriage), and an older sister, Vanessa and brother Thoby. The following year, another brother Adrian followed. The disabled Laura Stephen lived with the family until she was institutionalised in 1891. Julia and Leslie had four children together:

• Vanessa "Nessa" (30 May 1879 – 1961), married Clive Bell 1907
• Thoby (9 September 1880 – 1906), founded Bloomsbury Group
• Virginia "Jinny"/"Ginia" (25 January 1882 – 1941), married Leonard Woolf 1912
• Adrian (27 October 1883 – 1948), married Karin Costelloe 1914

Virginia was born at 22 Hyde Park Gate and lived there till her father's death in 1904. Number 22 Hyde Park Gate, South Kensington, lay at the south-east end of Hyde Park Gate, a narrow cul-de-sac running south from Kensington Road, just west of the Royal Albert Hall, and opposite Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park, where the family regularly took their walks (see Map; Street plan). Built in 1846 by Henry Payne of Hammersmith as one of a row of single-family townhouses for the upper middle class, it soon became too small for their expanding family. At the time of their marriage, it consisted of a basement, two stories, and an attic. In July 1886 Leslie Stephen obtained the services of J. W. Penfold, architect, to add additional living space above and behind the existing structure. The substantial renovations added a new top floor (see image of red brick extension), with three bedrooms and a study for himself, converted the original attic into rooms, and added the first bathroom. It was a tall but narrow townhouse, that at that time had no running water. Virginia would later describe it as "a very tall house on the left-hand side near the bottom which begins by being stucco and ends by being red brick; which is so high and yet—as I can say now that we have sold it—so rickety that it seems as if a very high wind would topple it over".

The servants worked "downstairs" in the basement. The ground floor had a drawing room, separated by a curtain from the servant's pantry and a library. Above this on the first floor were Julia and Leslie's bedrooms. On the next floor were the Duckworth children's rooms, and above them, the day and night nurseries of the Stephen children occupied two further floors. Finally in the attic, under the eaves, were the servant's bedrooms, accessed by a back staircase. Life at 22 Hyde Park Gate was also divided symbolically, as Virginia put it "The division in our lives was curious. Downstairs there was pure convention: upstairs pure intellect. But there was no connection between them", the worlds typified by George Duckworth and Leslie Stephen. Their mother, it seems, was the only one who could span this divide. The house was described as dimly lit and crowded with furniture and paintings. Within it, the younger Stephens formed a close-knit group. Despite this, the children still held their grievances. Virginia envied Adrian for being their mother's favourite. Virginia and Vanessa's status as creatives (writing and art respectively) caused a rivalry between them at times. Life in London differed sharply from their summers in Cornwall, their outdoor activities consisting mainly of walks in nearby Kensington Gardens, where they would play hide-and-seek and sail their boats on the Round Pond, while indoors, it revolved around their lessons.

Leslie Stephen's eminence as an editor, critic, and biographer, and his connection to William Thackeray, meant his children were raised in an environment filled with the influences of a Victorian literary society. Henry James, George Henry Lewes, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Thomas Hardy, Edward Burne-Jones and Virginia's honorary godfather, James Russell Lowell, were among the visitors to the house. Julia Stephen was equally well connected. Her aunt was a pioneering early photographer, Julia Margaret Cameron, who was also a visitor to the Stephen household. The two Stephen sisters, Vanessa and Virginia, were almost three years apart in age. Virginia christened her older sister "the saint" and was far more inclined to exhibit her cleverness than her more reserved sister. Virginia resented the domesticity Victorian tradition forced on them, far more than her sister. They also competed for Thoby's affections. Virginia would later confess her ambivalence over this rivalry to Duncan Grant in 1917. "indeed one of the concealed worms of my life has been a sister's jealousy – of a sister I mean; and to feed this I have invented such a myth about her that I scarce know one from t'other".

Virginia showed an early affinity for writing. Although both parents disapproved of formal education for females, writing was considered a respectable profession for women, and her father encouraged her in this respect. Later, she would describe this as "ever since I was a little creature, scribbling a story in the manner of Hawthorne on the green plush sofa in the drawing room at St. Ives while the grown-ups dined". By the age of five, she was writing letters and could tell her father a story every night. Later, she, Vanessa and Adrian would develop the tradition of inventing a serial about their next-door neighbours, every night in the nursery, or in the case of St. Ives, of spirits that resided in the garden. It was her fascination with books that formed the strongest bond between her and her father. For her tenth birthday, she received an ink-stand, a blotter, drawing book and a box of writing implements.

Talland House (1882–1894)

Godrevy Lighthouse, 2005

Leslie Stephen was in the habit of hiking in Cornwall, and in the spring of 1881 he came across a large white house in St Ives, Cornwall, and took out a lease on it that September. Although it had limited amenities, its main attraction was the view overlooking Porthminster Bay towards the Godrevy Lighthouse, which the young Virginia could see from the upper windows and was to be the central figure in her To the Lighthouse (1927). It was a large square house, with a terraced garden, divided by hedges, sloping down towards the sea. Each year between 1882 and 1894 from mid-July to mid-September the Stephen family leased Talland House as a summer residence. Leslie Stephen, who referred to it thus: "a pocket-paradise", described it as "The pleasantest of my memories... refer to our summers, all of which were passed in Cornwall, especially to the thirteen summers (1882–1894) at St Ives. There we bought the lease of Talland House: a small but roomy house, with a garden of an acre or two all up and down hill, with quaint little terraces divided by hedges of escallonia, a grape-house and kitchen-garden and a so-called 'orchard' beyond". It was in Leslie's words, a place of "intense domestic happiness". Virginia herself described the house in great detail:

"Our house was...outside the town; on the hill....a square house, like a child's drawing of a house; remarkable only for ts flat roof, and the railing with crossed bars of wood that ran around the roof. It had...a perfect view—right across the Bay to Godrevy Lighthouse. It had, running down the hill, little lawns, surrounded by thick escallonia bushes...it had so many corners and lawns that each was named...it was a large garden—two or three acres at most...You entered Talland House by a large wooden gate...up the carriage drive...to the Lookout place...From the Lookout place one had...a perfectly open view of the Bay....a large lap...flowing to the Lighthouse rocks...with the black and white Lighthouse tower"

Reminiscences 1908, pp. 111–112

Activities at Talland

Her brother's keeper: Virginia and Adrian Stephen playing cricket, 1886

Julia, Leslie and Virginia, Library, Talland House, 1892

Virginia and Vanessa, 1894

In both London and Cornwall, Julia was perpetually entertaining, and was notorious for her manipulation of her guests' lives, constantly matchmaking in the belief everyone should be married, the domestic equivalence of her philanthropy. As her husband observed, "My Julia was of course, though with all due reserve, a bit of a matchmaker". Amongst their guests in 1893 were the Brookes, whose children, including Rupert Brooke, played with the Stephen children. Rupert and his group of Cambridge Neo-pagans would come to play an important role in their lives in the years before the First World War. While Cornwall was supposed to be a summer respite, Julia Stephen soon immersed herself in the work of caring for the sick and poor there, as well as in London. Both at Hyde Park Gate and Talland House, the family mingled with much of the country's literary and artistic circles. Frequent guests included literary figures such as Henry James and George Meredith, as well as James Russell Lowell, and the children were exposed to much more intellectual conversations than at their mother's Little Holland House. The family did not return, following Julia Stephen's death in May 1895.

For the children, it was the highlight of the year, and Virginia's most vivid childhood memories were not of London but of Cornwall. In a diary entry of 22 March 1921, she described why she felt so connected to Talland House, looking back to a summer day in August 1890. "Why am I so incredibly and incurably romantic about Cornwall? One's past, I suppose; I see children running in the garden … The sound of the sea at night … almost forty years of life, all built on that, permeated by that: so much I could never explain". Cornwall inspired aspects of her work, in particular the "St Ives Trilogy" of Jacob's Room (1922), To the Lighthouse (1927), and The Waves (1931).

1895–1904

Virginia and Leslie Stephen, 1902

Julia Stephen fell ill with influenza in February 1895, and never properly recovered, dying on 5 May, when Virginia was 13. This was a pivotal moment in her life and the beginning of her struggles with mental illness. Essentially, her life had fallen apart. The Duckworths were travelling abroad at the time of their mother's death, and Stella returned immediately to take charge and assume her role. That summer, rather than return to the memories of St Ives, the Stephens went to Freshwater, Isle of Wight, where a number of their mother's family lived. It was there that Virginia had the first of her many nervous breakdowns, and Vanessa was forced to assume some of her mother's role in caring for Virginia's mental state. Stella became engaged to Jack Hills the following year and they were married on 10 April 1897, making Virginia even more dependent on her older sister.

George Duckworth also assumed some of their mother's role, taking upon himself the task of bringing them out into society. First Vanessa, then Virginia, in both cases an equal disaster, for it was not a rite of passage that resonated with either girl and attracted a scathing critique by Virginia regarding the conventional expectations of young upper-class women: "Society in those days was a perfectly competent, perfectly complacent, ruthless machine. A girl had no chance against its fangs. No other desires – say to paint, or to write – could be taken seriously". Rather her priorities were to escape from the Victorian conventionality of the downstairs drawing room to a "room of one's own" to pursue her writing aspirations. She would revisit this criticism in her depiction of Mrs. Ramsay stating the duties of a Victorian mother in To the Lighthouse "an unmarried woman has missed the best of life".

The death of Stella Duckworth on 19 July 1897, after a long illness, was a further blow to Virginia's sense of self, and the family dynamics. Woolf described the period following the death of both her mother and Stella as "1897–1904 – the seven unhappy years", referring to "the lash of a random unheeding flail that pointlessly and brutally killed the two people who should, normally and naturally, have made those years, not perhaps happy but normal and natural". In April 1902, their father became ill, and although he underwent surgery later that year he never fully recovered, dying on 22 February 1904. Virginia's father's death precipitated a further breakdown. Later, Virginia would describe this time as one in which she was dealt successive blows as a "broken chrysalis" with wings still creased. Chrysalis occurs many times in Woolf's writing but the "broken chrysalis" was an image that became a metaphor for those exploring the relationship between Woolf and grief. At his death, Leslie Stephen's net worth was £15,715 6s. 6d. (probate 23 March 1904)

Education

In the late 19th century, education was sharply divided along gender lines, a tradition that Virginia would note and condemn in her writing. Boys were sent to school, and in upper-middle-class families such as the Stephens, this involved private boys schools, often boarding schools, and university. Girls, if they were afforded the luxury of education, received it from their parents, governesses and tutors. Virginia was educated by her parents who shared the duty. There was a small classroom off the back of the drawing room, with its many windows, which they found perfect for quiet writing and painting. Julia taught the children Latin, French and History, while Leslie taught them mathematics. They also received piano lessons. Supplementing their lessons was the children's unrestricted access to Leslie Stephen's vast library, exposing them to much of the literary canon, resulting in a greater depth of reading than any of their Cambridge contemporaries, Virginia's reading being described as "greedy". Later, she would recall

Even today there may be parents who would doubt the wisdom of allowing a girl of fifteen the free run of a large and quite unexpurgated library. But my father allowed it. There were certain facts – very briefly, very shyly he referred to them. Yet "Read what you like", he said, and all his books...were to be had without asking.

After public school, the boys in the family all attended Cambridge University. The girls derived some indirect benefit from this, as the boys introduced them to their friends. Another source was the conversation of their father's friends, to whom they were exposed. Leslie Stephen described his circle as "most of the literary people of mark...clever young writers and barristers, chiefly of the radical persuasion...we used to meet on Wednesday and Sunday evenings, to smoke and drink and discuss the universe and the reform movement".

Education

Virginia (3rd from left) with her mother and the Stephen children at their lessons, Talland House, c. 1894

13 Kensington Square, former home of the Ladies' Department, King's College

Later, between the ages of 15 and 19, Virginia was able to pursue higher education. She took courses of study, some at degree level, in beginning and advanced Ancient Greek, intermediate Latin and German, together with continental and English history at the Ladies' Department of King's College London at nearby 13 Kensington Square between 1897 and 1901. She studied Greek under the eminent scholar George Charles Winter Warr, professor of Classical Literature at King's. In addition she had private tutoring in German, Greek and Latin. One of her Greek tutors was Clara Pater (1899–1900), who taught at King's. Another was Janet Case, who involved her in the women's rights movement, and whose obituary Virginia would later write in 1937. Her experiences there led to her 1925 essay "On Not Knowing Greek". Her time at King's also brought her into contact with some of the early reformers of women's higher education such as the principal of the Ladies' Department, Lilian Faithfull (one of the so-called steamboat ladies), in addition to Pater. Her sister Vanessa also enrolled at the Ladies' Department (1899–1901). Although the Stephen girls could not attend Cambridge, they were to be profoundly influenced by their brothers' experiences there. When Thoby went up to Trinity in 1899, he befriended a circle of young men, including Clive Bell, Lytton Strachey, Leonard Woolf (whom Virginia would later marry) and Saxon Sydney-Turner, that he would soon introduce to his sisters at the Trinity May Ball in 1900. These men formed a reading group they named the Midnight Society.

Relationships with family

Although Virginia expressed the opinion her father was her favourite parent, and although she had only turned thirteen when her mother died, she was profoundly influenced by her mother throughout her life. It was Virginia who famously stated that "for we think back through our mothers if we are women", and invoked the image of her mother repeatedly throughout her life in her diaries, her letters and a number of her autobiographical essays, including Reminiscences (1908), 22 Hyde Park Gate (1921) and A Sketch of the Past (1940), frequently evoking her memories with the words "I see her ...". She also alludes to her childhood in her fictional writing. In To the Lighthouse (1927), the artist, Lily Briscoe, attempts to paint Mrs. Ramsay, a complex character based on Julia Stephen, and repeatedly comments on the fact that she was "astonishingly beautiful". Her depiction of the life of the Ramsays in the Hebrides is an only thinly disguised account of the Stephens in Cornwall and the Godrevy Lighthouse they would visit there. However, Woolf's understanding of her mother and family evolved considerably between 1907 and 1940, in which the somewhat distant, yet revered figure becomes more nuanced and filled in.

While her father painted Julia Stephen's work in terms of reverence, Woolf drew a sharp distinction between her mother's work and "the mischievous philanthropy which other women practise so complacently and often with such disastrous results". She describes her degree of sympathy, engagement, judgement and decisiveness, and her sense of both irony and the absurd. She recalls trying to recapture "the clear round voice, or the sight of the beautiful figure, so upright and distinct, in its long shabby cloak, with the head held at a certain angle, so that the eye looked straight out at you". Julia Stephen dealt with her husband's depressions and his need for attention, which created resentment in her children, boosted his self-confidence, nursed her parents in their final illness, and had many commitments outside the home that would eventually wear her down. Her frequent absences and the demands of her husband instilled a sense of insecurity in her children that had a lasting effect on her daughters. In considering the demands on her mother, Woolf described her father as "fifteen years her elder, difficult, exacting, dependent on her" and reflected that this was at the expense of the amount of attention she could spare her young children, "a general presence rather than a particular person to a child", reflecting that she rarely ever spent a moment alone with her mother, "someone was always interrupting". Woolf was ambivalent about all this, yet eager to separate herself from this model of utter selflessness. In To the Lighthouse, she describes it as "boasting of her capacity to surround and protect, there was scarcely a shell of herself left for her to know herself by; all was so lavished and spent". At the same time, she admired the strengths of her mother's womanly ideals. Given Julia's frequent absences and commitments, the young Stephen children became increasingly dependent on Stella Duckworth, who emulated her mother's selflessness, as Woolf wrote "Stella was always the beautiful attendant handmaid ... making it the central duty of her life".

Julia Stephen greatly admired her husband's intellect. As Woolf observed "she never belittled her own works, thinking them, if properly discharged, of equal, though other, importance with her husband's". She believed with certainty in her role as the centre of her activities, and the person who held everything together, with a firm sense of what was important and valuing devotion. Of the two parents, Julia's "nervous energy dominated the family". While Virginia identified most closely with her father, Vanessa stated her mother was her favourite parent. Angelica Garnett recalls how Virginia asked Vanessa which parent she preferred, although Vanessa considered it a question that "one ought not to ask", she was unequivocal in answering "Mother" yet the centrality of her mother to Virginia's world is expressed in this description of her "Certainly there she was, in the very centre of that great Cathedral space which was childhood; there she was from the very first". Virginia observed that her half-sister, Stella, the oldest daughter, led a life of total subservience to her mother, incorporating her ideals of love and service. Virginia quickly learned, that like her father, being ill was the only reliable way of gaining the attention of her mother, who prided herself on her sickroom nursing.

