best biography virginia woolf

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The best virginia woolf books, recommended by hermione lee.

Virginia Woolf by Hermione Lee

Virginia Woolf was long dismissed as a 'minor modernist' but now stands as one of the giants of 20th century literature. Her biographer, Hermione Lee , talks us through the novels, essays, and diaries of Virginia Woolf.

Interview by David Shackleton

To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

The Years by Virginia Woolf

Walter Sickert: A Conversation by Virginia Woolf

On Being Ill by Virginia Woolf

Selected Diaries by Virginia Woolf

1 To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

2 the years by virginia woolf, 3 walter sickert: a conversation by virginia woolf, 4 on being ill by virginia woolf, 5 selected diaries by virginia woolf.

B efore we get to the books, let’s start this discussion by looking at your biography of  Virginia Woolf. In it you mention that when you were studying English literature as an undergraduate at Oxford University, there weren’t any lectures on Woolf, and as a graduate student, you were told that Woolf was a ‘minor modernist’, not to be classed with the likes of James Joyce, T. S. Eliot or D. H. Lawrence. Why has so much changed since then?

It must have been really exciting writing her biography when so many of her writings, diaries and letters had only recently become available, or weren’t available at all to the public.

I was interested that you chose To the Lighthouse and The Years as your two favourite Virginia Woolf books. Why did you choose To the Lighthouse ?

It’s a very difficult thing to be asked to choose your favourite novels, especially if you’re a Virginia Woolf biographer. I could just as happily have chosen Jacob’s Room or Mrs Dalloway . I chose To the Lighthouse because, when all is said and done, I think it is her greatest novel. I find it still, every single time I read it—and I must have read it more than any other book in my reading life—very moving, tremendously impressive, extremely complicated and interesting in how it’s put together, and approachable in many different kinds of ways. It’s approachable as a love story, as a family story, as a ghost story, as an elegy for the nineteenth century, as a war novel—in an indirect and interesting way—and as an astonishingly ambitious experiment in a completely different way of writing fiction.

It certainly is radically experimental. The literary critic Erich Auerbach famously analysed one scene in the novel, in which Mrs Ramsay sits knitting a stocking for the lighthouse keeper’s boy, and he points out that it probably takes longer to read this description than it would have taken Mrs Ramsay to knit. Why should we, as readers in the twenty-first century, be excited to read such slow-paced descriptions of seemingly trivial incidents?

There’s a fashion for that now. There could be another life of Virginia Woolf in the context of books like Elena Ferrante ’s series on Naples, where you have a slow burn through the minute descriptions of the lives of her characters. Or Karl Knausgård’s autobiographies, where you spend fifty pages on slow processes of his life. John Updike is another example. The idea that you go minutely and slowly, in intense close-up, into moments in people’s lives, is something that people find interesting, perhaps because readers are fascinated by autobiography and memoir. What Woolf does in her narratives is to think about many kinds of different shapes and forms, like a painting, or abstract marks down the middle of a page, or the shape of a bowl of fruit, or the shape of a lighthouse in the bay. She tries to build a story almost like an abstract painting—and there’s a lot about painting in To the Lighthouse . It’s a novel that doesn’t just let you read the story, it makes you think about the shape and structure. She is interested in how to master the passing of time. She is obsessed with death and loss and elegy and memory. This is a kind of a ghost story. And you feel, at any moment, that the whole thing could fall apart into fragments if she didn’t keep on shaping it and shaping it. In the middle there’s an extraordinary section called ‘Time Passes’, where you see the house left on its own, beginning to decay, and then it’s brought back into life. You’re made to think about structure all the time. You don’t just read for the story—chapter 1, chapter 2, chapter 3. She’s making you think about how a narrative can shape the passing of time.

It’s an amazing middle section, ‘Time Passes’.

You don’t know who is speaking, there’s nobody there.

It’s very disconcerting.

I think these achievements are very modern and still fresh. Students who are now reading it for the first time are deeply interested in those kinds of experiments.

I remember being shocked by the way that Mrs Ramsay’s death is treated in ‘Time Passes’. Can you say a bit about that?

