Virginia Woolf Add a review

Adeline Virginia Woolf (; née Stephen; 25 January 1882 – 28 March 1941) was an English writer and one of the most influential 20th century modernist authors. She pioneered the use of stream of consciousness narration as a literary device.

Woolf was born into an affluent household in South Kensington, London as the seventh child of Julia Prinsep Jackson and Leslie Stephen. She grew up in a blended family of eight that included her sister, modernist painter Vanessa Bell. From a young age, she was home-schooled in English classics and Victorian literature. Between 1897 to 1901, she attended the Ladies' Department of King's College London, where she studied classics and history. There, she encountered early reformers advocating for women's higher education and the women's rights movement.

After her father's death in 1904, the Stephen family moved from Kensington to Bloomsbury, a more bohemian neighbourhood. There, alongside her brothers' intellectual friends, she helped form the artistic and literary Bloomsbury Group. In 1912, she married Leonard Woolf, and in 1917, the couple founded the Hogarth Press, which went on to publish much of her work. They rented a home in Sussex and permanently settled there in 1940.

Woolf began writing professionally in 1900. During the inter-war period, Woolf became an important part of London's literary and artistic society, and its anti-war position. 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, such as A Room of One's Own (1929).

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