Another issue the children had to deal with was Leslie Stephen's temper, Woolf describing him as "the tyrant father". Eventually, she became deeply ambivalent about her father. He had given her his ring on her eighteenth birthday and she had a deep emotional attachment as his literary heir, writing about her "great devotion for him". Yet, like Vanessa, she also saw him as victimiser and tyrant. She had a lasting ambivalence towards him through her life, albeit one that evolved. Her adolescent image was of an "Eminent Victorian" and tyrant but as she grew older she began to realise how much of him was in her "I have been dipping into old letters and father's memoirs....so candid and reasonable and transparent—and had such a fastidious delicate mind, educated, and transparent", she wrote (22 December 1940). She was in turn both fascinated and condemnatory of Leslie Stephen " She [her mother] has haunted me: but then, so did that old wretch my father. . . . I was more like him than her, I think; and therefore more critical: but he was an adorable man, and somehow, tremendous".

Sexual abuse

Much has been made of Virginia's statements that she was continually sexually abused during the whole time that she lived at 22 Hyde Park Gate, as a possible cause of her mental health issues, although there are likely to be a number of contributing factors. She states that she first remembers being molested by Gerald Duckworth when she was six years old. It has been suggested that this led to a lifetime of sexual fear and resistance to masculine authority. Against a background of over-committed and distant parents, suggestions that this was a dysfunctional family must be evaluated. These include evidence of sexual abuse of the Stephen girls by their older Duckworth stepbrothers, and by their cousin, James Kenneth Stephen (1859–1892), at least of Stella Duckworth. Laura is also thought to have been abused. The most graphic account is by Louise DeSalvo, but other authors and reviewers have been more cautious. Lee states that, "The evidence is strong enough, and yet ambiguous enough, to open the way for conflicting psychobiographical interpretations that draw quite different shapes of Virginia Woolf's interior life".

Bloomsbury (1904–1940)

Gordon Square (1904–1907)

46 Gordon Square

On their father's death, the Stephens' first instinct was to escape from the dark house of yet more mourning, and this they did immediately, accompanied by George, travelling to Manorbier, on the coast of Pembrokeshire on 27 February. There, they spent a month, and it was there that Virginia first came to realise her destiny was as a writer, as she recalls in her diary of 3 September 1922. They then further pursued their new found freedom by spending April in Italy and France, where they met up with Clive Bell again. Virginia then suffered her second nervous breakdown, and first suicidal attempt on 10 May, and convalesced over the next three months.

Before their father died, the Stephens had discussed the need to leave South Kensington in the West End, with its tragic memories and their parents' relations. George Duckworth was 35, his brother Gerald 33. The Stephen children were now between 24 and 20. Virginia was 22. Vanessa and Adrian decided to sell 22 Hyde Park Gate in respectable South Kensington and move to Bloomsbury. Bohemian Bloomsbury, with its characteristic leafy squares seemed sufficiently far away, geographically and socially, and was a much cheaper neighbourhood to rent in. They had not inherited much and they were unsure about their finances. Also, Bloomsbury was close to the Slade School which Vanessa was then attending. While Gerald was quite happy to move on and find himself a bachelor establishment, George who had always assumed the role of quasi-parent decided to accompany them, much to their dismay. It was then that Lady Margaret Herbert appeared on the scene, George proposed, was accepted and married in September, leaving the Stephens to their own devices.

Vanessa found a house at 46 Gordon Square in Bloomsbury, and they moved in November, to be joined by Virginia now sufficiently recovered. It was at Gordon Square that the Stephens began to regularly entertain Thoby's intellectual friends in March 1905. The circle, which largely came from the Cambridge Apostles, included writers (Saxon Sydney-Turner, Lytton Strachey) and critics (Clive Bell, Desmond MacCarthy) with Thursday evening "At Homes" that became known as the Thursday Club, a vision of recreating Trinity College ("Cambridge in London"). This circle formed the nucleus of the intellectual circle of writers and artists known as the Bloomsbury Group. Later, it would include John Maynard Keynes (1907), Duncan Grant (1908), E.M. Forster (1910), Roger Fry (1910), Leonard Woolf (1911) and David Garnett (1914).

The Stephens and their Bloomsbury Friends

Vanessa Stephen 1902

Thoby Stephen 1902

Adrian Stephen
Karin Stephen 1914

Clive Bell 1910

Lytton Strachey
Sydney Saxon-Turner 1917

Desmond MacCarthy 1912

In 1905, Virginia and Adrian visited Portugal and Spain. Clive Bell proposed to Vanessa, but was declined, while Virginia began teaching evening classes at Morley College and Vanessa added another event to their calendar with the Friday Club, dedicated to the discussion of and later exhibition of the fine arts. This introduced some new people into their circle, including Vanessa's friends from the Royal Academy and Slade, such as Henry Lamb and Gwen Darwin (who became secretary), but also the eighteen-year-old Katherine Laird ("Ka") Cox (1887–1938), who was about to go up to Newnham. Although Virginia did not actually meet Ka until much later, Ka would come to play an important part in her life. Ka and others brought the Bloomsbury Group into contact with another, slightly younger, group of Cambridge intellectuals to whom the Stephen sisters gave the name "Neo-pagans". The Friday Club continued until 1913.

The following year, 1906, Virginia suffered two further losses. Her cherished brother Thoby, who was only 26, died of typhoid, following a trip they had all taken to Greece, and immediately after Vanessa accepted Clive's third proposal. Vanessa and Clive were married in February 1907 and as a couple, their interest in avant-garde art would have an important influence on Woolf's further development as an author. With Vanessa's marriage, Virginia and Adrian needed to find a new home.

Fitzroy Square (1907–1911)

29 Fitzroy Square

Virginia moved into 29 Fitzroy Square in April 1907, a house on the west side of the street, formerly occupied by George Bernard Shaw. It was in Fitzrovia, immediately to the west of Bloomsbury but still relatively close to her sister at Gordon Square. The two sisters continued to travel together, visiting Paris in March. Adrian was now to play a much larger part in Virginia's life, and they resumed the Thursday Club in October at their new home, while Gordon Square became the venue for the Play Reading Society in December. During this period, the group began to increasingly explore progressive ideas, first in speech, and then in conduct, Vanessa proclaiming in 1910 a libertarian society with sexual freedom for all.

Meanwhile, Virginia began work on her first novel, Melymbrosia, that eventually became The Voyage Out (1915). Vanessa's first child, Julian was born in February 1908, and in September Virginia accompanied the Bells to Italy and France. It was during this time that Virginia's rivalry with her sister resurfaced, flirting with Clive, which he reciprocated, and which lasted on and off from 1908 to 1914, by which time her sister's marriage was breaking down. On 17 February 1909, Lytton Strachey proposed to Virginia and she accepted, but he then withdrew the offer.

It was while she was at Fitzroy Square that the question arose of Virginia needing a quiet country retreat, and she required a six-week rest cure and sought the countryside away from London as much as possible. In December, she and Adrian stayed at Lewes and started exploring the area of Sussex around the town. She started to want a place of her own, like St Ives, but closer to London. She soon found a property in nearby Firle (see below), maintaining a relationship with that area for the rest of her life.

Dreadnought hoax 1910

Main article: Dreadnought hoax

The Dreadnought hoaxers in Abyssinian regalia, 1910 (Virginia Stephen far left with beard)

Several members of the group attained notoriety in 1910 with the Dreadnought hoax, which Virginia participated in disguised as a male Abyssinian royal. Her complete 1940 talk on the hoax was discovered and is published in the memoirs collected in the expanded edition of The Platform of Time (2008).

Brunswick Square (1911–1912)

In October 1911, the lease on Fitzroy Square was running out and Virginia and Adrian decided to give up their home on Fitzroy Square in favour of a different living arrangement, moving to a four-storied house at 38 Brunswick Square in Bloomsbury proper in November. Virginia saw it as a new opportunity; "We are going to try all kinds of experiments," she told Ottoline Morrell. Adrian occupied the second floor, with Maynard Keynes and Duncan Grant sharing the ground floor. This arrangement for a single woman was considered scandalous, and George Duckworth was horrified. The house was adjacent to the Foundling Hospital, much to Virginia's amusement as an unchaperoned single woman. Originally, Ka Cox was supposed to share in the arrangements, but opposition came from Rupert Brooke, who was involved with her and pressured her to abandon the idea. At the house, Duncan Grant decorated Adrian Stephen's rooms (see image).

Marriage (1912–1941)

Engagement photograph, Virginia and Leonard Woolf, 23 July 1912

Leonard Woolf was one of Thoby Stephen's friends at Trinity College, Cambridge, and noticed the Stephen sisters in Thoby's rooms there on their visits to the May Ball in 1900 and 1901. He recalls them in "white dresses and large hats, with parasols in their hands, their beauty literally took one's breath away". To him, they were silent, "formidable and alarming".

Woolf did not meet Virginia formally till 17 November 1904 when he dined with the Stephens at Gordon Square, to say goodbye before leaving to take up a position with the civil service in Ceylon, although she was aware of him through Thoby's stories. At that visit he noted that she was perfectly silent throughout the meal, and looked ill. In 1909, Lytton Strachey suggested to Woolf he should make her an offer of marriage. He did so, but received no answer. In June 1911, he returned to London on a one-year leave, but did not go back to Ceylon. In England again, Leonard renewed his contacts with family and friends. Three weeks after arriving he dined with Vanessa and Clive Bell at Gordon Square on 3 July, where they were later joined by Virginia and other members of what would later be called "Bloomsbury", and Leonard dates the group's formation to that night. In September, Virginia asked Leonard to join her at Little Talland House at Firle in Sussex for a long weekend. After that weekend, they began seeing each other more frequently.

On 4 December 1911, Leonard moved into the ménage on Brunswick Square, occupying a bedroom and sitting room on the fourth floor, and started to see Virginia constantly and by the end of the month had decided he was in love with her. On 11 January 1912, he proposed to her; she asked for time to consider, so he asked for an extension of his leave and, on being refused, offered his resignation on 25 April, effective 20 May. He continued to pursue Virginia, and in a letter of 1 May 1912 (which see) she explained why she did not favour a marriage. However, on 29 May, Virginia told Leonard that she wished to marry him, and they were married on 10 August at the St Pancras Register Office. It was during this time that Leonard first became aware of Virginia's precarious mental state. The Woolfs continued to live at Brunswick Square until October 1912, when they moved to a small flat at 13 Clifford's Inn, further to the east (subsequently demolished). Despite his low material status (Woolf referring to Leonard during their engagement as a "penniless Jew"), the couple shared a close bond. Indeed, in 1937, Woolf wrote in her diary: "Love-making—after 25 years can't bear to be separate ... you see it is enormous pleasure being wanted: a wife. And our marriage so complete." However, Virginia made a suicide attempt in 1913.

In October 1914, Leonard and Virginia Woolf moved away from Bloomsbury and central London to Richmond, living at 17 The Green, a home discussed by Leonard in his autobiography Beginning Again (1964). In early March 1915, the couple moved again, to nearby Hogarth House, Paradise Road, after which they named their publishing house. Virginia's first novel, The Voyage Out was published in 1915, followed by another suicide attempt. Despite the introduction of conscription in 1916, Leonard was exempted on medical grounds.

Between 1924 and 1940, the Woolfs returned to Bloomsbury, taking out a ten-year lease at 52 Tavistock Square, from where they ran the Hogarth Press from the basement, where Virginia also had her writing room, and is commemorated with a bust of her in the square (see illustration). 1925 saw the publication of Mrs Dalloway in May followed by her collapse while at Charleston in August. In 1927, her next novel, To the Lighthouse, was published, and the following year she lectured on Women & Fiction at Cambridge University and published Orlando in October. Her two Cambridge lectures then became the basis for her major essay A Room of One's Own in 1929. Virginia wrote only one drama, Freshwater, based on her great-aunt Julia Margaret Cameron, and produced at her sister's studio on Fitzroy Street in 1935. 1936 saw another collapse of her health following the completion of The Years.

The Woolf's final residence in London was at 37 Mecklenburgh Square (1939–1940), destroyed during the Blitz in September 1940; a month later their previous home on Tavistock Square was also destroyed. After that, they made Sussex their permanent home. For descriptions and illustrations of all Virginia Woolf's London homes, see Jean Moorcroft Wilson's book Virginia Woolf, Life and London: A Biography of Place (pub. Cecil Woolf, 1987).

Hogarth Press (1917–1938)

Main article: Hogarth Press

Woolf's in Richmond

17 The Green

Hogarth House

Shelf of Shakespeare plays hand-bound by Virginia Woolf in her bedroom at Monk's House

Virginia had taken up book-binding as a pastime in October 1901, at the age of 19, and the Woolfs had been discussing setting up a publishing house for some time, and at the end of 1916 started making plans. Having discovered that they were not eligible to enroll in the St Bride School of Printing, they started purchasing supplies after seeking advice from the Excelsior Printing Supply Company on Farringdon Road in March 1917, and soon they had a printing press set up on their dining room table at Hogarth House, and the Hogarth Press was born.

Their first publication was Two Stories in July 1917, inscribed Publication No. 1, and consisted of two short stories, "The Mark on the Wall" by Virginia Woolf and Three Jews by Leonard Woolf. The work consisted of 32 pages, hand bound and sewn, and illustrated by woodcuts designed by Dora Carrington. The illustrations were a success, leading Virginia to remark that the press was "specially good at printing pictures, and we see that we must make a practice of always having pictures" (13 July 1917). The process took two and a half months with a production run of 150 copies. Other short short stories followed, including Kew Gardens (1919) with a woodblock by Vanessa Bell as frontispiece. Subsequently, Bell added further illustrations, adorning each page of the text.

The press subsequently published Virginia's novels along with works by T.S. Eliot, Laurens van der Post, and others. The Press also commissioned works by contemporary artists, including Dora Carrington and Vanessa Bell. Woolf believed that to break free of a patriarchal society women writers needed a "room of their own" to develop and often fantasised about an "Outsider's Society" where women writers would create a virtual private space for themselves via their writings to develop a feminist critique of society. Though Woolf never created the "Outsider's society", the Hogarth Press was the closest approximation as the Woolfs chose to publish books by writers that took unconventional points of view to form a reading community. Initially the press concentrated on small experimental publications, of little interest to large commercial publishers. Until 1930, Woolf often helped her husband print the Hogarth books as the money for employees was not there. Virginia relinquished her interest in 1938, following a third attempted suicide. After it was bombed in September 1940, the press was moved to Letchworth for the remainder of the war. Both the Woolfs were internationalists and pacifists who believed that promoting understanding between peoples was the best way to avoid another world war and chose quite consciously to publish works by foreign authors of whom the British reading public were unaware. The first non-British author to be published was the Soviet writer Maxim Gorky, the book Reminiscences of Leo Nikolaiovich Tolstoy in 1920, dealing with his friendship with Count Leo Tolstoy.

Memoir Club (1920–1941)

Main article: Memoir Club

Bloomsberries

Mary MacCarthy and son 1915

E.M. Forster 1917

Duncan Grant (L)
John Maynard Keynes 1912

Roger Fry 1913

David Garnett c. 1902

1920 saw a postwar reconstitution of the Bloomsbury Group, under the title of the Memoir Club, which as the name suggests focussed on self-writing, in the manner of Proust's A La Recherche, and inspired some of the more influential books of the 20th century. The Group, which had been scattered by the war, was reconvened by Mary ('Molly') MacCarthy who called them "Bloomsberries", and operated under rules derived from the Cambridge Apostles, an elite university debating society that a number of them had been members of. These rules emphasised candour and openness. Among the 125 memoirs presented, Virginia contributed three that were published posthumously in 1976, in the autobiographical anthology Moments of Being. These were 22 Hyde Park Gate (1921), Old Bloomsbury (1922) and Am I a Snob? (1936).