It’s a very bold thing to do. You get invested in the characters in the first part of the novel, even if you don’t like them much—and you’re not necessarily supposed to like them. There’s a rather tyrannical, eccentric father, Mr Ramsay, and the kind of mother who thinks that a woman’s life is about having children and bringing up families and matchmaking, and being attentive to the head of the family. She is not particularly interested in feminism or new ways for women to live their lives. There is the family with all the conflicts that go on inside the many children’s lives, and then there are the visitors, who are watching this family. Mrs Ramsay is a magnetic figure who pulls people towards her. It is partly a love story between the parents, and between the children and visitors who are all in love with her. And then she dies. She dies in brackets, in passing, in the middle section. The last section is about how they all live their lives after she has gone, and about their memory of her. The brutality with which she is chucked away in the middle section never fails to shock people when they read the book for the first time. Here is this woman you’re supposed to be minding about, then she’s killed off in brackets. That’s exactly what happens to people, and certainly happened a lot to Virginia Woolf. You’re living your life, and suddenly fate comes and wipes someone out—you don’t know why and you don’t know how. This brutal, fatal, sudden removal of people in whom you are deeply invested is something that she writes about over and over again.

So it’s almost more true-to-life than a prolonged death-bed scene?

Let’s talk more about your second choice of Virginia Woolf books, The Years . At least at first glance, it seems a lot less obviously experimental than To the Lighthouse , or The Waves . It tells the story of the Pargiter family over three generations, which, on the face of it, is a fairly conventional thing to be doing. Is it a more straightforward novel?

In some ways it is, and it had a kind of success that suggests that people were reading it as if it were, say, like Galsworthy’s Forsyte Saga . It was a big commercial success in her time. Now it’s the least favoured of all her books, which is partly why I chose it: because I wanted to give it an airing. That and Night and Day , I would think, are the two least read. It’s not a transfixingly experimental book in the way that Mrs Dalloway or To the Lighthouse are. She called it her ‘failure’. She had a terrible time writing it, and kept changing her mind about what she wanted to do with it. But the reason why I think it’s interesting and important is that it’s an extremely political book. In The Years , the Victorian family that is growing into the modern world—the novel goes from the 1880s until the present day, which is 1936—is dealing with issues of feminism, of attitudes to women and the abuse of women, issues of abortion and child abuse, and women’s rights, racism and class war. These things are implicit in novels like Jacob’s Room or Mrs Dalloway or To the Lighthouse —novels of the 1920s—but in the 1930s, when all around her Woolf sees the rise of fascism, she feels, like other writers of the time, the need to speak about politics. She is extremely engaged with the public world.

The Years is a deeply flawed book, but it’s brave about political issues. In her mind, the late nineteenth-century world in which she grew up had all kinds of conventions and hypocrisies and rather stultifying ways of treating family life—in which girls, for instance, didn’t go to school if they were from an upper-middle class family, and sex was never spoken about, and young women had chaperones. The people of her generation get out of that. They go and live in Bloomsbury, they become artists, they are outspoken about sex. But they’ve lost something as well. They’ve lost a sense of solidity and gravitas and rootedness, and she struggles with that. She feels that the quality of modern life is thinner, somehow, than the quality of the life of her parents. The Years is partly about that, but it is also about individual struggles to make a meaningful life, at a time which seemed to her not helpful to individual fruition or fulfillment. She felt that the times were dark. And they were.

It coincides with a lot of her most overtly political writings.

Moving away from Virginia Woolf’s books and on to her essays, why did you select ‘Walter Sickert: A Conversation’?

Writing about ‘On Being Ill’, you have distinguished between vertical and horizontal types of reading. Could you say briefly what the difference between the two is, and how this essay could be thought to be about horizontal reading?

