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Virginia Woolf was born in London in 1882. In 1904 Virginia and her sister, the painter Vanessa Bell, moved to Bloomsbury and became the centre of 'The Bloomsbury Group'. This informal collective of artists and writers which included Lytton Strachey and Roger Fry, exerted a powerful influence over early twentieth-century British culture. In 1912 Virginia married Leonard Woolf. Her first novel The Voyage Out was published in 1915, followed by Night and Day (1919) and Jacob's Room (1922). It was during this time that she and Leonard Woolf founded The Hogarth Press. The majority of Virginia Woolf's work was first published by The Hogarth Press, and these original texts are now available, together with her selected letters and diaries, from Vintage Classics, which belongs to the publishing group that Hogarth became part of in 1987. Between 1925 and 1931 Virginia Woolf produced what are now regarded as her finest masterpieces, from Mrs Dalloway (1925) to the poetic and highly experimental novel The Waves (1931). She also maintained an astonishing output of literary criticism, short fiction, journalism and biography, including the playfully subversive Orlando (1928) and A Room of One's Own (1929) a passionate feminist essay. On 28 March 1941, a few months before the publication of her final novel, Between the Acts, Virginia Woolf committed suicide. Helen Dunmore was born in Yorkshire in 1952. She is a poet, short story writer and novelist.Her novels include Zennor in Darkness, Talking to the Dead, Your Blue-Eyed Boy, With Your Crooked Heart, The Siege, Mourning Ruby , House of Orphans and Betrayal. Her second novel, A Spell of Winter, about a brother and sister brought up by their grandfather in his decaying house in the country won the first Orange Prize for Fiction in 1995
==
Adeline Virginia Woolf (
/
ˈ
w
ʊ
l
f
/
; 25 January 1882 – 28 March 1941) was an English writer, regarded as one of the foremost
modernist
literary figures of the twentieth century.
During the
interwar period
, Woolf was a significant figure in London literary society and a member of the
Bloomsbury Group
. Her most famous works include the novels
Mrs Dalloway
(1925),
To the Lighthouse
(1927) and
Orlando
(1928), and the book-length essay
A Room of One's Own
(1929), with its famous dictum, "A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction."
Contents
Early life
-
Virginia Woolf was born Adeline Virginia Stephen in London in 1882 to Sir
Leslie Stephen
and Julia Prinsep Stephen (née Jackson).
-
Virginia's father, Sir Leslie Stephen (1832–1904), was a notable historian, author, critic and mountaineer. He was the editor of the
Dictionary of National Biography
, a work that would influence Woolf's later experimental biographies.
-
Virginia's mother Julia Stephen (1846–1895
)
was a renowned beauty, born
in
India
to Dr. John and Maria Pattle Jackson.
She was also the niece of the photographer
Julia Margaret Cameron
and first cousin of the temperance leader
Lady Henry Somerset
. Julia moved to England with her mother, where she served as a model for
Pre-Raphaelite
painters such as
Edward Burne-Jones
.
[2]
Woolf was educated by her parents in their literate and well-connected household at 22
Hyde Park Gate
,
Kensington
.
-
Her parents had each been married previously and been widowed, and, consequently, the household contained the children of three marriages.
Julia had three children by her first husband, Herbert Duckworth:
George
, Stella, and
Gerald Duckworth
. Leslie first married Harriet Marian (Minny) Thackeray (1840–1875), the daughter of
William Thackeray
, and they had one daughter: Laura Makepeace Stephen, who was declared
mentally disabled
and lived with the family until she was institutionalised in 1891.
[3]
Leslie and Julia had four children together:
Vanessa Stephen
(1879),
Thoby Stephen
(1880), Virginia (1882), and
Adrian Stephen
(1883).
Sir Leslie Stephen's eminence as an editor, critic, and biographer, and his connection to
William Thackeray
, meant that his children were raised in an environment filled with the influences of
Victorian
literary society.