Vita Sackville-West (1922–1941)

Vita Sackville-West at Monk's House c. 1934

The ethos of the Bloomsbury group encouraged a liberal approach to sexuality, and on 14 December 1922 Woolf met the writer and gardener Vita Sackville-West, wife of Harold Nicolson, while dining with Clive Bell. Writing in her diary the next day, she referred to meeting "the lovely gifted aristocratic Sackville West". At the time, Sackville-West was the more successful writer as both poet and novelist, commercially and critically, and it was not until after Woolf's death that she became considered the better writer. After a tentative start, they began a sexual relationship, which, according to Sackville-West in a letter to her husband on 17 August 1926, was only twice consummated. The relationship reached its peak between 1925 and 1928, evolving into more of a friendship through the 1930s, though Woolf was also inclined to brag of her affairs with other women within her intimate circle, such as Sibyl Colefax and Comtesse de Polignac. This period of intimacy was to prove fruitful for both authors, Woolf producing three novels, To the Lighthouse (1927), Orlando (1928) and The Waves (1931) as well as a number of essays, including "Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown" (1924) and "A Letter to a Young Poet" (1932).

Sackville-West worked tirelessly to lift Woolf's self-esteem, encouraging her not to view herself as a quasi-reclusive inclined to sickness who should hide herself away from the world, but rather offered praise for her liveliness and wit, her health, her intelligence and achievements as a writer. Sackville-West led Woolf to reappraise herself, developing a more positive self-image, and the feeling that her writings were the products of her strengths rather than her weakness. Starting at the age of 15, Woolf had believed the diagnosis by her father and his doctor that reading and writing were deleterious to her nervous condition, requiring a regime of physical labour such as gardening to prevent a total nervous collapse. This led Woolf to spend much time obsessively engaging in such physical labour.

Sackville-West was the first to argue to Woolf she had been misdiagnosed, and that it was far better to engage in reading and writing to calm her nerves—advice that was taken. Under the influence of Sackville-West, Woolf learned to deal with her nervous ailments by switching between various forms of intellectual activities such as reading, writing and book reviews, instead of spending her time in physical activities that sapped her strength and worsened her nerves. Sackville-West chose the financially struggling Hogarth Press as her publisher to assist the Woolfs financially. Seducers in Ecuador, the first of the novels by Sackville-West published by Hogarth, was not a success, selling only 1500 copies in its first year, but the next Sackville-West novel they published, The Edwardians, was a best-seller that sold 30,000 copies in its first six months. Sackville-West's novels, though not typical of the Hogarth Press, saved Hogarth, taking them from the red into the black. However, Woolf was not always appreciative of the fact that it was Sackville-West's books that kept the Hogarth Press profitable, writing dismissively in 1933 of her "servant girl" novels. The financial security allowed by the good sales of Sackville-West's novels in turn allowed Woolf to engage in more experimental work, such as The Waves, as Woolf had to be cautious when she depended upon Hogarth entirely for her income.

In 1928, Woolf presented Sackville-West with Orlando, a fantastical biography in which the eponymous hero's life spans three centuries and both sexes. It was published in October, shortly after the two women spent a week travelling together in France, that September. Nigel Nicolson, Vita Sackville-West's son, wrote, "The effect of Vita on Virginia is all contained in Orlando, the longest and most charming love letter in literature, in which she explores Vita, weaves her in and out of the centuries, tosses her from one sex to the other, plays with her, dresses her in furs, lace and emeralds, teases her, flirts with her, drops a veil of mist around her." After their affair ended, the two women remained friends until Woolf's death in 1941. Virginia Woolf also remained close to her surviving siblings, Adrian and Vanessa; Thoby had died of typhoid fever at the age of 26.

Sussex (1911–1941)

Virginia Stephen (L) with Katherine Cox, Asham 1912

Virginia was needing a country retreat to escape to, and on 24 December 1910 Virginia found a house for rent in Firle, Sussex, near Lewes (see Map). She obtained a lease and took possession of the house the following month, and named it 'Little Talland House", after their childhood home in Cornwall, although it was actually a new red gabled villa on the main street opposite the village hall. The lease was a short one and in October she and Leonard Woolf found Asham House at Asheham a few miles to the west, while walking along the Ouse from Firle. The house, at the end of a tree-lined road was a strange beautiful Regency-Gothic house in a lonely location. She described it as "flat, pale, serene, yellow-washed", without electricity or water and allegedly haunted. She took out a five-year lease jointly with Vanessa in the New Year, and they moved into it in February 1912, holding a house warming party on the 9th.

It was at Asham that the Woolfs spent their wedding night later that year. At Asham, she recorded the events of the weekends and holidays they spent there in her Asham Diary, part of which was later published as A Writer's Diary in 1953. In terms of creative writing, The Voyage Out was completed there, and much of Night and Day. Asham provided Woolf with well needed relief from the pace of London life and was where she found a happiness that she expressed in her diary of 5 May 1919 "Oh, but how happy we've been at Asheham! It was a most melodious time. Everything went so freely; – but I can't analyse all the sources of my joy". Asham was also the inspiration for A Haunted House (1921–1944), and was painted by members of the Bloomsbury Group, including Vanessa Bell and Roger Fry. It was during these times at Asham that Ka Cox (seen here) started to devote herself to Virginia and become very useful.

Life in Sussex

Little Talland House, Firle

Asham House, Beddingham

The Round House, Lewes

Monk's House, Rodmell

While at Asham Leonard and Virginia found a farmhouse in 1916, that was to let, about four miles away, which they thought would be ideal for her sister. Eventually, Vanessa came down to inspect it, and moved in in October of that year, taking it as a summer home for her family. The Charleston Farmhouse was to become the summer gathering place for the literary and artistic circle of the Bloomsbury Group.

After the end of the war, in 1918, the Woolfs were given a year's notice by the landlord, who needed the house. In mid-1919, "in despair", they purchased "a very strange little house" for £300, the Round House in Pipe Passage, Lewes, a converted windmill. No sooner had they bought the Round House, than Monk's House in nearby Rodmell, came up for auction, a weatherboarded house with oak beamed rooms, said to be 15th or 16th century. The Leonards favoured the latter because of its orchard and garden, and sold the Round House, to purchase Monk's House for £700. Monk's House also lacked water and electricity, but came with an acre of garden, and had a view across the Ouse towards the hills of the South Downs. Leonard Woolf describes this view (and the amenities) as being unchanged since the days of Chaucer. From 1940, it became their permanent home after their London home was bombed, and Virginia continued to live there until her death. Meanwhile, Vanessa made Charleston her permanent home in 1936. It was at Monk's House that Virginia completed Between the Acts in early 1941, followed by a further breakdown directly resulting in her suicide on 28 March 1941, the novel being published posthumously later that year.

The Neo-pagans (1911–1912)

Noël Olivier; Maitland Radford; Virginia Stephen; Rupert Brooke camping on Dartmoor August 1911

During her time in Firle, Virginia became better acquainted with Rupert Brooke and his group of Neo-Pagans, pursuing socialism, vegetarianism, exercising outdoors and alternative life styles, including social nudity. They were influenced by the ethos of Bedales, Fabianism and Shelley. The women wore sandals, socks, open neck shirts and head-scarves, as Virginia does here. Although she had some reservations, Woolf was involved with their activities for a while, fascinated by their bucolic innocence in contrast to the sceptical intellectualism of Bloomsbury, which earned her the nickname "The Goat" from her brother Adrian. While Woolf liked to make much of a weekend she spent with Brooke at the vicarage in Grantchester, including swimming in the pool there, it appears to have been principally a literary assignation. They also shared a psychiatrist in the name of Maurice Craig. Through the Neo-Pagans, she finally met Ka Cox on a weekend in Oxford in January 1911, who had been part of the Friday Club circle and now became her friend and played an important part in dealing with her illnesses. Virginia nicknamed her "Bruin". At the same time, she found herself dragged into a triangular relationship involving Ka, Jacques Raverat and Gwen Darwin. She became resentful of the other couple, Jacques and Gwen, who married later in 1911, not the outcome Virginia had predicted or desired. They would later be referred to in both To the Lighthouse and The Years. The exclusion she felt evoked memories of both Stella Duckworth's marriage and her triangular involvement with Vanessa and Clive.

The two groups eventually fell out. Brooke pressured Ka into withdrawing from joining Virginia's ménage on Brunswick Square in late 1911, calling it a "bawdy-house" and by the end of 1912 he had vehemently turned against Bloomsbury. Later, she would write sardonically about Brooke, whose premature death resulted in his idealisation, and express regret about "the Neo-Paganism at that stage of my life". Virginia was deeply disappointed when Ka married William Edward Arnold-Forster in 1918, and became increasingly critical of her.

Mental health

Much examination has been made of Woolf's mental health (e.g., see Mental health bibliography). From the age of 13, following the death of her mother, Woolf suffered periodic mood swings from severe depression to manic excitement, including psychotic episodes, which the family referred to as her "madness". But as Hermione Lee points out, she was not "mad,” she was merely a woman who suffered from and struggled with illness for much of her relatively short life, a woman of "exceptional courage, intelligence and stoicism,” a woman who made the best use, and achieved the best understanding, she could of that illness. Psychiatrists today consider that her illness constitutes bipolar disorder (manic-depressive illness). Her mother's death in 1895, "the greatest disaster that could happen,” precipitated a crisis of alternating excitability and depression accompanied by irrational fears, for which their family doctor, Dr. Seton, prescribed rest, stopping lessons and writing, and regular walks supervised by Stella. Yet, just two years later, Stella too was dead, bringing on her next crisis in 1897, and her first expressed wish for death at the age of fifteen, writing in her diary that October that "death would be shorter & less painful.” She then stopped keeping a diary for some time. This was a scenario she would later recreate in "Time Passes" (To the Lighthouse, 1927).

The death of her father in 1904 provoked her most alarming collapse, on 10 May, when she threw herself out of a window and she was briefly institutionalised under the care of her father's friend, the eminent psychiatrist George Savage. Savage blamed her education—frowned on by many at the time as unsuitable for women—for her illness. She spent time recovering at the house of Stella's friend Violet Dickinson, and at her aunt Caroline's house in Cambridge, and by January 1905, Dr Savage considered her "cured.” Violet, seventeen years older than Virginia, became one of her closest friends and one of her more effective nurses. She characterised this as a "romantic friendship" (Letter to Violet 4 May 1903). Her brother Thoby's death in 1906 marked a "decade of deaths” that ended her childhood and adolescence. From then on her life was punctuated by urgent voices from the grave that at times seemed more real than her visual reality.

On Dr. Savage's recommendation, Virginia spent three short periods in 1910, 1912, and 1913 at Burley House at 15 Cambridge Park, Twickenham (see image), described as "a private nursing home for women with nervous disorder" run by Miss Jean Thomas. By the end of February 1910, she was becoming increasingly restless, and Dr. Savage suggested being away from London. Vanessa rented Moat House outside Canterbury in June but there was no improvement, so Dr. Savage sent her to Burley for a "rest cure.” This involved partial isolation, deprivation of literature, and force-feeding, and after six weeks she was able to convalesce in Cornwall and Dorset during the autumn. She loathed the experience; writing to her sister on 28 July she described how she found the phony religious atmosphere stifling and the institution ugly, and informed Vanessa that to escape "I shall soon have to jump out of a window.” The threat of being sent back would later lead to her contemplating suicide. Despite her protests, Savage would refer her back in 1912 for insomnia and in 1913 for depression. On emerging from Burley House in September 1913, she sought further opinions from two other physicians on the 13th, Maurice Wright, and Henry Head, who had been Henry James' physician. Both recommended she return to Burley House. Distraught, she returned home and attempted suicide by taking an overdose of 100 grains of veronal (a barbiturate) and nearly dying, had she not been found by Ka Cox who summoned help. On recovery, she went to Dalingridge Hall, George Duckworth's home in East Grinstead, Sussex, to convalesce on 30 September, accompanied by Ka Cox and a nurse, returning to Asham on 18 November with Janet Case and Ka Cox. She remained unstable over the next two years, with another incident involving veronal that she claimed was an "accident" and consulted another psychiatrist in April 1914, Maurice Craig, who explained that she was not sufficiently psychotic to be certified or committed to an institution. The rest of the summer of 1914 went better for her and they moved to Richmond, but in February 1915, just as The Voyage Out was due to be published, she relapsed once more and remained in poor health for most of that year. Then, despite Miss Thomas's gloomy prognosis, she began to recover following 20 years of ill health. Nevertheless, there was a feeling among those around her that she was now permanently changed, and not for the better.

Over the rest of her life she suffered recurrent bouts of depression. In 1940 a number of factors appeared to overwhelm her. Her biography of Roger Fry had been published in July and she had been disappointed in its reception. The horrors of war depressed her and their London homes had been destroyed in the Blitz in September and October. She had completed Between the Acts (1941 posthumously) in November, and completing a novel was frequently accompanied by exhaustion. Her health became increasingly a matter of concern, culminating in her decision to end her life on 28 March 1941.

Though this instability would frequently affect her social life, she was able to continue her literary productivity with few interruptions throughout her life. Woolf herself provides not only a vivid picture of her symptoms in her diaries and letters, but also her response to the demons that haunted her and at times made her long for death "But it is always a question whether I wish to avoid these glooms...These 9 weeks give one a plunge into deep waters....One goes down into the well & nothing protects one from the assault of truth.” Psychiatry had little to offer her in her lifetime, but she recognised that writing was one of the behaviours that enabled her to cope with her illness, "The only way I keep afloat...is by working...Directly I stop working I feel that I am sinking down, down. And as usual, I feel that if I sink further I shall reach the truth.” Sinking under water was Woolf's metaphor for both the effects of depression and psychosis— but also for finding truth, and ultimately was her choice of death. Throughout her life Woolf struggled, without success, to find meaning in her illness, on the one hand an impediment, on the other something she visualised as an essential part of who she was, and a necessary condition of her art. When she was able to control her illness, it informed her work, such as the character of Septimus Warren Smith in Mrs Dalloway (1925), who, like Woolf, was haunted by the dead, and ultimately takes his own life rather than be admitted to a sanitorium.

Leonard Woolf relates how during the 30 years they were married they consulted many doctors in the Harley Street area, and although they were given a diagnosis of neurasthenia, he felt they had little understanding of the causes or nature. The solution was simple—as long as she lived a quiet life without any physical or mental exertion, she was well. On the other hand, any mental, emotional, or physical strain resulted in a reappearance of her symptoms. These began with a headache, followed by insomnia and thoughts that started to race. Her remedy was simple, to retire to bed in a darkened room, eat, and drink plenty of milk, following which the symptoms slowly subsided.

Modern scholars, including her nephew and biographer, Quentin Bell, have suggested her breakdowns and subsequent recurring depressive periods were influenced by the sexual abuse which she and her sister Vanessa were subjected by their half-brothers George and Gerald Duckworth (which Woolf recalls in her autobiographical essays "A Sketch of the Past" and "22 Hyde Park Gate") (see Sexual abuse). Biographers point out that when Stella died in 1897, there was no counterbalance to control George's predation, and his nighttime prowling. Virginia describes him as her first lover, "The old ladies of Kensington and Belgravia never knew that George Duckworth was not only father and mother, brother and sister to those poor Stephen girls; he was their lover also.”

It is likely that other factors also played a part. It has been suggested that these include genetic predisposition, for both trauma and family history have been implicated in bipolar disorder. Virginia's father, Leslie Stephen, suffered from depression, and her half-sister Laura was institutionalised. Many of Virginia's symptoms, including persistent headache, insomnia, irritability, and anxiety resemble those of her father. Another factor is the pressure she placed upon herself in her work; for instance, her breakdown of 1913 was at least partly triggered by the need to finish The Voyage Out. Virginia herself hinted that her illness was related to how she saw the repressed position of women in society, when she wrote in A Room of One's Own that had Shakespeare had a sister of equal genius, "she would certainly have gone crazed, shot herself, or ended her days in some lonely cottage outside the village, half witch, half wizard, feared and mocked at.” These inspirations emerged from what Woolf referred to as her lava of madness, describing her time at Burley in a 1930 letter to Ethel Smyth:

As an experience, madness is terrific I can assure you, and not to be sniffed at; and in its lava I still find most of the things I write about. It shoots out of one everything shaped, final, not in mere driblets, as sanity does. And the six months—not three—that I lay in bed taught me a good deal about what is called oneself.