Yes. Well, she’s horizontal because she’s ill and is lying on her back, and so the essay is about what it feels like to have given up the race to make your living and go out and live in the normal world. And so I suppose vertical reading would be orthodox reading where you are accountable and have to make sense of what you’re reading, and to be able to have an intelligent conversation about it once you have read it. Whereas horizontal reading is when you’re lying down with a raging temperature—perhaps you have got the flu—and you’re picking up books that happen to be lying around, as they would have been in her house, and you are biting off little bits of poetry, and little bits of stuff here and there, and you’re not even making sense of it. It’s almost like nonsense, but all kinds of unlikely and unexpected emotions are coming at you through the little fragments that you’re picking up here and there. Reading with a high temperature is a sort of illicit reading.

“What Woolf does in her narratives is to think about many kinds of different shapes and forms, like a painting.”

I was interested that you chose Virginia Woolf’s diaries. Compared to her novels or her essays, they might be overlooked, or if not overlooked, mined for insights about the novels. Are they worth reading in themselves?

Yes, completely. It’s a life’s work for her. It’s an astonishing thing to have decades of almost daily diary entries from a great writer, who tells you about her work in progress, about her innermost thoughts, about the people she knows, about everything she’s been doing. They’re written in a different way from the novels, and she often talks in the diaries about how she’s writing them. She invents what she calls a loose, quick, free style; she’s trying not to correct herself. When you read them, the actual physical things, sometimes she’s writing so fast, with very few crossings out or blots, that you can see the line of the handwriting dipping down towards the end of the line. This is her mind pouring out at you. Of course, there are times when you can see she’s thinking, ‘maybe I’ll write a really good description of Yeats or H. G. Wells now, and then when I’m dead, people will publish my diaries, and read it’. There’s a slight self-consciousness there. But the diary works on many levels. It works as a practice book: she’s practising certain kinds of sentences. It works as a therapeutic book: she says ‘I’m going to calm myself down now by writing this in the book’. And it is a commentary on work in progress: she tells you the first thought she has of To the Lighthouse , or Mrs Dalloway .

Just to give you an example, there are a couple of pages, over four days in October 1922, where she moves from a visit from ‘Tom Eliot’, as she calls him—who she thinks may be wearing lipstick, and is somewhat overbearing and threatening to her, but is someone in whom she is much interested—to anxiety because her novel,  Jacob’s Room, is about to come out, and then to a sense of great pleasure or freedom. She says: ‘At last, I like reading my own writing. . . . I have done my task here better than I expected’. She’s pleased for Jacob’s Room . ‘At forty I am beginning to learn the mechanism of my own brain—how to get the greatest amount of pleasure and work out of it. The secret is I think always so to contrive that work is pleasant’. Then somebody dies—an acquaintance called Kitty Maxse—and there’s a whole page on that, which has interrupted her train of thought. If you have read Mrs Dalloway , you can see that that death is somehow going to make its way into that novel. And then she jumps onto the fact that Jacob’s Room is coming out. She says to herself: ‘My sensations?—they remain calm’. It’s as if she’s telling herself: stay calm; how am I feeling? She’s monitoring herself in the diaries, taking her own temperature with a thermometer. Then she says she’s writing a chapter about Greek literature: ‘I must get on with my reading for the Greek literature’. She is reading ‘some Sophocles & Euripides & a Plato dialogue: also the lives of Bentley & Jebb’. All that is happening in two pages. Death, life, reading, publication, self-monitoring. Amazing.

If we are coming to the diaries for the first time, is this quite a good way of approaching them—just dipping in?

There are lots of different ways of doing it. If you want to start reading a particular Virginia Woolf book, say To the Lighthouse , what you can do is go to the index for the diaries, and look up To the Lighthouse . There’s a good index for the diaries in the five-volume edition. You can read all the entries of how she first thinks of the novel, how she’s working on it. You can read the diaries as a sourcebook for the writing. Or if you’re interested in how she reacts to, say, a visit to Thomas Hardy , you look up ‘Thomas Hardy’. Or you can just dip in. You can go to them for lots of different things. But you never go to them without feeling that you know this person, and that this voice is vividly coming at you off the page. We’re so privileged to have this. Thank god her husband Leonard didn’t do what she asked him to do, in the note that she left him when she went to drown herself, which was to destroy all her papers.