Henry James
,
George Henry Lewes
, and Virginia's honorary godfather,
James Russell Lowell
, were among the visitors to the house. Julia Stephen was equally well connected. Descended from an attendant of
Marie Antoinette
,[
citation needed
] she came from a family of beauties who left their mark on Victorian society as models for Pre-Raphaelite artists and early photographers, including her aunt
Julia Margaret Cameron
who was also a visitor to the Stephen household. Supplementing these influences was the immense library at the Stephens' house, from which Virginia and Vanessa were taught the
classics
and
English literature
. Unlike the girls, their brothers Adrian and Julian (Thoby) were formally educated and sent to Cambridge, a difference which Virginia would resent. The sisters did, however, benefit indirectly from their brothers' Cambridge contacts, as the boys brought their new intellectual friends home to the Stephens' drawing room.[
citation needed
]
According to Woolf's memoirs, her most vivid childhood memories were not of London but of
St. Ives
in
Cornwall
, where the family spent every summer until 1895. The Stephens' summer home, Talland House, looked out over Porthminster Bay, and is still standing today, though somewhat altered. Memories of these family holidays and impressions of the landscape, especially the
Godrevy Lighthouse
, informed the fiction Woolf wrote in later years, most notably
To the Lighthouse
.
-
The sudden death of her mother in 1895, when Virginia was 13, and that of her half-sister Stella two years later, led to the first of Virginia's several
nervous breakdowns
.
She was, however, able to take courses of study (some at degree level) in Greek, Latin, German and history at the Ladies’ Department of
King's College London
between 1897 and 1901, and this brought her into contact with some of the early reformers of women’s higher education such as Clara Pater, George Warr and Lilian Faithfull (Principal of the King’s Ladies’ Department and noted as one of the
Steamboat ladies
).
[4]
Her sister Vanessa also studied Latin, Italian, art and architecture at King’s Ladies’ Department.
-
The death of her father in 1904 provoked her most alarming collapse and she was briefly institutionalised.
-
Modern scholars (including her nephew and biographer,
Quentin Bell
) have suggested
[5]
her breakdowns and subsequent recurring
depressive
periods were also influenced by the
sexual abuse
to 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
).
-
Throughout her life, Woolf was plagued by periodic
mood swings
and associated illnesses.
Though this instability often affected her social life, her literary productivity continued with few breaks throughout her life.
Bloomsbury
After the death of their father and Virginia's second nervous breakdown, Vanessa and Adrian sold 22 Hyde Park Gate and bought a house at 46
Gordon Square
in
Bloomsbury
.
Woolf came to know
Lytton Strachey
,
Clive Bell
,
Rupert Brooke
,
Saxon Sydney-Turner
,
Duncan Grant
,
Leonard Woolf
,
John Maynard Keynes
, and
Roger Fry
, who together formed the nucleus of the intellectual circle of writers and artists known as the
Bloomsbury Group
. 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). In 1907 Vanessa married
Clive Bell
, and the couple's interest in
avant garde
art would have an important influence on Woolf's development as an author.
[6]
Virginia Stephen married writer
Leonard Woolf
on the 10th August, 1912.
[7]
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." The two also collaborated professionally, in 1917 founding the
Hogarth Press
, which subsequently published Virginia's novels along with works by
T.S. Eliot
,
Laurens van der Post
, and others.
[8]
The Press also commissioned works by contemporary artists, including
Dora Carrington
and
Vanessa Bell
.
The ethos of the Bloomsbury group encouraged a liberal approach to sexuality, and in 1922 she met the writer and gardener
Vita Sackville-West
, wife of
Harold Nicolson
. After a tentative start, they began a sexual relationship, which, according to Sackville- West, was only twice consummated.
[9]
In 1928, Woolf presented Sackville-West with
Orlando
, a fantastical biography in which the eponymous hero's life spans three centuries and both sexes.
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".
[10]
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 an illness at the age of 26
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