Thomas Caramagno and others, in discussing her illness, warn against the "neurotic-genius" way of looking at mental illness, which rationalises the theory that creativity is somehow born of mental illness. Stephen Trombley describes Woolf as having a confrontational relationship with her doctors, and possibly being a woman who is a "victim of male medicine,” referring to the contemporary relative lack of understanding about mental illness.

Death

Virginia Woolf's suicide letter to her husband. (Reading by Juliet Stevenson)

After completing the manuscript of her last novel (posthumously published), Between the Acts (1941), Woolf fell into a depression similar to that which she had earlier experienced. The onset of World War II, the destruction of her London home during the Blitz, and the cool reception given to her biography of her late friend Roger Fry all worsened her condition until she was unable to work. When Leonard enlisted in the Home Guard, Virginia disapproved. She held fast to her pacifism and criticised her husband for wearing what she considered to be "the silly uniform of the Home Guard".

After World War II began, Woolf's diary indicates that she was obsessed with death, which figured more and more as her mood darkened. On 28 March 1941, Woolf drowned herself by filling her overcoat pockets with stones and walking into the River Ouse near her home. Her body was not found until 18 April. Her husband buried her cremated remains beneath an elm tree in the garden of Monk's House, their home in Rodmell, Sussex.

In her suicide note, addressed to her husband, she wrote:

Dearest, I feel certain that I am going mad again. I feel we can't go through another of those terrible times. And I shan't recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can't concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do. You have given me the greatest possible happiness. You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I don't think two people could have been happier till this terrible disease came. I can't fight it any longer. I know that I am spoiling your life, that without me you could work. And you will I know. You see I can't even write this properly. I can't read. What I want to say is I owe all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good. I want to say that—everybody knows it. If anybody could have saved me it would have been you. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can't go on spoiling your life any longer. I don't think two people could have been happier than we have been. V.

Work

A portrait of Woolf by Roger Fry c. 1917

Lytton Strachey and Woolf at Garsington, 1923

Virginia Woolf 1927

Woolf is considered to be one of the more important 20th century novelists. A modernist, she was one of the pioneers of using stream of consciousness as a narrative device, alongside contemporaries such as Marcel Proust, Dorothy Richardson and James Joyce. Woolf's reputation was at its greatest during the 1930s, but declined considerably following World War II. The growth of feminist criticism in the 1970s helped re-establish her reputation.

Virginia submitted her first article in 1890, to a competition in Tit-Bits. Although it was rejected, this shipboard romance by the 8-year-old would presage her first novel 25 years later, as would contributions to the Hyde Park News, such as the model letter "to show young people the right way to express what is in their hearts", a subtle commentary on her mother's legendary matchmaking. She transitioned from juvenilia to professional journalism in 1904 at the age of 22. Violet Dickinson introduced her to Mrs. Lyttelton, the editor of the Women's Supplement of The Guardian, a Church of England newspaper. Invited to submit a 1,500-word article, Virginia sent Lyttelton a review of W.D. Howells' The Son of Royal Langbirth and an essay about her visit to Haworth that year, Haworth, November 1904. The review was published anonymously on 4 December, and the essay on the 21st. In 1905, Woolf began writing for The Times Literary Supplement.

Woolf would go on to publish novels and essays as a public intellectual to both critical and popular acclaim. Much of her work was self-published through the Hogarth Press. "Virginia Woolf's peculiarities as a fiction writer have tended to obscure her central strength: she is arguably the major lyrical novelist in the English language. Her novels are highly experimental: a narrative, frequently uneventful and commonplace, is refracted—and sometimes almost dissolved—in the characters' receptive consciousness. Intense lyricism and stylistic virtuosity fuse to create a world overabundant with auditory and visual impressions". "The intensity of Virginia Woolf's poetic vision elevates the ordinary, sometimes banal settings"—often wartime environments—"of most of her novels".

Fiction and drama

Novels

Main article: The Voyage Out

Her first novel, The Voyage Out, was published in 1915 at the age of 33, by her half-brother's imprint, Gerald Duckworth and Company Ltd. This novel was originally titled Melymbrosia, but Woolf repeatedly changed the draft. An earlier version of The Voyage Out has been reconstructed by Woolf scholar Louise DeSalvo and is now available to the public under the intended title. DeSalvo argues that many of the changes Woolf made in the text were in response to changes in her own life. The novel is set on a ship bound for South America, and a group of young Edwardians onboard and their various mismatched yearnings and misunderstandings. In the novel are hints of themes that would emerge in later work, including the gap between preceding thought and the spoken word that follows, and the lack of concordance between expression and underlying intention, together with how these reveal to us aspects of the nature of love.

Main article: Mrs Dalloway

"Mrs Dalloway (1925) centres on the efforts of Clarissa Dalloway, a middle-aged society woman, to organise a party, even as her life is paralleled with that of Septimus Warren Smith, a working-class veteran who has returned from the First World War bearing deep psychological scars".

Main article: To the Lighthouse

"To the Lighthouse (1927) is set on two days ten years apart. The plot centres on the Ramsay family's anticipation of and reflection upon a visit to a lighthouse and the connected familial tensions. One of the primary themes of the novel is the struggle in the creative process that beset painter Lily Briscoe while she struggles to paint in the midst of the family drama. The novel is also a meditation upon the lives of a nation's inhabitants in the midst of war, and of the people left behind." It also explores the passage of time, and how women are forced by society to allow men to take emotional strength from them.

Main article: Orlando: A Biography

Orlando: A Biography (1928) is one of Virginia Woolf's lightest novels. A parodic biography of a young nobleman who lives for three centuries without ageing much past thirty (but who does abruptly turn into a woman), the book is in part a portrait of Woolf's lover Vita Sackville-West. It was meant to console Vita for the loss of her ancestral home, Knole House, though it is also a satirical treatment of Vita and her work. In Orlando, the techniques of historical biographers are being ridiculed; the character of a pompous biographer is being assumed for it to be mocked.

Main article: The Waves

"The Waves (1931) presents a group of six friends whose reflections, which are closer to recitatives than to interior monologues proper, create a wave-like atmosphere that is more akin to a prose poem than to a plot-centred novel".

Main article: Flush: A Biography

Flush: A Biography (1933) is a part-fiction, part-biography of the cocker spaniel owned by Victorian poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning. The book is written from the dog's point of view. Woolf was inspired to write this book from the success of the Rudolf Besier play The Barretts of Wimpole Street. In the play, Flush is on stage for much of the action. The play was produced for the first time in 1932 by the actress Katharine Cornell.

Main article: The Years

The Years (1941), traces the history of the genteel Pargiter family from the 1880s to the "present day" of the mid-1930s. The novel had its origin in a lecture Woolf gave to the National Society for Women's Service in 1931, an edited version of which would later be published as "Professions for Women". Woolf first thought of making this lecture the basis of a new book-length essay on women, this time taking a broader view of their economic and social life, rather than focusing on women as artists, as the first book had. She soon jettisoned the theoretical framework of her "novel-essay" and began to rework the book solely as a fictional narrative, but some of the non-fiction material she first intended for this book was later used in Three Guineas (1938).

Main article: Between the Acts

"Her last work, Between the Acts (1941), sums up and magnifies Woolf's chief preoccupations: the transformation of life through art, sexual ambivalence, and meditation on the themes of flux of time and life, presented simultaneously as corrosion and rejuvenation—all set in a highly imaginative and symbolic narrative encompassing almost all of English history." This book is the most lyrical of all her works, not only in feeling but in style, being chiefly written in verse. While Woolf's work can be understood as consistently in dialogue with the Bloomsbury Group, particularly its tendency (informed by G.E. Moore, among others) towards doctrinaire rationalism, it is not a simple recapitulation of the coterie's ideals.

Themes

Woolf's fiction has been studied for its insight into many themes including war, shell shock, witchcraft, and the role of social class in contemporary modern British society. In the postwar Mrs Dalloway (1925), Woolf addresses the moral dilemma of war and its effects and provides an authentic voice for soldiers returning from World War I, suffering from shell shock, in the person of Septimus Smith. In A Room of One's Own (1929) Woolf equates historical accusations of witchcraft with creativity and genius among women "When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils...then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet, of some mute and inglorious Jane Austen". Throughout her work Woolf tried to evaluate the degree to which her privileged background framed the lens through which she viewed class. She both examined her own position as someone who would be considered an elitis snob, but attacked the class structure of Britain as she found it. In her 1936 essay Am I a Snob?, she examined her values and those of the privileged circle she existed in. She concluded she was, and subsequent critics and supporters have tried to deal with the dilemma of being both elite and a social critic.

Despite the considerable conceptual difficulties, given Woolf's idiosyncratic use of language, her works have been translated into over 50 languages. Some writers, such as the Belgian Marguerite Yourcenar, had rather tense encounters with her, while others, such as the Argentinian Jorge Luis Borges, produced versions that were highly controversial.

Drama

Main article: Freshwater (play)

Virginia Woolf researched the life of her great-aunt, the photographer Julia Margaret Cameron, publishing her findings in an essay titled "Pattledom" (1925), and later in her introduction to her 1926 edition of Cameron's photographs. She had begun work on a play based on an episode in Cameron's life in 1923, but abandoned it. Finally it was performed on 18 January 1935 at the studio of her sister, Vanessa Bell on Fitzroy Street in 1935. Woolf directed it herself, and the cast were mainly members of the Bloomsbury Group, including herself. Freshwater is a short three act comedy satirising the Victorian era, only performed once in Woolf's lifetime. Beneath the comedic elements, there is an exploration of both generational change and artistic freedom. Both Cameron and Woolf fought against the class and gender dynamics of Victorianism and the play shows links to both To the Lighthouse and A Room of One's Own that would follow.

Non-fiction

Woolf wrote a body of autobiographical work and more than 500 essays and reviews, some of which, like A Room of One's Own (1929) were of book length. Not all were published in her lifetime. Shortly after her death, Leonard Woolf produced an edited edition of unpublished essays titled The Moment and other Essays, published by the Hogarth Press in 1947. Many of these were originally lectures that she gave, and several more volumes of essays followed, such as The Captain's death bed: and other essays (1950).

A Room of One's Own

Main article: A Room of One's Own

Among Woolf's non-fiction works, one of the best known is A Room of One's Own (1929), a book-length essay. Considered a key work of feminist literary criticism, it was written following two lectures she delivered on "Women and Fiction" at Cambridge University the previous year. In it, she examines the historical disempowerment women have faced in many spheres, including social, educational and financial. One of her more famous dicta is contained within the book "A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction". Much of her argument ("to show you how I arrived at this opinion about the room and the money") is developed through the "unsolved problems" of women and fiction writing to arrive at her conclusion, although she claimed that was only "an opinion upon one minor point". In doing so, she states a good deal about the nature of women and fiction, employing a quasi-fictional style as she examines where women writers failed because of lack of resources and opportunities, examining along the way the experiences of the Brontës, George Eliot and George Sand, as well as the fictional character of Shakespeare's sister, equipped with the same genius but not position. She contrasted these women who accepted a deferential status with Jane Austen, who wrote entirely as a woman.

Influences

A major influence on Woolf from 1912 onward was Russian literature as Woolf adopted many of its aesthetic conventions. The style of Fyodor Dostoyevsky with his depiction of a fluid mind in operation helped to influence Woolf's writings about a "discontinuous writing process", though Woolf objected to Dostoyevsky's obsession with "psychological extremity" and the "tumultuous flux of emotions" in his characters together with his right-wing, monarchist politics as Dostoyevsky was an ardent supporter of the autocracy of the Russian Empire. In contrast to her objections to Dostoyevsky's "exaggerated emotional pitch", Woolf found much to admire in the work of Anton Chekhov and Leo Tolstoy. Woolf admired Chekhov for his stories of ordinary people living their lives, doing banal things and plots that had no neat endings. From Tolstoy, Woolf drew lessons about how a novelist should depict a character's psychological state and the interior tension within. From Ivan Turgenev, Woolf drew the lessons that there are multiple "I's" when writing a novel, and the novelist needed to balance those multiple versions of him- or herself to balance the "mundane facts" of a story vs. the writer's overreaching vision, which required a "total passion" for art.

Another influence on Woolf was the American writer Henry David Thoreau, with Woolf writing in a 1917 essay that her aim as a writer was to follow Thoreau by capturing "the moment, to burn always with this hard, gem-like flame" while praising Thoreau for his statement "The millions are awake enough for physical labor, but only one in hundreds of millions is awake enough to a poetic or divine life. To be awake is to be alive". Woolf praised Thoreau for his "simplicity" in finding "a way for setting free the delicate and complicated machinery of the soul". Like Thoreau, Woolf believed that it was silence that set the mind free to really contemplate and understand the world. Both authors believed in a certain transcendental, mystical approach to life and writing, where even banal things could be capable of generating deep emotions if one had enough silence and the presence of mind to appreciate them. Woolf and Thoreau were both concerned with the difficulty of human relationships in the modern age. Other notable influences include William Shakespeare, George Eliot, Leo Tolstoy, Marcel Proust, Anton Chekhov, Emily Brontë, Daniel Defoe, James Joyce, and E.M. Forster.

List of selected publications

Main article: Bibliography of Virginia Woolf

  see Kirkpatrick & Clarke (1997), VWS (2018), Carter (2002)

Novels

• Woolf, Virginia (2017) [1915]. The voyage out. FV Éditions. ISBN 979-10-299-0459-2. see also The Voyage Out & Complete text
• — (2004) [1922]. Night and Day. 1st World Publishing. ISBN 978-1-59540-530-2. see also Night and Day & Complete text
• — (2015) [1922]. Jacob's Room. Mondial. ISBN 978-1-59569-114-9. see also Jacob's Room & Complete text
• — (2012) [1925]. Mrs. Dalloway. Broadview Press. ISBN 978-1-55111-723-2. see also Mrs Dalloway & Complete text
• — (2004) [1927]. To the Lighthouse. Collector's Library. ISBN 978-1-904633-49-5. see also To the Lighthouse & Complete text, also Texts at Woolf Online
• Woolf, Virginia (2006) [1928]. DiBattista, Maria (ed.). Orlando (Annotated): A Biography. HMH. ISBN 978-0-547-54316-1. see also Orlando: A Biography & Complete text
• — (2000) [1931]. The Waves. Wordsworth Editions. ISBN 978-1-84022-410-8. see also The Waves & Complete text
• — (1936). The Years. Hogarth Press.
• — (2014) [1941]. Between the Acts. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. ISBN 978-0-544-45178-0. see also Between the Acts & Complete text

Short stories

• Woolf, Virginia (2016) [1944]. The Short Stories of Virginia Woolf. Read Books Limited. ISBN 978-1-4733-6304-5. see also A Haunted House and Other Short Stories & Complete text
• — (2015) [1917 Hogarth Press]. The Mark on the Wall. Booklassic. ISBN 978-963-522-263-6. see also The Mark on the Wall & Complete text
• — (7 July 2015) [1919 Hogarth Press]. Kew Gardens. Booklassic. ISBN 978-963-522-264-3. see also Kew Gardens & Complete text

Cross-genre

• Woolf, Virginia (1998) [1933]. Flush. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-283328-0. see also Flush: A Biography & Complete text

Drama

• Woolf, Virginia (2017) [1935]. Freshwater: A Comedy by Virginia Woolf (The 1923 & 1935 Editions). Musaicum Books. ISBN 978-80-272-3556-8. see also Freshwater
• — (1976). Ruotolo, Lucio (ed.). Freshwater: a comedy. Illustrations: Edward Gorey. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. ISBN 9780151334872.