June 17, 2016

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Hermione Lee

Professor Dame Hermione Lee is a biographer and literary critic. Her biography of Virginia Woolf won the British Academy Rose Mary Crawshay prize, and was named as one of the New York Times Book Review’s best books of 1997. She has also written biographies of Willa Cather, Edith Wharton, and Penelope Fitzgerald, and critical studies on Elizabeth Bowen and Philip Roth. She is President of Wolfson College, Oxford.

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The Best Virginia Woolf Books

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

Virginia Woolf wrote just nine novels, but she also left a number of volumes of non-fiction, an important volume of short stories, and an unusual work of biography, among countless essays and reviews. But what are Woolf’s best books?

We’ve compiled our favourite top-ten list of Virginia Woolf’s books, with some interesting facts about each of them. What’s your personal recommendation for the best Virginia Woolf book?

Disclaimer: as an Amazon Associate, we get commissions for purchases made through links in this post.

10. The Years (1937).

Woolf’s most popular novel during her lifetime,  The Years spans over half a century from 1880 to the 1930s, chronicling the lives of one family, the Pargiters.The novel adapts an idea she had explored in several of her previous novels, notably  Mrs Dalloway and the first section of To the Lighthouse (see below) – namely, the depiction of one day in the lives of the characters.

Here, each section (which focuses on a particular year during the novel’s 50-year span) centres on just one day in that year.

9. Flush: A Biography (1933).

Not strictly a novel, this ‘biography’ is – like Woolf’s other great ‘biography’,  Orlando (see below) – not really non-fiction either. However, its subject is, or was, real: Victorian poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning ‘s pet dog.

The cocker spaniel, Flush, is acquired by Barrett Browning and taken from the countryside to London, where he lives among the London literati before travelling out with the Brownings to Italy.

8. Between the Acts (1941).

Woolf’s ninth and final novel,  Between the Acts was published shortly after her suicide in 1941. Like Orlando it engages with centuries of English history (particularly literary history), in this instance in the form of a pageant play which is being put on in a small English village. Like the more famous  Mrs Dalloway , the action of the novel takes place on a single day.

7. A Room of One’s Own (1929).

Based on several lectures Woolf delivered at the University of Cambridge, A Room of One’s Own  is seen as a feminist literary tract. Woolf argues that great writers are ‘androgynous’ in the sense that they contain both masculine and feminine impulses and sympathies.

She also discusses how, if Shakespeare had had a sister of equal talents, ‘Judith’ Shakespeare (as Woolf chooses to call this fictional sibling) would never have made it as a poet and playwright during the Elizabethan era, because she would not have had the opportunities in terms of schooling and stage-acting that her brother enjoyed.

Woolf later published a sequel to this work,  Three Guineas  (1938) – the idea for which supposedly came to her while she was lying musing in the bath.

6. Monday or Tuesday (1921).

Woolf’s landmark collection of short stories which marked a watershed in her creative development. After two rather conventional novels,  The Voyage Out (1915) and  Night and Day  (1919), Woolf began to experiment with short ‘stories’ or sketches as a way of trying out her new impressionistic mode of writing.

The result was a handful of classic vignettes – some of them little more than a page long – such as ‘The Mark on the Wall’, ‘Kew Gardens’, and ‘A Haunted House’ (a two-page take on the ghost story).

5. Jacob’s Room (1922).

After the critical success of her short stories in  Monday or Tuesday , Woolf wrote her third novel,  Jacob’s Room , to see if she could translate such an impressionistic style to the big canvas. Although a summary of the plot of Jacob’s Room  makes the novel sound quite conventional – it follows the early life of a young man, Jacob Flanders, from childhood to maturity – the  way  that she goes about telling Jacob’s life is pure Woolf.

We never gain a great insight into Jacob’s character, instead having to make do with glimpses of the man caught by other people, fleeting impressions of him in the train or at the next table in the restaurant. We won’t give away the ending here.

4. The Waves (1931).

Perhaps the most lyrical and poetic of all Woolf’s novels,  The Waves  was originally titled ‘The Moths’ and comprises six monologues or ‘voices’, which are loosely linked together by a more conventional narrator-figure who describes the course of the day (yes, one day again) from sunrise to sunset.

In a letter of November 1928, Woolf referred to the book as ‘an abstract mystical eyeless book: a playpoem’, rather than a novel.

3. Orlando (1928).

Subtitled ‘A Biography’, this novel is a sort of fantasy version of several centuries of British history, through which the titular Orlando – a gender-switching bohemian figure – joyously moves. In part a tongue-in-cheek fantasy ‘biography’ of Woolf’s friend Vita Sackville-West, in part a response to English literary history, it’s one of Woolf’s most inventive novels.

2. To the Lighthouse (1927).

Divided into three sections – perhaps in ironic homage to the classic Victorian ‘triple-decker’ novel – To the Lighthouse , Woolf’s fifth novel , focuses on the Ramsay family and their holiday on the Isle of Skye in the early twentieth century.

However, Woolf is drawing on memories of her own childhood holidays in the 1890s; the patriarch of the novel, Mr Ramsay, is reminiscent of Woolf’s own father, the Victorian man of letters Sir Leslie Stephen. Staying with the Ramsays are various other characters including the female artist Lily Briscoe, who in many ways is Woolf’s artistic stand-in in the novel.

1. Mrs Dalloway (1925).

As we reveal in our post on this novel , the character of Clarissa Dalloway made her debut in print in Woolf’s first novel,  The Voyage Out  (1915). But ten years later Woolf would return to the character for this, her fourth – and, for our money, greatest – novel.

Set over the course of one day in June 1923, the novel cleverly and poetically interfuses a number of different consciousnesses, including the title character, her old flame Peter Walsh, and the WWI veteran and shell-shock sufferer Septimus Smith. We include  Mrs Dalloway  in our pick of the 8 works of modernist literature everyone should read .

If you enjoyed this list of the best Virginia Woolf books, you might enjoy our interesting facts about her  and our pick of the best Joseph Conrad novels .

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7 thoughts on “The Best Virginia Woolf Books”

You’ve made me want to re-read the books I’ve already read, and start on the others!

Reblogged this on My Outlook Adventure .

I’ve never really been interested in reading any Virginia Woolf, but now I am! Thank you :)

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‘It Had a Lifelong Effect on Her.’ A New Virginia Woolf Biography Deals With the Author’s Experience of Childhood Sexual Abuse

T he English author Virginia Woolf is one of the 20th century’s literary giants, renowned for the pioneering stream-of-consciousness style she immortalized in novels like To the Lighthouse and Mrs. Dalloway — but her fame has never been solely based on her work, as her personal life has long been the subject of fascination. Her involvement in the influential intellectual circle known as the Bloomsbury Group brought her attention, and her 1929 essay A Room of One’s Own did the same for her feminist ideas.

In her death, interest in the woman behind the books continued. After a lifelong struggle with her mental health, including periods of severe depression and suicide attempts, Woolf died in 1941 by drowning herself near her house in Sussex, England, at the age of 59. As TIME noted in her obituary , she left behind a body of work that was complex and lyrical. “To some readers [her books] didn’t always make sense,” the piece noted, “but they made her name and parts of them almost made music.”

To biographer Gillian Gill, it’s important to note another part of the Virginia Woolf story: her experience of sexual abuse during her childhood and as a young woman. In Gill’s recent book Virginia Woolf and the Women Who Shaped Her World , she highlights Woolf’s identity not only as a literary titan and a woman shaped by her female relationships , but also as a survivor of traumatic abuse at the hands of her half-brothers and later — not coincidentally — as an advocate for protecting children vulnerable to similar experiences.

“This [sexual abuse] is a subject of enormous controversy in Virginia Woolf literature,” Gill says. “By her own account, it had a lifelong effect on her and we see this when she’s in her 40s and she writes about it in her memoirs in 1939.”