Biography

• Woolf, Virginia (2017) [1940]. Roger Fry: A Biography. Musaicum Books. ISBN 978-80-272-3516-2. see also Roger Fry: A Biography & Complete text

Essays

• Woolf, Virginia (14 December 1904). "Haworth, November 1904". The Guardian. Retrieved 8 March 2018.
• — (2016) [1929]. A Room of One's Own. Read Books Limited. ISBN 978-1-4733-6305-2. see also A Room of One's Own & Complete text
• — (2017) [1924 Hogarth Press]. Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown. ISBN 978-88-260-3291-7. see also Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown & Complete text
• — (2016) [1932 Hogarth Press]. A Letter to a Young Poet. Read Books Limited. ISBN 978-1-4733-6307-6. see also A Letter to a Young Poet & Complete text
• — (2016) [1938]. Three Guineas. Read Books Limited. ISBN 978-1-4733-6301-4. see also Three Guineas & Complete text

Collections

• Woolf, Virginia (1986–2011). McNeillie, Andrew; Clarke, Stuart N. (eds.). The Essays of Virginia Woolf 6 vols. Random House.
  • — (1986). The Essays of Virginia Woolf Volume Two 1912–1918. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. ISBN 978-0-15-629055-5.
    • Ackroyd, Peter (27 March 1988). "The knots and loops of literature". The New York Times (Review).
  • — (1994). The Essays of Virginia Woolf Volume Four 1925–1928. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. ISBN 978-0-7012-0666-6.
• — (2017). The Essays of Virginia Woolf Volume Five 1929–1932. Random House. ISBN 978-1-4481-8194-0.
  • — (2011). The Essays of Virginia Woolf Volume Six 1933–1941. Random House. ISBN 978-0-7012-0671-0.
    • Patten, Eve (2 April 2011). "Virginia Woolf's battle with her tea table training". The Irish Times (Review).
• — (2017) [1947 Hogarth Press]. Woolf, Leonard (ed.). The Moment & Other Essays (posthumous). Musaicum Books. ISBN 978-80-272-3619-0. Complete text
  • The Leaning Tower. 1940. pp. 100ff.
    • Trilling, Diana (21 March 1948). "Virginia Woolf's Special Realm". The New York Times (Review).
• — (1950). Woolf, Leonard (ed.). The Captain's death bed: and other essays (posthumous). The Hogarth Press.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: ref duplicates default (link) (excerpts)
  • — (1932). Leslie Stephen. pp. 67–73. (excerpt) & also here
• — (2009). Bradshaw, David (ed.). Selected Essays. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-955606-9.
• — (2017). The Greatest Essays of Virginia Woolf. Musaicum Books. ISBN 978-80-272-3514-8.

Contributions

• Cameron, Julia Margaret (1973) [1926 Hogarth Press, edited by Leonard and Virginia Woolf]. Powell, Tristram (ed.). Victorian photographs of famous men & fair women. Introductions by Virginia Woolf and Roger Fry (Revised ed.). D. R. Godine. ISBN 978-0-87923-076-0. (Digital edition)

Autobiographical writing

• Woolf, Virginia (2003) [1953]. Woolf, Leonard (ed.). A Writer's Diary. HMH. ISBN 978-0-547-54691-9.
  • Auden, W. H. (27 February 1954). "Virginia Woolf: A Consciousness of Reality". The New Yorker (Review).
• — (1985) [1976]. Schulkind, Jeanne (ed.). Moments of being: unpublished autobiographical writings (2nd ed.). Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. ISBN 978-0-15-162034-0. (see [[Moments of Being]])
  • Schulkind, Jeanne (2007). Preface to the Second Edition. p. 6. Bibcode:2007ess..bookD..17M., in Woolf (1985) (excerpts)
  • Schulkind, Jeanne. Introduction. pp. 11–24., in Woolf (1985)
  • Reminiscences. 1908. pp. 25–60.
  • A Sketch of the Past. 1940. pp. 61–160. (excerpts – 1st ed.)
    • Memoir Club Contributions
    • 22 Hyde Park Gate. 1921. pp. 162–178.
    • Old Bloomsbury. 1922. pp. 179–202.
    • Am I a Snob?. 1936. pp. 203–220.

Diaries and notebooks

• Woolf, Virginia (1990). Leaska, Mitchell A (ed.). A passionate apprentice: the early journals, 1897–1909. Hogarth Press.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: ref duplicates default (link)
• Woolf, Virginia (2003). Bradshaw, David (ed.). Carlyle's House and Other Sketches. Hesperus Press. ISBN 978-1-84391-055-8.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: ref duplicates default (link)
• Woolf, Virginia (1977–1984). Bell, Anne Oliver (ed.). The Diary of Virginia Woolf 5 vols. Houghton Mifflin.
  • — (1979). The Diary of Virginia Woolf Volume One 1915–1919. ISBN 978-0-544-31037-7.
  • — (1981). The Diary of Virginia Woolf Volume Two 1920–1924. ISBN 978-0-14-005283-1.
  • — (1978). The Diary of Virginia Woolf Volume Three 1925–1930.
  • — (1985). The Diary of Virginia Woolf Volume Five 1936–1941. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. ISBN 978-0-15-626040-4.
• — (2008). Rosenbaum, S. P. (ed.). The Platform of Time: Memoirs of Family and Friends. Hesperus Press. ISBN 978-1-84391-711-3.

Letters

• — (1975–1980). Nicolson, Nigel; Banks, Joanne Trautmann (eds.). The Letters of Virginia Woolf 6 vols. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
  • — (1977). The Letters of Virginia Woolf Volume One 1888–1912. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. ISBN 978-0-15-650881-0.
    • "Shut up in the Dark (Letter 531: Vanessa Bell, July 28, 1910)". The Paris Review. 25 January 2017. Retrieved 10 April 2018.
  • — (1982). The Letters of Virginia Woolf Volume Two 1912–1922. Harvest/HBJ Books. ISBN 978-0-15-650882-7.
  • — (1975). The Letters of Virginia Woolf Volume Three 1923–1928. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. ISBN 978-0-15-150926-3.
  • — (1979). The Letters of Virginia Woolf Volume Four 1929–1931. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. ISBN 978-0-15-150927-0.
    • Edel, Leon (25 March 1979). "Triumphs and Symptoms". The New York Times (Review). Retrieved 13 April 2018.
  • — (1982). The Letters of Virginia Woolf Volume Five 1932–1935. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. ISBN 978-0-15-650886-5.

Photograph albums

• Woolf, Virginia (1983). "Virginia Woolf Monk's House photographs, ca. 1867-1967 (MS Thr 564)" (Guide). Harvard Theatre Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard Library. Retrieved 31 December 2017.
  • List of Album Guides

1. Album 1 MS Thr 557 (1863–1938)
2. Album 2 MS Thr 559 (1909–1922)
3. Album 3 MS Thr 560 (1890–1933)
4. Album 4 MS Thr 561 (1890–1947)
5. Album 5 MS Thr 562 (1892–1938)
6. Album 6 MS Thr 563 (1850–1900)

Collections

• Woolf, Virginia (2013). Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated). Delphi Classics. ISBN 978-1-908909-19-0.
• — (2015). "eBooks@Adelaide". Library of University of Adelaide. Retrieved 14 February 2018.
• — (2017a). The Complete Works of Virginia Woolf. Musaicum Books. ISBN 978-80-272-1784-7.
• — (2007). "Virginia Woolf". Project Gutenberg Australia. Retrieved 27 March 2018.

Views

In her lifetime, Woolf was outspoken on many topics that were considered controversial, some of which are now considered progressive, others regressive. She was an ardent feminist at a time when women's rights were barely recognised, and anti-colonialist, anti-imperialist and a pacifist when chauvinism was popular. On the other hand, she has been criticised for views on class and race in her private writings and published works. Like many of her contemporaries, some of her writing is now considered offensive. As a result, she is considered polarising, a revolutionary feminist and socialist hero or a purveyor of hate speech.

Works such as A Room of One's Own (1929) and Three Guineas (1938) are frequently taught as icons of feminist literature in courses that would be very critical of some of her views expressed elsewhere. She has also been the recipient of considerable homophobic and misogynist criticism.

Humanist views

Virginia Woolf was born into a non-religious family and is regarded, along with her fellow Bloomsberries E.M. Forster and G.E. Moore, as a humanist. Both her parents were prominent agnostic atheists. Her father, Leslie Stephen, had become famous in polite society for his writings which expressed and publicised reasons to doubt the veracity of religion. Woolf's mother, Julia Stephen, wrote the book Agnostic Women (1880), which argued that agnosticism (defined here as something more like atheism) could be a highly moral approach to life.

Woolf was a critic of Christianity. In a letter to Ethel Smyth, she gave a scathing denunciation of the religion, seeing it as self-righteous "egotism" and stating "my Jew [Leonard] has more religion in one toenail—more human love, in one hair." Woolf stated in her private letters that she thought of herself as an atheist.

She thought there were no Gods; no one was to blame; and so she evolved this atheist's religion of doing good for the sake of goodness.

— Woolf characterises Clarissa Dalloway, the title character of Mrs Dalloway

Controversies

Hermione Lee cites a number of extracts from Woolf's writings that many, including Lee, would consider offensive, and these criticisms can be traced back as far as those of Wyndham Lewis and Q.D. Leavis in the 1920s and 1930s. Other authors provide more nuanced contextual interpretations, and stress the complexity of her character and the apparent inherent contradictions in analysing her apparent flaws. She could certainly be off-hand, rude and even cruel in her dealings with other authors, translators and biographers, such as her treatment of Ruth Gruber. Some authors, particularly postcolonial feminists dismiss her (and modernist authors in general) as privileged, elitist, classist, racist, and antisemitic.

Woolf's tendentious expressions, including prejudicial feelings against disabled people, have often been the topic of academic criticism:

The first quotation is from a diary entry of September 1920 and runs: "The fact is the lower classes are detestable." The remainder follow the first in reproducing stereotypes standard to upper-class and upper-middle class life in the early 20h century: "imbeciles should certainly be killed"; "Jews" are greasy; a "crowd" is both an ontological "mass" and is, again, "detestable"; "Germans" are akin to vermin; some "baboon faced intellectuals" mix with "sad green dressed negroes and negresses, looking like chimpanzees" at a peace conference; Kensington High St. revolts one's stomach with its innumerable "women of incredible mediocrity, drab as dishwater".

Anti-semitism

Though accused of anti-semitism, the treatment of Judaism and Jews by Woolf is far from straightforward. She was happily married to a Jewish man but often wrote about Jewish characters using stereotypes and generalisations. For instance, she described some of the Jewish characters in her work in terms that suggested they were physically repulsive or dirty. On the other hand, she could criticise her own views: "How I hated marrying a Jew — how I hated their nasal voices and their oriental jewellery, and their noses and their wattles — what a snob I was: for they have immense vitality, and I think I like that quality best of all" (Letter to Ethel Smyth 1930). These attitudes have been construed to reflect, not so much anti-semitism, but tribalism; she married outside her social grouping, and Leonard Woolf, too, expressed misgivings about marrying a gentile. Leonard, "a penniless Jew from Putney", lacked the material status of the Stephens and their circle.

While travelling on a cruise to Portugal, she protested at finding "a great many Portuguese Jews on board, and other repulsive objects, but we keep clear of them". Furthermore, she wrote in her diary: "I do not like the Jewish voice; I do not like the Jewish laugh." Her 1938 short story, The Duchess and the Jeweller (originally titled The Duchess and the Jew) has been considered anti-semitic.

Yet Woolf and her husband Leonard came to despise and fear the 1930s fascism and antisemitism. Her 1938 book Three Guineas was an indictment of fascism and what Woolf described as a recurring propensity among patriarchal societies to enforce repressive societal mores by violence.

Modern scholarship and interpretations

Though at least one biography of Virginia Woolf appeared in her lifetime, the first authoritative study of her life was published in 1972 by her nephew Quentin Bell. Hermione Lee's 1996 biography Virginia Woolf provides a thorough and authoritative examination of Woolf's life and work, which she discussed in an interview in 1997. In 2001, Louise DeSalvo and Mitchell A. Leaska edited The Letters of Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf. Julia Briggs's Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life (2005) focuses on Woolf's writing, including her novels and her commentary on the creative process, to illuminate her life. The sociologist Pierre Bourdieu also uses Woolf's literature to understand and analyse gender domination. Woolf biographer Gillian Gill notes that Woolf's traumatic experience of sexual abuse by her half-brothers during her childhood influenced her advocacy of protection of vulnerable children from similar experiences.

Virginia Woolf and her mother

The intense scrutiny of Virginia Woolf's literary output (see Bibliography) has led to speculation as to her mother's influence, including psychoanalytic studies of mother and daughter. Woolf states that, "my first memory, and in fact it is the most important of all my memories" is of her mother. Her memories of her mother are memories of an obsession, starting with her first major breakdown on her mother's death in 1895, the loss having a profound lifelong effect. In many ways, her mother's profound influence on Virginia Woolf is conveyed in the latter's recollections, "there she is; beautiful, emphatic ... closer than any of the living are, lighting our random lives as with a burning torch, infinitely noble and delightful to her children".

Woolf described her mother as an "invisible presence" in her life, and Ellen Rosenman argues that the mother-daughter relationship is a constant in Woolf's writing. She describes how Woolf's modernism needs to be viewed in relationship to her ambivalence towardsher Victorian mother, the centre of the former's female identity, and her voyage to her own sense of autonomy. To Woolf, "Saint Julia" was both a martyr whose perfectionism was intimidating and a source of deprivation, by her absences real and virtual and premature death. Julia's influence and memory pervades Woolf's life and work. "She has haunted me," she wrote.

Historical feminism

"Recently, studies of Virginia Woolf have focused on feminist and lesbian themes in her work, such as in the 1997 collection of critical essays, Virginia Woolf: Lesbian Readings, edited by Eileen Barrett and Patricia Cramer." In 1928, Virginia Woolf took a grassroots approach to informing and inspiring feminism. She addressed undergraduate women at the ODTAA Society at Girton College, Cambridge and the Arts Society at Newnham College with two papers that eventually became A Room of One's Own (1929). Woolf's best-known nonfiction works, A Room of One's Own (1929) and Three Guineas (1938), examine the difficulties that female writers and intellectuals faced because men held disproportionate legal and economic power, as well as the future of women in education and society, as the societal effects of industrialisation and birth control had not yet fully been realised. In The Second Sex (1949), Simone de Beauvoir counts, of all women who ever lived, only three female writers—Emily Brontë, Woolf and "sometimes" Katherine Mansfield— have explored "the given."

In popular culture

Virginia Woolf on Romanian stamp 2007

• Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is a 1962 play by Edward Albee. It examines the structure of the marriage of an American middle-aged academic couple, Martha and George. Mike Nichols directed a film version in 1966, starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. Taylor won the 1966 Academy Award for Best Actress for the role.
• Me! I'm Afraid of Virginia Woolf, a 1978 TV play, references the title of the Edward Albee play and features an English literature teacher who has a poster of her. It was written by Alan Bennett and directed by Stephen Frears.
• The artwork The Dinner Party (1979) features a place setting for Woolf.
• The 1996 album Poetic Justice, by British musician Steve Harley, contains a tribute to Woolf, specifically her most adventurous novel, in its closing track: "Riding the Waves (for Virginia Woolf)".
• Michael Cunningham's 1998 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Hours focused on three generations of women affected by Woolf's novel Mrs Dalloway. In 2002, a film version of the novel was released starring Nicole Kidman as Woolf. Kidman won the 2003 Academy Award for her portrayal.
• Susan Sellers's novel Vanessa and Virginia (2008) explores the close sibling relationship between Woolf and her sister, Vanessa Bell. It was adapted for the stage by Elizabeth Wright in 2010 and first performed by Moving Stories Theatre Company.
• Priya Parmar's 2014 novel Vanessa and Her Sister also examined the Stephen sisters' relationship during the early years of their association with what became known as the Bloomsbury Group.
• An exhibition on Virginia Woolf was held at the National Portrait Gallery from July to October 2014.
• In the 2014 novel The House at the End of Hope Street, Woolf is featured as one of the women who has lived in the titular house.
• Virginia is portrayed by both Lydia Leonard and Catherine McCormack in the BBC's three-part drama series Life in Squares (2015).
• On 25 January 2018, Google showed a Google doodle celebrating her 136th birthday.
• In many Barnes & Noble stores, Woolf is featured in Gary Kelly's Author Mural Panels, an imprint of the Barnes & Noble Author brand that also features other notable authors like Hurston, Tagore, and Kafka.
• The 2018 film Vita and Virginia depicts the relationship between Vita Sackville-West and Woolf, portrayed by Gemma Arterton and Elizabeth Debicki respectively.