During her lifetime, Woolf publicly stated — in her 1939 memoirs as well as a 1920 speech at the Bloomsbury Memoir Club — that, when she was a child, her genitals had been fondled by her half-brother Gerald Duckworth, and that, after the death of her father in 1904, both Woolf and her sister Vanessa Bell had been abused over a period of five years by their other older half-brother, George . The Duckworth brothers were the sons of Virginia Woolf’s mother, Julia Jackson, from her first marriage. Per the account of her nephew and biographer Quentin Bell, Woolf’s statements were met with some skepticism. Some biographers suggested that Woolf fantasized the abuse, and attributed her claims to her supposed “madness.” Bell wrote that several people had attempted to persuade him “that these ugly stories were untrue, that they were phantoms of Virginia Woolf’s wild imagination, delusions conceived during periods of nervous breakdown. ”

Others like Gill, especially more recently, have suggested the opposite, that Woolf’s lifelong struggles with mental health were at least in part a result of the abuse perpetrated by the Duckworth brothers. Though many Woolf scholars today don’t question whether the abuse happened (in fact, much research in recent years has focused on this part of her life, among literature and psychology experts alike) disagreement persists about its effect on the rest of her life. Gill — building on the work of scholars like Louise DeSalvo, author of the 1989 book Virginia Woolf: The Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse on Her Life and Work — holds that it’s impossible to understand Woolf without acknowledging the abuse.

“The incident where a child Virginia is placed on a table and has her knickers opened, that’s brushed off as being trivial. But what she says is that it wasn’t trivial for her,” says Gill. “What we have learnt now, as we hear more and more about what the effect of sexual abuse has, is that even a single incident can scar a girl or a boy. It’s something that they carry with them, and that molds them in unfortunate ways.”

From Gill’s reading of Woolf’s life, “as a great writer, as a great novelist, as a great understander of human relations,” the trauma she experienced would fuel her advocacy for children, and lead her to form a close and caring relationship with her sister Vanessa’s children. Their father, the author Clive Bell, was also part of the Bloomsbury Group; during her research, Gill came across suggestive postcards he had been sent, framing children as an object of sexual attraction. Gill argues that Virginia always “distrusted and disliked” Bell. “As I read more and more about the Bloomsbury group, I get more and more disturbed by aspects of it,” she says, “and I see Virginia as standing in opposition to so much of that.”

In some ways, this bond between Woolf and her nephews and niece paralleled other relationships that she had experienced earlier on in her life. “For some time I’ve been interested in mother-daughter and sister-sister relationships,” says Gill. “Mothering is not just biological, it can be adoptive.” Indeed, much of Virginia Woolf and the Women Who Shaped Her World is focused on the women of the Victorian era who were key influences in Woolf’s early life, like Anne Thackeray Ritchie, daughter of Vanity Fair author William Makepeace Thackeray, acted as a surrogate aunt, and her own career as a writer made an impression on a young Virginia, who was frustrated by the opportunities her brothers had that she did not due to her gender.

Gill sees Woolf’s public revelations in her later life as her way of speaking therapeutically about the abuse — and argues that, in doing so, she helped many people deal with the issues she faced.

When Woolf addressed an audience of friends and colleagues with an autobiographical speech in 1920 and even when she collated her memoirs about two decades later, it was a “remarkably early” moment in history, Gill says, for a woman like her to give witness to sexual abuse within the family. Attitudes at this time , which are still pervasive today, tended to characterize child abuse as something perpetrated by “strangers” outside the family, with victim-shaming and blaming often accompanying these views. “This is one of the things Virginia says: Abuse is within families, it’s not the unknown predator from outside who snatches children from the streets. It’s the uncle, it’s the brother, this is the dark side of family life,” says Gill.

As late as the 1950s and 1960s, discourse surrounding child sexual abuse referred to its apparent minimal impacts on children , and some narratives attempted to portray incest as not harmful. For Gill, Woolf’s efforts to speak up about her own case set an example, and is still relevant today.

“It indicates to me that if you’re able to talk about it, you’ve made a stride, you’ve moved forward, you’re no longer a victim, you’re a survivor, you’re a protester,” Gill says. “This is such a complicated subject, but it seems to me that we’re making progress here, in a very dark area of human life. And listening is the least we can do.”

If you or someone you know may be contemplating suicide, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-273-8255 or text HOME to 741741 to reach the Crisis Text Line. In emergencies, call 911 or seek care from a local hospital or mental-health provider.

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Beholding Virginia Woolf Through the Women in Her Life

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By Claire Jarvis

• Dec. 20, 2019

VIRGINIA WOOLF And the Women Who Shaped Her World By Gillian Gill

You would be hard pressed to find a writer from the 20th century more admiringly cited than Virginia Woolf. Her potent, evocative fiction still impresses itself on new readers; her essays give clear and vivid insight into a writer’s mind at work. There are, of course, a lot of biographies of Woolf, the most monumental perhaps being Hermione Lee’s “Virginia Woolf” (1996), and Woolf’s autobiographical writings (collected, in part, in “Moments of Being” and “A Writer’s Diary”) are also powerful resources for her readers. She is, weirdly, everywhere and nowhere. There is hardly a novelist, woman or not, more central to our understanding of modernism, women’s writing or literary fiction. Joyce is a byword for difficulty and obscurity, Lawrence for weedy crypto-fascism and misogyny, but Woolf’s work, while densely lyrical and complex, has such apparent availability that it prompts near universal adoration in critics, writers, students and book clubs.

Gillian Gill’s new biography of Woolf, “Virginia Woolf: And the Women Who Shaped Her World,” takes as its organizing principle Woolf’s relationships, familial and otherwise, with women, placing special emphasis on the writer’s connections to intellectually and literarily ambitious female figures of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Instead of progressing chronologically through Woolf’s life, Gill, who has also written biographies of Victoria and Albert and of Florence Nightingale, traces female influences across clusters of her interlocutors. She considers what Woolf called “Pattledom,” the family of her formidable Anglo-Indian forebears on her mother’s side, separately from the family of Minny Thackeray, her father’s first wife. The aim seems to be to investigate various women’s impact on Woolf’s life from broad quarters, but the effect is to disrupt the chronological logic of biographical coherence. In chapters on Woolf’s years in Hyde Park Gate and Bloomsbury, for instance, Gill must rehearse the circumstances of Woolf’s brother Thoby Stephen’s death, despite having detailed it in an earlier section as well. No doubt this circling around Thoby’s death and other traumas in Virginia’s extended family (both her parents had been previously married and had children by their former spouses) is intended to underscore the immense intellectual and psychic pressure that death produced on the sensitive Virginia, but it does complicate the reader’s sense of events as they unfolded in her life.

Despite this, Gill’s chatty, often conspiratorial tone helps mitigate some of the anguished hand-wringing that often accompanies discussions of Woolf’s life. After all, she isn’t only one of literature’s most famous suicides; she also suffered extreme mental illness, horrible, and early, familial loss; her half brothers’ incestuous advances; and deep sexual and literary frustration. Gill brings to this potentially grim picture an ear for the playful undercurrent — a sense of the world’s splendid possibility — that also ran through Woolf’s life, countering much of the darkness. While she does not downplay the writer’s difficulties, Gill’s portrait shows Woolf’s character to have been complicated not just by difficulty but by pleasure, too. Pleasure is a challenge for a literary biographer: Pain reads much better as a block to creative expression, but happiness and comfort can be just as destructive to the work ethic.

Woolf’s own cruelties and limitations are also discussed in some detail, particularly her impatience with her mentally disabled half sister, Laura Stephen, her father’s daughter from his first marriage. In Gill’s account, Woolf’s distaste for Laura seems to have been a byproduct of her mother Julia’s irritation with the girl’s needs. Laura’s intellectual challenges were made infinitely worse by Julia’s isolating severity, and Woolf’s inability to perceive this is a failing. Gill presses further on Laura’s problems, suggesting that she, too, was a victim of her half brothers’ sexual aggression in her youth. Woolf’s own writing on the abuse she suffered at the hands of those half brothers makes this speculation, sadly, all too likely to be true.