Adaptations

A number of Virginia Woolf's works have been adapted for the screen, and her play Freshwater (1935) is the basis for a 1994 chamber opera, Freshwater, by Andy Vores. The final segment of the 2018 London Unplugged is adapted from her short story Kew Gardens. Septimus and Clarissa, a stage adaptation of Mrs. Dalloway was created and produced by the New York-based ensemble Ripe Time (www.ripetime.org) in 2011 at the Baruch Performing Arts Center. It was adapted by Ellen McLaughlin and directed and devised by Rachel Dickstein. It was nominated for a 2012 Drama League award for Outstanding Production, a Drama Desk nomination for Outstanding Score (Gina Leishman) and a Joe A. Calloway Award nomination for outstanding direction (Rachel Dickstein.)

Legacy

Memorials

Plaque honouring Virginia Woolf on the building bearing her name, King's College, London, Kingsway

Woolf's bust in Tavistock Square, London, by Stephen Tomlin, 2004

Virginia Woolf is known for her contributions to 20th-century literature and her essays, as well as the influence she has had on literary, particularly feminist criticism. A number of authors have stated that their work was influenced by her, including Margaret Atwood, Michael Cunningham, Gabriel García Márquez, and Toni Morrison. Her iconic image is instantly recognisable from the Beresford portrait of her at twenty (at the top of this page) to the Beck and Macgregor portrait in her mother's dress in Vogue at 44 (see image) or Man Ray's cover of Time magazine (see image) at 55. More postcards of Woolf are sold by the National Portrait Gallery, London than any other person. Her image is ubiquitous, and can be found on tea towels to T-shirts.

Virginia Woolf is studied around the world, with organisations such as the Virginia Woolf Society, and The Virginia Woolf Society of Japan. In addition, trusts—such as the Asham Trust—encourage writers in her honour. Although she had no descendants, a number of her extended family are notable.

Monuments and memorials

In 2013, Woolf was honoured by her alma mater of King's College London with the opening of the Virginia Woolf Building on Kingsway, with a plaque commemorating her time there and her contributions (see image), together with this exhibit depicting her accompanied by a quotation "London itself perpetually attracts, stimulates, gives me a play & a story & a poem" from her 1926 diary. Busts of Virginia Woolf have been erected at her home in Rodmell, Sussex and at Tavistock Square, London where she lived between 1924 and 1939.

In 2014 she was one of the inaugural honorees in the Rainbow Honor Walk, a walk of fame in San Francisco's Castro neighbourhood noting LGBTQ people who have "made significant contributions in their fields."

Woolf Works, a women's co-working space in Singapore, opened in 2014 and was named after her in tribute to the essay A Room of One's Own, which essay has many other things named after it (see the essay's article).

A campaign was launched in 2018 by Aurora Metro Arts and Media to erect a statue of Woolf in Richmond, where she lived for 10 years. The statue showed her reclining on a bench overlooking the river Thames.

Family trees

 see Lee 1999, pp. xviii–xvix, Bell 1972, pp. x–xi, Bicknell 1996, p. xx,Venn 1904

Pattle-de l'Etang Family Tree

James Peter Pattle 1775–1845 m. 1811 Adeline Marie de l'Etang 1793–1845 Adeline Pattle 1812–1836 Eliza Pattle 1814–1818 Julia Margaret Pattle 1815–1879 m. 1835 Henry Prinsep 1792–1878 Sara Monckton Pattle 1816–1887 m. 1837 Dr John Jackson 1804–1887 Maria Theodosia Pattle 1818–1892 Louisa Colebrooke Pattle 1821–1873 m. 1850 Earl Somers 1819–1883 Virginia Pattle 1827–1910 Sophia Ricketts Pattle 1829–1911 Valentine 1838–1904 m.1856 Halford Vaughan 1811–1885 Adeline Maria Jackson 1837–1881 m.1862 Herbert Fisher 1826–1903 Mary Louisa Jackson 1840–1916 m. (1)1867 Herbert Duckworth 1833–1870 Julia Prinsep Jackson 1846–1895 m. (2) 1878 Leslie Stephen 1832–1904 Isabella Caroline Somers-Cocks 1851–1921 Adeline Marie Somers-Cocks 1852–1920 Laura 1870–1945 George Herbert Duckworth 1868–1934 Stella 1869–1897 Gerald de l'Etang Duckworth 1870–1937 Duncan Grant 1885–1978 Vanessa Bell 1879–1961 m.1907 Clive Bell 1881–1964 Thoby Stephen 1880–1906 Virginia 1882–1941 m. 1912 Leonard Woolf 1880–1969 Adrian Stephen 1883–1948 Angelica Vanessa Bell 1918–2012 Julian Bell 1908 –1937 Quentin Bell 1910–1996

Stephen Family Tree

Robert Wilberforce 1728–1768 Elizabeth Bird 1730–1798 m.(1) 1783 Anna Stent 1758–1790 James Stephen 1758–1832 m.(2) 1800 Sarah Wilberforce 1757–1816 William Wilberforce 1759–1833 John Venn 1759–1813 m. 1789 Katherine King 1760–1803 William Makepeace Thackeray 1811–1863 m. 1836 Isabella Gethin Shawe 1816–1893 James 1789–1859 1814 Jane Catherine 1793–1875 m. 1877 Richmond Ritchie Annie 1837–1919 m.(1) Minnie Thackeray 1840–1875 Leslie 1832–1904 m.(2) 1878 Julia Duckworth 1846–1895 James Fitzjames 1829–1894 Caroline 1834–1909 Laura 1870–1945 Virginia+3 other see Julia Stephen

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Biography: Virginia Woolf

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  • Poole, Roger (1991). "Virginia Woolf: The Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse on Her Life and Work, and: Who Killed Virginia Woolf?: A Psychobiography, and: Virginia Woolf: A Study of the Short Fiction, and: Virginia Woolf: Strategist of Language". MFS Modern Fiction Studies (Review). 37 (2): 300–305. doi:10.1353/mfs.0.0773. S2CID 162382065.
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• Curtis, Vanessa (2002). Virginia Woolf's Women. University of Wisconsin Press. ISBN 978-0-299-18340-0.
• Curtis, Anthony (2006). Virginia Woolf: Bloomsbury & Beyond. Haus Publishing. ISBN 978-1-904950-23-3.
• Czarnecki, Kristin; Rohman, Carrie, eds. (2011). Virginia Woolf and the Natural World. Liverpool University Press. ISBN 978-1-942954-14-9.
• Dalsimer, Katherine (2008) [2001]. Virginia Woolf: Becoming a Writer. Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0-300-13376-9.
• Dally, Peter John (1999). Virginia Woolf: The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Robson Books. ISBN 978-1-86105-219-3.
• DeSalvo, Louise A. (1989). Virginia Woolf: The Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse on Her Life and Work. Women's Press. ISBN 978-0-7043-5042-7.
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• Dunn, Jane (1990). A Very Close Conspiracy: Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf. Random House. ISBN 978-1-4464-3465-9. (additional excerpts)
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• Froula, Christine (2005). Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Avant-Garde: War, Civilization, Modernity. Columbia University Press. ISBN 978-0-231-50878-0.
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• Squier, Susan Merrill (1985). Virginia Woolf and London: The Sexual Politics of the City. University of North Carolina Press. ISBN 978-1-4696-3991-8.
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• Wilson, Jean Moorcroft (1987). Virginia Woolf Life and London. A Biography of Place. Cecil Woolf. ISBN 9781860646447. (Illustrations of Woolf's London homes are excerpted at UAH (2018).)

Mental health

• Bennett, Maxwell (2013). Virginia Woolf and Neuropsychiatry. Springer Science & Business Media. ISBN 978-94-007-5748-6. additional excerpts
• Bond, Alma Halbert (2000). Who Killed Virginia Woolf?: A Psychobiography. Insight Books Human Sciences. ISBN 978-0-595-00205-4.
  • Poole, Roger (1991). "Virginia Woolf: The Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse on Her Life and Work, and: Who Killed Virginia Woolf?: A Psychobiography, and: Virginia Woolf: A Study of the Short Fiction, and: Virginia Woolf: Strategist of Language". MFS Modern Fiction Studies (Review). 37 (2): 300–305. doi:10.1353/mfs.0.0773. S2CID 162382065.
• Caramagno, Thomas C. (1992). The Flight of the Mind: Virginia Woolf's Art and Manic-Depressive Illness. University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-93512-9. (summary)
• Drummer, Carlee Rader (1989). The Broken Chrysalis: Virginia Woolf's Grieved Grief (PhD thesis). Stony Brook University.
• Jamison, Kay Redfield (1996). Touched With Fire. Simon and Schuster. ISBN 978-1-4391-0663-1. see also Touched with Fire
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• Trombley, Stephen (October 1980). Virginia Woolf and her doctors (PDF) (PhD thesis). University of Nottingham.
• Trombley, Stephen (1981). All that Summer She was Mad: Virginia Woolf and Her Doctors. London: Junction Books. ISBN 978-0-86245-039-7.
• Webb, Ruth (2000). Virginia Woolf. British Library.

Biography: Other

• Bell, Vanessa (1993). Marler, Regina (ed.). The Selected Letters of Vanessa Bell. Pantheon Books. ISBN 978-0-679-41939-6.
  • Marler, Regina. Biographical introduction. pp. xvii–xviii.
• Bennett, Mary (2002). Who was Dr Jackson?: Two Calcutta Families, 1830–1855. BACSA. ISBN 978-0-907799-78-8.
  • Vogeler, Martha S. (11 July 2014). "Bennett, Mary. Who Was Dr. Jackson? Two Calcutta Families: 1830–1855. London: British Association for Cemeteries in South Asia. 2002. Pp. xv, 116. £12. ISBN 0-90779-9-78-71". Albion (Review). 36 (2): 388–389. doi:10.2307/4054289. JSTOR 4054289.
• Bicknell, John W, ed. (1996). Selected Letters of Leslie Stephen: Volume 1. 1864-1882. Basingstoke: Macmillan. ISBN 9781349248872.
• Bicknell, John W, ed. (1996). Selected Letters of Leslie Stephen: Volume 2. 1882-1904. Ohio State University Press. ISBN 978-0-8142-0691-1.
• Bloom, Abigail Burnham; Maynard, John, eds. (1994). Anne Thackeray Ritchie: Journals and letters. Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press. ISBN 9780814206386.
• Brooke, Rupert; Strachey, James (1998). Hale, Keith (ed.). Friends and Apostles: The Correspondence of Rupert Brooke and James Strachey, 1905–1914. Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0-300-07004-0.
• Curtis, Anthony (2002). Before Bloomsbury: the 1890s diaries of three Kensington ladies : Margaret Lushington, Stella Duckworth and Mildred Massingberd. The Eighteen Nineties Society. ISBN 978-0-905744-28-5.
• Delany, Paul (2015). Fatal Glamour: The Life of Rupert Brooke. MQUP. ISBN 978-0-7735-8278-1.
• Garnett, Angelica (2011) [1985]. Deceived With Kindness. Random House. ISBN 978-1-4464-7525-6.
• Garnett, Henrietta (2004). Anny: A Life of Anny Thackeray Ritchie. London: Chatto & Windus. ISBN 0-7011-7129-4.
  • Lee, Hermione (10 January 2004). "A perfect match". The Guardian (Review).
• Glendinning, Victoria (2006). Leonard Woolf: A Biography. Simon and Schuster. ISBN 978-0-7432-4653-8.
  • Messud, Claire (10 December 2006). "The Husband". The New York Times (Review). Retrieved 14 February 2018.
• Jones, Nigel (2014) [1999 Metro Books]. Rupert Brooke: Life, Death and Myth. Head of Zeus. ISBN 978-1-78185-715-1.
  • Parker, Peter (23 October 1999). "Rupert Brooke: a bundle of prejudice and insanity?". The Daily Telegraph (Review). Retrieved 10 April 2018.
• Knights, Sarah (2015). Bloomsbury's Outsider: A Life of David Garnett. Bloomsbury Publishing. ISBN 978-1-4482-1544-7.
  • Taylor, D. J. (23 July 2015). "Bloomsbury's Outsider: A Life of David Garnett by Sarah Knights". The Guardian (Review).
  • Wade, Francesca (26 June 2015). "Dangerous liaisons among the Bloomsbury set". The Daily Telegraph (Review).
• Llewellyn-Jones, Rosie (2017). The Louisa Parlby Album: Watercolours from Murshidabad 1795–1803 (PDF) (Exhibition catalogue: 23 October – 1 December 2017). London: Francesca Galloway. ISBN 978-0-956-914-767.
• Maitland, Frederic William (1906). The life and letters of Leslie Stephen. London: Duckworth & Co. Retrieved 2 January 2018.
• Moggridge, Donald Edward (1992). Maynard Keynes: An Economist's Biography. Psychology Press. ISBN 978-0-415-05141-5.
• Olsen, Victoria (2003). From Life: Julia Margaret Cameron & Victorian Photography. Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 978-1-4039-6019-1.
• Read, Mike (2015). Forever England: The Life of Rupert Brooke. Biteback Publishing. ISBN 978-1-84954-866-3.
• Rose, Phyllis (1983). Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages. Vintage Books. ISBN 978-0-394-72580-2.
• Spalding, Frances (2010). Gwen Raverat: Friends, Family and Affections. Random House. ISBN 978-1-4090-2941-0.
• Stephen, Virginia; Stephen, Vanessa; Stephen, Thoby (2005). Hyde Park Gate News: The Stephen Family Newspaper. Hesperus Press. ISBN 978-1-84391-701-4.
  • "'Hyde Park Gate News', a magazine by Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell". Collection items (Manuscript). British Library. Retrieved 9 January 2018.
• Tolley, Christopher (1997). Domestic Biography: The Legacy of Evangelicalism in Four Nineteenth-century Families. Clarendon Press. ISBN 978-0-19-820651-4.
• Venn, John (2012) [1904 Macmillan, London]. Annals of a Clerical Family: Being Some Account of the Family and Descendants of William Venn, Vicar of Otterton, Devon, 1600-1621. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-1-108-04492-9. also Internet archive
• Wilson, Scott (2016). Resting Places: The Burial Sites of More Than 14,000 Famous Persons (3rd ed.). McFarland & Company. ISBN 978-1-4766-2599-7.
• Wolf, Sylvia, ed. (1998). Julia Margaret Cameron's Women. Art Institute of Chicago. ISBN 978-0-300-07781-0. also available through MOMA here
• Woolf, Leonard (1989) [1962]. Growing: an autobiography of the years 1904 to 1911. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. ISBN 978-0-15-637215-2.
• — (1975) [1964]. Beginning Again: An Autobiography of the Years 1911 to 1918. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. ISBN 978-0-15-611680-0.

Literary commentary

• Alexander, Christine; McMaster, Juliet, eds. (2005). The Child Writer from Austen to Woolf. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-81293-1.
• Barrett, Eileen; Cramer, Patricia, eds. (1997). Virginia Woolf: Lesbian Readings. NYU Press. ISBN 978-0-8147-1263-4.
  • Cramer, Patricia (July 1997). Lesbian readings of Woolf's novels: Introduction. pp. 117–127. ISBN 9780814712641.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: ref duplicates default (link)
• Bloom, Harold, ed. (2009). Virginia Woolf. Infobase Publishing. ISBN 978-1-4381-1548-1.
• Beja, Morris (1985). Critical essays on Virginia Woolf. G. K. Hall. ISBN 978-0-8161-8753-9.
• Berman, Jessica, ed. (2016). A Companion to Virginia Woolf. Wiley. ISBN 978-1-118-45790-0.
• Blair, Emily (2012). Virginia Woolf and the Nineteenth-Century Domestic Novel. SUNY Press. ISBN 978-0-7914-7992-6.
• Blamires, Harry (1983). A Guide to Twentieth Century Literature in English. Methuen. ISBN 978-0-416-36450-7.
• Booth, Alison (1992). Greatness Engendered: George Eliot and Virginia Woolf. Cornell University Press. ISBN 0-8014-9930-5.
• Briggs, Julia (2006). Reading Virginia Woolf. Edinburgh University Press. ISBN 978-0-7486-2695-3.
• Bunyan, David (1970). Virginia Woolf's views of consciousness in relation to art and life (MLitt thesis). Department of English Studies, Durham University.
• Dalgarno, Emily (2007). Virginia Woolf and the Visible World. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-03360-2.
• Ellis, Steve (2007). Virginia Woolf and the Victorians. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-1-139-46896-1. (additional excerpts)
• Goldman, Jane (2001). The Feminist Aesthetics of Virginia Woolf: Modernism, Post-Impressionism, and the Politics of the Visual. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-79458-9.
• Gruber, Ruth (2012) [2005]. Virginia Woolf: The Will to Create as a Woman. Open Road Media. ISBN 978-1-4532-4864-5.
• Hague, Angela (2003). Fiction, Intuition, & Creativity: Studies in Brontë, James, Woolf, and Lessing. CUA Press. ISBN 978-0-8132-1314-9.
• Hill-Miller, Katherine (2001). From the Lighthouse to Monk's House: A Guide to Virginia Woolf's Literary Landscapes. Duckworth. ISBN 978-0-7156-2995-6.
• Humm, Maggie, ed. (2010). Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf and the Arts. Edinburgh University Press. ISBN 978-0-7486-3553-5.
• Hussey, Mark (1991). Virginia Woolf and war: fiction, reality, and myth. Syracuse University Press. ISBN 978-0-8156-2537-7.
• Kirkpatrick, Brownlee Jean; Clarke, Stuart N. (1997). A Bibliography of Virginia Woolf. Clarendon Press. ISBN 978-0-19-818383-9.
• Koutsantoni, Dr Katerina (2013). Virginia Woolf's Common Reader. Ashgate Publishing, Ltd. ISBN 978-1-4094-7526-2.
• Latham, Sean (2003). "Am I a Snob?": Modernism and the Novel. Cornell University Press. ISBN 0-8014-8841-9.
  • Hite, Molly (11 March 2004). "Am I a Snob? Modernism and the Novel". Modernism/modernity (Review). 11 (1): 190–192. doi:10.1353/mod.2004.0011. ISSN 1080-6601. S2CID 143644837.
• Lee, Hermione (1977). The novels of Virginia Woolf. Holmes & Meier.
• Madden, Mary C (31 March 2006). Virginia Woolf and the persistent question of class: The protean nature of class and self (PhD thesis). Department of English, University of South Florida.
• Majumdar, Robin; McLaurin, Allen (2003) [1975]. Virginia Woolf: The critical heritage. Routledge. ISBN 978-1-134-72404-8.
• Martin, Ann; Holland, Kathryn, eds. (June 2013). Interdisciplinary / Multidisciplinary Woolf: Selected Papers from the Twenty-Second Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf. Liverpool University Press. ISBN 978-0-9890826-2-4.
• Miller, C. Ruth (24 November 1988). Virginia Woolf: The Frames of Art and Life. Palgrave Macmillan UK. ISBN 978-1-349-19595-4.
• Paul, Janis M. (1987). The Victorian heritage of Virginia Woolf: the external world in her novels. Pilgrim Books. ISBN 978-0-937664-73-5.
• Randall, Bryony; Goldman, Jane, eds. (2012). Virginia Woolf in Context. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-1-107-00361-3.
• Rhydderch, Francesca (2000). Cultural translations: A comparative critical study of Kate Roberts and Virginia Woolf (PDF) (PhD thesis). University of Wales, Aberystwyth.
• Ryan, Derek; Bolaki, Stella, eds. (2012). Contradictory Woolf. Liverpool University Press. ISBN 978-1-942954-11-8.
• Sellers, Susan (2010). The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-89694-8.
• Sim, Lorraine (2016). Virginia Woolf: The Patterns of Ordinary Experience. Routledge. ISBN 978-1-317-00160-7.
  • Introduction (PDF). pp. 1–26.
• Simpson, Kathryn (2016). Woolf: A Guide for the Perplexed. Bloomsbury Publishing. ISBN 978-1-4725-9068-8.
• Transue, Pamela J. (1986). Virginia Woolf and the Politics of Style. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. ISBN 978-1-4384-2228-2.
• Zamith, Maria Cândida; Flora, Luísa, eds. (2007). Virginia Woolf: Three Centenary Celebrations. Universidade do Porto. ISBN 978-972-8932-23-7. additional excerpt
• Zink, Suzana (2018). Virginia Woolf's Rooms and the Spaces of Modernity. Springer Nature. ISBN 978-3-319-71909-2.
• Zwerdling, Alex (1986). Virginia Woolf and the Real World. University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-06184-2.
  • Caramagno, Thomas C. (1989). "Review of Virginia Woolf and the Real World; The Invisible Presence: Virginia Woolf and the Mother-Daughter Relationship". Modern Philology (Review). 86 (3): 324–328. doi:10.1086/391719. JSTOR 438044.
  • Middleton, Victoria (1987). "Alex Zwerdling: Virginia Woolf and the Real World". Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature. 41 (4): 277–278. doi:10.2307/1347313. JSTOR 1347313.
  • Pearce, Richard (Autumn 1987). "Review: Virginia Woolf's Reality". Novel: A Forum on Fiction (Review). 21 (1): 93–96. doi:10.2307/1345993. JSTOR 1345993.

Bloomsbury

• Caws, Mary Ann; Wright, Sarah Bird (1999). Bloomsbury and France: Art and Friends. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-802781-2.
• Rosenbaum, S.P. (2016) [1987]. Victorian Bloomsbury: Volume 1: The Early Literary History of the Bloomsbury Group. Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 978-1-349-13368-0. (additional excerpts)
• — (2016) [1994]. Edwardian Bloomsbury: The Early Literary History of the Bloomsbury Group. Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 978-1-349-23237-6.
• — (2003). Georgian Bloomsbury: Volume 3: The Early Literary History of the Bloomsbury Group, 1910–1914. Palgrave Macmillan UK. ISBN 978-0-230-50512-4.
• —; Haule, J. (2014). The Bloomsbury Group Memoir Club. Palgrave Macmillan UK. ISBN 978-1-137-36036-6.
  • Hughes, Kathryn (23 January 2014). "The Bloomsbury Group Memoir Club by SP Rosenbaum and James M Haule – review. How a writing group – and some shocking recollections – influenced classic novels". The Guardian (Review). Retrieved 21 March 2018.
• Rosner, Victoria, ed. (2014). The Cambridge Companion to the Bloomsbury Group. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-1-107-01824-2.
• Todd, Pamela (2001). Bloomsbury at Home. Pavilion. ISBN 978-1-86205-428-8.
• Woolf, Virginia; Raverat, Gwen; Raverat, Jacques (2003). Pryor, William (ed.). Virginia Woolf & the Raverats: A Different Sort of Friendship. Clear Books. ISBN 978-1-904555-02-5.

Chapters and contributions

• Alexander, Christine (2005). Play and apprenticeship: the culture of family magazines. pp. 31–50., in Alexander & McMaster (2005)
• Birrento, Ana Clara. Virginia Woolf: Moments of Being (PDF). pp. 61–72., in Zamith & Flora (2007)
• Brassard, Geneviève (2016). Woolf in translation. pp. 441–452. ISBN 9781118457900., in Berman (2016)
• Dunlap, Sarah (2013). "One Must Be Scientific": Natural History and Ecology in Mrs. Dalloway. pp. 127–131. ISBN 9780989082624., in Martin & Holland (2013)
• Flint, Kate. Victorian Roots: The sense of the past in Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse. pp. 46–59., in Acheson (2017)
• Gillespie, Diane F (April 1993). The elusive Julia Stephen. pp. 1–28. ISBN 9780815625926., in Stephen (1987)
• Gerzina, Gretchen Holbrook (2010). Virginia Woolf, Performing Race. pp. 74–87. ISBN 9780748635535., in Humm (2010)
• Hussey, Mark (2006). Preface. pp. ix–xviii. ISBN 9780547543161., in Woolf (1928)
• Hussey, Mark. Biographical approaches. pp. 83–97., in Snaith (2007)
• Hussey, Mark (2012). Woolf: After Lives. pp. 13–27. ISBN 9781107003613., in Randall & Goldman (2012)
• Lee, Hermione (1995). Virginia Woolf and Offence. Oxford University Press. pp. 129–150. ISBN 9780191673917.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: ref duplicates default (link), in Batchelor (1995)
• Lilienfeld, Jane (1997). 'The Gift of a China Inkpot': Violet Dickinson, Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte Brontë and the Love of Women in Writing. pp. 35–56. ISBN 9780814712641., in Barrett & Cramer (1997)
• Minow-Pinkney, Makiko (2007). Psychonalytic approaches. pp. 60–82. ISBN 9780230206045.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: ref duplicates default (link), in Snaith (2007)
• Minow-Pinkney, Makiko (2006). Domestic Arts: Virginia Woolf and entertaining. pp. 227–244. ISBN 9780748635535., in Humm (2006)
• Ross, Stephen (2014). Introduction. pp. 9–46., in Richardson (2014)
• Stimpson, Catherine R (1999). Foreword. pp. xi–xiv. ISBN 9780226757469., in Silver (1999)

Articles

Journals

• Banks, Joanne Trautmann (April 1998). "Mrs Woolf in Harley Street". The Lancet. 351 (9109): 1124–1126. doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(98)02502-1. PMID 9660599. S2CID 206010710.
• Barzilai, Shuli (1988). "Virginia Woolf's Pursuit of Truth: "Monday or Tuesday," "Moments of Being" and "The Lady in the Looking-Glass"". The Journal of Narrative Technique. 18 (3): 199–210. JSTOR 30225221.
• Bell, Quentin (1965). "The Mausoleum Book". A Review of English Literature. 6 (1): 9–18.
• Boeira, Manuela V.; Berni, Gabriela de Á.; Passos, Ives C.; Kauer-Sant'Anna, Márcia; Kapczinski, Flávio (14 June 2016). "Virginia Woolf, neuroprogression, and bipolar disorder". Revista Brasileira de Psiquiatria. 39 (1): 69–71. doi:10.1590/1516-4446-2016-1962. PMC 7112729. PMID 27304258.
• Bond, AH (October 1986). "Virginia Woolf and Leslie Stephen: a father's contribution to psychosis and genius". The Journal of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis. 14 (4): 507–24. doi:10.1521/jaap.1.1986.14.4.507. PMID 3771329.
• Church, Johanna (January 2016). "Literary Representations of Shell Shock as a Result of World War I in the Works of Virginia Woolf and Ernest Hemingway". Peace & Change. 41 (1): 52–63. doi:10.1111/pech.12172.
• Dalsimer, Katherine (May 2004). "Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)". American Journal of Psychiatry. 161 (5): 809. doi:10.1176/appi.ajp.161.5.809. PMID 15121644.
• DeSalvo, Louise A. (Winter 1982). "Lighting the Cave: The Relationship between Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf". Signs. 8 (2): 195–214. doi:10.1086/493959. JSTOR 3173896. S2CID 144131048.
• Floyd, Riley H. (Summer 2016). ""Must Tell the Whole World": Septimus Smith as Virginia Woolf's Legal Messenge". Indiana Law Journal. 91 (4 (9)): 14721492.
• Haule, James (Winter 1982). "Virginia Woolf's First Voyage: A Novel in the Making by Louise A. DeSalvo; Melymbrosia: An Early Version of "The Voyage out" by Virginia Woolf and Louise A. DeSalvo". Contemporary Literature (Review). 23 (1): 100–104. doi:10.2307/1208147. JSTOR 1208147.
• Jones, Christine Kenyon; Snaith, Anna (2010a). ""Tilting at Universities": Woolf at King's College London". Woolf Studies Annual. 16: 1–44.
• Jones, Christine Kenyon; Snaith, Anna (31 January 2010b). "A castle of one's own". Kings College Report. 17: 26–31.
• Lackey, Michael (2012). "Virginia Woolf and British Russophilia". Journal of Modern Literature. 36 (1): 150. doi:10.2979/jmodelite.36.1.150. S2CID 161783820.
• Leonard, Diane R. (1981). "Proust and Virginia Woolf, Ruskin and Roger Fry: Modernist Visual Dynamics". Comparative Literature Studies. 18 (3): 333–343. JSTOR 40246272.
• Koutsantoni, Katerina (June 2012). "Manic depression in literature: the case of Virginia Woolf". Medical Humanities. 38 (1): 7–14. doi:10.1136/medhum-2011-010075. PMID 22389442. S2CID 32059883.
• Koutsantoni; Oakley, Madeleine (2 April 2014). "Hypothesis of Autism and Psychosis in the Case of Laura Makepeace Stephen". Disability Studies. 4 (3). doi:10.2139/ssrn.2418709. SSRN 2418709.
• Lewis, Alison M (Autumn 2000). "Caroline Emelia Stephen (1834-1909) and Virginia Woolf (1882-1941): A Quaker Influence on Modern English Literature". Quaker Theology (3). Retrieved 12 February 2018.
• McManus, Patricia (2008). "The "Offensiveness" of Virginia Woolf: From a Moral to a Political Reading". Woolf Studies Annual. 14: 92–138.
• McNicol, Jean (20 October 2016). "Something Rather Scandalous". London Review of Books. 38 (20): 19–22. ISSN 0260-9592.
• McTaggart, Ursula (2010). ""Opening the Door": The Hogarth Press as Virginia Woolf's Outsiders' Society". Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature. 29 (1): 63–81. JSTOR 41337032.
• Majumdar, Raja (Fall 1969). "Virginia Woolf and Thoreau". The Thoreau Society Bulletin (109): 4–5.
• Metzgar, Lisa (Spring 1998). ""All This One Could Never Share;" Virginia Woolf and the Conflict between Community and Independence". Matrix. 1 (1). Colorado State University.
• Rodríguez, Laura María Lojo (2001–2002). "Contradiction and ambivalence: Virginia Woolf and the aesthetic experience in "The Duchess and the Jeweller"". Journal of English Studies. 3: 115–129. doi:10.18172/jes.73.
• Schröder, Leena Kore (Autumn 2003). "Tales of Abjection and Miscegenation: Virginia Woolf's and Leonard Woolf's "Jewish" Stories". Twentieth Century Literature. 49 (3): 298–327. doi:10.2307/3175983. JSTOR 3175983. (text also available here)
• Smith, Victoria L. (2006). "Ransacking the Language": Finding the Missing Goods in Virginia Woolf's "Orlando". Journal of Modern Literature. 29 (4): 57–75. JSTOR 3831880.
• Swenson, Kristine (26 October 2017). "Hothouse Victorians: Art and Agency in Freshwater". Open Cultural Studies. 1 (1): 183–193. doi:10.1515/culture-2017-0017.
• Terr, LC (1990). "Who's afraid in Virginia Woolf? Clues to early sexual abuse in literature". The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child. 45: 533–46. doi:10.1080/00797308.1990.11823533. PMID 2251325.
• Usui, Masami (2007). "Julia Margaret Cameron as a Feminist Precursor of Virginia Woolf" (PDF). Doshisha Studies in English. 80 (3): 59–83.

Dictionaries and encyclopaedias

• Bell, Alan (24 May 2012). "Stephen, Sir Leslie (1832–1904)". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/36271. {{cite encyclopedia}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help) (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
• Byers, Paula, ed. (2004). "Virginia Stephen Woolf". Encyclopedia of World Biography. Gale Group.
• Garnett, Jane (23 September 2004). "Stephen [née Jackson], Julia Prinsep (1846–1895)". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/46943. {{cite encyclopedia}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help) (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
• Gordon, Lyndall (2004). "Woolf [née Stephen], (Adeline) Virginia". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/37018. {{cite encyclopedia}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Luebering, J. E. (21 December 2006). "Sir Leslie Stephen". Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved 2 January 2018.
• Reid, Panthea (25 January 2018). "Virginia Woolf". Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Newspapers and magazines

• Anonymous (25 January 2018). "Google celebrates 136th birthday of Virginia Woolf with a doodle". The Times of India. Retrieved 25 January 2018.
• Anonymous. "1 May (1912): Virginia Stephen Woolf to Leonard Woolf". The American Reader. Retrieved 22 March 2018.
• Bas, Marcel (23 January 2008). "Virginia Woolf's Class Consciousness: Snubbing or uplifting the masses?". Die Roepstem.
• Bollen, Christopher (1 May 2012). "Toni Morrison". Interview. Retrieved 23 February 2018.
• Brockes, Emma (7 February 2011). "Michael Cunningham: A life in writing". The Guardian. Retrieved 23 February 2018.
• Brown, Mark (9 July 2014). "Virginia Woolf celebrated in gallery she spurned as it was 'filled with men'". The Guardian.
• Fallon, Claire (25 January 2016). "Virginia Woolf's Guide To Grieving". HuffPost. Retrieved 9 February 2018.
• Gross, John (1 December 2006). "Mr. Virginia Woolf". Commentary. archived version
• Himmelfarb, Gertrude (1 February 1985). "From Clapham to Bloomsbury: a genealogy of morals". Commentary. archived version
• Humm, Maggie (2006). "The Stephen sisters as young photographers". Canvas. No. 15. Firle, East Sussex: Charleston Trust.
• Kronenberger, Louis (10 November 1929). "Virginia Woolf Discusses Women and fiction". The New York Times (Review).
• Matar, Hisham (10 November 2014). "The Unsaid: The Silence of Virginia Woolf". The New Yorker.
• Monks, Aoife (23 May 2012). "Virginia Woolf's play exposes the silly side of the Bloomsbury group". The Guardian.
• Stone, Peter H. (Winter 1981). "Gabriel García Márquez, The Art of Fiction No. 69". The Paris Review. No. 82. Retrieved 23 February 2018.
• Usui, Masami (2007). "Julia Margaret Cameron as a Feminist Precursor of Virginia Woolf" (PDF). Doshisha Studies in English. 80 (3): 59–83.
• Wills, Mathew (13 May 2017). "When Virginia Woolf Wore Blackface". JSTOR Daily.
• Young, Kevin (27 October 2017). "The Time Virginia Woolf Wore Blackface". The New Yorker.

Websites and documents

• Brown, Kimmy Sophia (8 April 2015). "Virginia Woolf— On the Track of the Lost Novelist". Significato. Retrieved 17 February 2018.
• Carter, Jason (14 September 2010). "Virginia Woolf Seminar". Women's Studies, University of Alabama, Huntsville.
• Deegan, Marilyn; Shillingsburg, Peter, eds. (2018). "Woolf Online: A digital archive of Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse (1927)". Society of Authors. Retrieved 7 January 2018.
• Jones, Josh (26 August 2013). "Virginia Woolf's Handwritten Suicide Note: A Painful and Poignant Farewell (1941)". Open Culture. Retrieved 18 February 2018.
• Saryazdi, Melissa (27 September 2017). "Writers in Cornwall: Virginia Woolf". FalWriting: English & Creative Writing at Falmouth. Retrieved 28 February 2018.
• Olsen, Victoria (1 February 2012). "Looking for Laura". Open Letters Monthly. Retrieved 20 January 2018.
• White, Sian (2015). "Virginia Woolf in Time and Space". James Madison University. Retrieved 17 February 2018.
  • Adams, Terry (29 September 2016). "The death of George Savage". Virginia Woolf in Time and Space. Retrieved 17 February 2018.
• "Virginia Woolf". Notable alumni. King's College, London. Retrieved 2 February 2018.
• "Virginia and Leonard Woolf marry". This day in history. A & E Television. 2018. Retrieved 14 February 2018.
• "Androom Archives". 2017. Retrieved 19 December 2017.
• Woolf. Harper Collins Publishers. Retrieved 2 February 2018. {{cite encyclopedia}}: |work= ignored (help)
• "Woolf, Creativity and Madness: From Freud to FMRI". Smith College Libraries: Online exhibits. Northampton MA: Smith College Libraries. Retrieved 15 December 2017.
• "Virginia Woolf Building (22 Kingsway)". King's College London. 2018. Retrieved 12 February 2018.
• "Virginia Woolf honoured by new Strand Campus building". News. King's College London. 2 May 2013. Archived from the original on 13 July 2015. Retrieved 15 February 2018.
• Chicago, Judy (1974–1979). "The Dinner Party: Place Settings". Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, Brooklyn Museum. Retrieved 23 February 2018.
• "Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain". Archived from the original on 18 December 2017. Retrieved 26 December 2017.
• "Virginia Woolf: Art, Life and Vision" (Museum exhibition). National Portrait Gallery. 10 July – 20 October 2014.
• "Find a will. Index to wills and administrations (1858–1995)". Calendars of the Grants of Probate and Letters of Administration. The National Archives. Retrieved 2 March 2018.
• "Currency converter". National Archives. Retrieved 2 March 2018.
• NPG. "Maurice Beck and Helen Macgregor (1886–1960)". National Portrait Gallery, London. Retrieved 10 March 2018.
• "Virginia Woolf Around The World". Exhibitions. E. J. Pratt Library, Victoria University, Toronto. 2018. January 2017. Retrieved 14 March 2018.
• "Virginia Woolf – First Editions". Adrian Harrington Rare Books. Retrieved 14 March 2018.
• "Cox, Katherine Laird 'Ka'". Introduction to archives: Rupert Brooke (Biographies). King's College, Cambridge. 19 March 2015. Retrieved 2 April 2018.

Blogs

• Brooks, Rebecca Beatrice (2018). "The Virginia Woolf Blog". Retrieved 19 January 2018.
  • Brooks, Rebecca Beatrice (8 April 2015). "Virginia Woolf's Family". Retrieved 19 January 2018.
• Eve, Kimberly (19 November 2017). "Victorian Musings". Retrieved 26 December 2017.
• Roe, Dinah (2011). "Virginia Woolf and Holman Hunt go to the Lighthouse". Pre-Raphaelites in the city. Retrieved 25 December 2017.

British Library

• Gordon, Lyndall (25 May 2016). "Too much suicide?". Discovering Literature: 20th century. London: British Library. Retrieved 9 February 2018.
• Heyes, Duncan (25 May 2016). "The Hogarth Press". Discovering Literature: 20th century. British Library. Retrieved 7 March 2018.
• British Library (2018e). "Grace Higgens's diary for 1924". 20th century collection. Retrieved 20 March 2018.

Literary commentary

• Nagy, Kim (29 October 2015). "Meeting Virginia Woolf at the Strand". Wild River Review. Retrieved 28 March 2018.
• Rahn, Josh (2018). "Modernism". The Literature Network. Jalic. Retrieved 21 February 2018.
• Rosenbaum, S. P. (2013). "Virginia Woolf among the Apostles". Le Tour Critique (2): 131–146. Retrieved 13 April 2018.
• Snodgrass, Chris. "Chris Snodgrass". Department of English, University of Florida. Retrieved 15 March 2018.
  • Snodgrass, Chris (2015). "Introduction: Virginia Woolf (1882‒1941)" (PDF) (Course materials). Department of English, University of Florida. Retrieved 15 March 2018.

British Library

• Bradshaw, David (25 May 2016). "Mrs Dalloway and the First World War". Discovering Literature: 20th century. British Library. Retrieved 14 March 2018.
• Taunton, Matthew (25 May 2016). "Modernism, time and consciousness: the influence of Henri Bergson and Marcel Proust". Discovering Literature: 20th century. British Library. Retrieved 15 March 2018.
• British Library (2018a). "A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf". 20th century collection. Retrieved 5 March 2018.
• — (2018d). "Kew Gardens by Virginia Woolf, 1927". 20th century collection. Retrieved 20 March 2018.
• — (2019e). "'Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown' by Virginia Woolf". 20th century collection. Retrieved 3 April 2018.
• — (2018). "To the Lighthouse". 20th century works. 37018. Retrieved 9 February 2018.
• — (2018c). "Two Stories, written and printed by Virginia and Leonard Woolf". 20th century collection. Retrieved 20 March 2018.
• — (2018b). "Virginia Woolf". 20th century people. British Library. Retrieved 11 March 2018.

Virginia Woolf's homes and venues

• Brooks, Rebecca Beatrice (21 March 2012a). "Virginia Woolf's Homes Destroyed in the London Blitz". Retrieved 28 February 2018., in Brooks (2018)
• Brooks, Rebecca Beatrice (10 July 2012b). "Did Virginia Woolf Live in a Haunted House?". Retrieved 28 February 2018., in Brooks (2018)
• Grant, Duncan (1978). "Shutter design for 38 Brunswick Square 1912". Art & Architecture: Gallery collections. Courtauld Institute of Art. Retrieved 4 March 2018.
• Halstead, Hannah (24 November 2017). "52 Tavistock Square". Sites of British Modernism: Mapping Key Locations of British Modernism. Seton Hall University. Retrieved 5 March 2018.
• Maggio, Paula (4 May 2009). "Virginia's Round House in Lewes up for sale"., in Blogging Woolf (2018)
• Richardson, Phyllis (24 March 2015). "Tales from Talland House". Unbound. Retrieved 1 January 2018.
• Wilkinson, Sheila M (2001). "Firle Village, Sussex". Retrieved 4 March 2018., in VWS (2017)
• "The Woolfs at Asham House". The Asham Award. The Asham Trust. Archived from the original on 6 March 2018. Retrieved 5 March 2018.
• "Literary history celebrated in Brunswick Square". Bloomsbury Squares & Gardens. Association of Bloomsbury Squares and Gardens. 1 December 2015. Retrieved 4 March 2018.
• "Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) and Hogarth House". London Borough of Richmond upon Thames. 9 January 2015. Retrieved 15 February 2018.
• "Bloomsbury Walk" (Word document). 2018. Retrieved 5 March 2018., in Carter (2010)
• "Monk's House: Leonard and Virginia Woolf's 17th-century country retreat". National Trust. 2018. Retrieved 11 March 2018.
• "Take a Tour of Virginia Woolf's Life in London". Google Arts & Culture. Retrieved 31 March 2018.

Virginia Woolf biography

• Liukkonen, Petri (2008). "Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)". Books and Writers. Finland: Kuusankoski Public Library. Archived from the original on 28 January 2015. Retrieved 8 February 2016.
• Svendsen, Jessica; Lewis, Pericles. "Virginia Woolf". Modernism Lab. Yale University. Retrieved 11 March 2018.

Timelines

• "Timeline of Virginia Woolf's Life". 9 February 2012. Retrieved 19 January 2018., in Brooks (2018)
• Clarke, S. N. (2000). "Where Virginia Woolf Lived in London". Archived from the original on 15 January 2018. Retrieved 1 March 2018., in VWS (2017)
• "Chronological List of Works By Virginia Woolf". 4 December 2002. Retrieved 1 March 2018., in Carter (2010)
• "The Principal Works of Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)". Archived from the original on 25 August 2017. Retrieved 29 March 2018., in VWS (2017)}
• "Chronology of Virginia Woolf's Life". 7 July 1997. Retrieved 1 March 2018., in Carter (2010)
• "Virginia Woolf: The Highs and Lows of Her Creative Genius". Biography. A&E Television Networks. 25 January 2017. Retrieved 30 March 2018.

Genealogy

• Vine, Nikki. "Nikki's Family History and Wells Local History Pages". Retrieved 6 January 2018.
• Wood, Dudley (3 November 2017). "Family Histories of Wood of Kent, Bone of Hampshire, Lloyd of Cheshire, Thompson of West Yorkshire". Retrieved 30 December 2017.
• "Geni". 2018. Retrieved 2 January 2018.
• "Relatives of Virginia Woolf". 22 March 2011. Retrieved 15 December 2017., in Smith (2017)
• "Duckworth, Herbert (DKWT851H)". A Cambridge Alumni Database. University of Cambridge. Retrieved 14 February 2018.
• "Duckworth, George Herbert (DKWT886GH)". A Cambridge Alumni Database. University of Cambridge. Retrieved 14 February 2018.
• "Duckworth, Gerald de l'Étang (DKWT889GD)". A Cambridge Alumni Database. University of Cambridge. Retrieved 14 February 2018.
• "Stephen, Julian Thoby (STFN899JT)". A Cambridge Alumni Database. University of Cambridge. Retrieved 14 February 2018.
• "Stephen, Leslie (STFN850L)". A Cambridge Alumni Database. University of Cambridge. Retrieved 14 February 2018.

Images

• Beck, Maurice; Macgregor, Helen (May 1926). "Virginia Woolf tries on her mother's Victorian dress, May 1926". Vogue (Photograph). Retrieved 9 January 2018.
• Colman, Dan (14 January 2014). "Vintage Photos of a Young Virginia Woolf Playing Cricket (Ages 5 & 12)". Open Culture. Retrieved 11 March 2018.
• Fry, Roger (1913). "Landscape at Asheham House, near Lewes, Sussex" (Painting). Art UK. Arts Council England. Retrieved 10 March 2018.
• Kukil, Karen V. (2011). "Julia Prinsep Jackson, c.1856". Leslie Stephen's Photograph Album (Exhibition catalogue: photograph album). Northampton MA: Smith College. Retrieved 19 December 2017.
• Ray, Man (12 April 1937). "Virginia Woolf". Time. Retrieved 10 March 2018.
• "Literary history celebrated in Brunswick Square" (Photograph). 1 December 2015. Retrieved 4 March 2018., in Bloomsbury Squares (2015)
• "Shutter design" (Painting). 1912. Retrieved 4 March 2018., in Grant (1912)
• "Asham" (Photograph). 2012., in Brooks (2012)
• 22 Hyde Park Gate showing red brick extension. Cambridge University Press. 2005. ISBN 9780521812931. Retrieved 20 March 2018.

Maps

• "Map of location of 22 Hyde Park Gate". Google Earth (Map). Retrieved 23 January 2018.
• "Street plan of Hyde Park Gate" (Plan). 1975., in Sheppard (1975)
• "Map of Bloomsbury with Gordon, Brunswick, Mecklenburg and Tavistock Squares". Google Earth (Map). Retrieved 8 March 2018.
• "Map of East Sussex from Lewes in the northwest to Alciston in the southwest, including Rodmell and Firle". Google Earth (Map). Retrieved 8 March 2018.

Audiovisual media

• Coe, Amanda (Producer) (2015). Life in Squares (T.V. series (3)). UK: BBC.{{cite AV media}}: CS1 maint: ref duplicates default (link) see also Life in Squares
• Lee, Hermione (13 June 1997). Virginia Woolf (TV). C-SPAN. Retrieved 7 March 2018.{{cite AV media}}: CS1 maint: ref duplicates default (link)
• Stevenson, Juliet (31 March 2015). Suicide letter to Leonard Woolf, March 28 1941 (Audio). BBC Newsnight (YouTube). Retrieved 28 March 2018.
• Young, Eric Neal (Director) (2002). The Mind and Times of Virginia Woolf (Documentary). USA: Miramax.{{cite AV media}}: CS1 maint: ref duplicates default (link) excerpt
• Virginia Woolf at IMDb
  • "Virginia Woolf (Character)". Character. IMDb. Archived from the original on 27 February 2017. Retrieved 11 March 2018.
• "Greatest writers find their voice". BBC. 22 October 2008. Retrieved 11 March 2018.
  • Woolf, Virginia (29 April 1937). Craftmanship (Radio). BBC Radio Words Fail Me. Retrieved 7 March 2018.{{cite AV media}}: CS1 maint: ref duplicates default (link)

Selected online texts

• Works by Virginia Woolf at Project Gutenberg
• Works by Virginia Woolf at Faded Page (Canada)
• Woolf, Virginia (2016). The Collected Essays and Letters of Virginia Woolf – Including a Short Biography of the Author. Read Books Limited. ISBN 978-1-4733-6310-6.

Audiofiles

• Works by Virginia Woolf at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
• "The Legacy". La Clé des Langues [en ligne]: Littérature britannique. École normale supérieure de Lyon. 1944.
• "The Searchlight". La Clé des Langues [en ligne]: Littérature britannique. École normale supérieure de Lyon. 1944.

Archival material

• "Archival material relating to Virginia Woolf". UK National Archives.
• "Virginia Woolf: Author and publisher". E. J. Pratt Library, Victoria University, Toronto. 2018.
• "Virginia Woolf collection of papers 1882–1984". Archives and Manuscripts: Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature. New York Public Library. 2018. Retrieved 11 March 2018.

Bibliography notes

Bibliography references

External links

• Works by or about Virginia Woolf at the Internet Archive
• Virginia Woolf Papers at the Mortimer Rare Book Collection, Smith College Special Collections