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Virginia Woolf

(1882-1941)

Who Was Virginia Woolf?

Born into a privileged English household in 1882, author Virginia Woolf was raised by free-thinking parents. She began writing as a young girl and published her first novel, The Voyage Out , in 1915. She wrote modernist classics including Mrs. Dallowa y, To the Lighthouse and Orlando , as well as pioneering feminist works, A Room of One's Own and Three Guineas . In her personal life, she suffered bouts of deep depression. She committed suicide in 1941, at the age of 59.

Born on January 25, 1882, Adeline Virginia Stephen was raised in a remarkable household. Her father, Sir Leslie Stephen, was a historian and author, as well as one of the most prominent figures in the golden age of mountaineering. Woolf’s mother, Julia Prinsep Stephen (née Jackson), had been born in India and later served as a model for several Pre-Raphaelite painters. She was also a nurse and wrote a book on the profession. Both of her parents had been married and widowed before marrying each other. Woolf had three full siblings — Thoby, Vanessa and Adrian — and four half-siblings — Laura Makepeace Stephen and George, Gerald and Stella Duckworth. The eight children lived under one roof at 22 Hyde Park Gate, Kensington.

Two of Woolf’s brothers had been educated at Cambridge, but all the girls were taught at home and utilized the splendid confines of the family’s lush Victorian library. Moreover, Woolf’s parents were extremely well connected, both socially and artistically. Her father was a friend to William Thackeray, the father of his first wife who died unexpectedly, and George Henry Lewes, as well as many other noted thinkers. Her mother’s aunt was the famous 19th century photographer Julia Margaret Cameron. 

From the time of her birth until 1895, Woolf spent her summers in St. Ives, a beach town at the very southwestern tip of England. The Stephens’ summer home, Talland House, which is still standing today, looks out at the dramatic Porthminster Bay and has a view of the Godrevy Lighthouse, which inspired her writing. In her later memoirs, Woolf recalled St. Ives with a great fondness. In fact, she incorporated scenes from those early summers into her modernist novel, To the Lighthouse (1927).

As a young girl, Virginia was curious, light-hearted and playful. She started a family newspaper, the Hyde Park Gate News , to document her family’s humorous anecdotes. However, early traumas darkened her childhood, including being sexually abused by her half-brothers George and Gerald Duckworth, which she wrote about in her essays  A Sketch of the Past and 22 Hyde Park Gate . In 1895, at the age of 13, she also had to cope with the sudden death of her mother from rheumatic fever, which led to her first mental breakdown, and the loss of her half-sister Stella, who had become the head of the household, two years later. 

While dealing with her personal losses, Woolf continued her studies in German, Greek and Latin at the Ladies’ Department of King’s College London. Her four years of study introduced her to a handful of radical feminists at the helm of educational reforms. In 1904, her father died from stomach cancer, which contributed to another emotional setback that led to Woolf being institutionalized for a brief period. Virginia Woolf’s dance between literary expression and personal desolation would continue for the rest of her life. In 1905, she began writing professionally as a contributor for The Times Literary Supplement . A year later, Woolf's 26-year-old brother Thoby died from typhoid fever after a family trip to Greece. 

After their father's death, Woolf's sister Vanessa and brother Adrian sold the family home in Hyde Park Gate, and purchased a house in the Bloomsbury area of London. During this period, Virginia met several members of the Bloomsbury Group, a circle of intellectuals and artists including the art critic Clive Bell, who married Virginia's sister Vanessa, the novelist E.M. Forster, the painter Duncan Grant, the biographer Lytton Strachey, economist John Maynard Keynes and essayist Leonard Woolf, among others. The group became famous in 1910 for the Dreadnought Hoax, a practical joke in which members of the group dressed up as a delegation of Ethiopian royals, including Virginia disguised as a bearded man, and successfully persuaded the English Royal Navy to show them their warship, the HMS Dreadnought . After the outrageous act, Leonard Woolf and Virginia became closer, and eventually they were married on August 10, 1912. The two shared a passionate love for one another for the rest of their lives.

Literary Work

Several years before marrying Leonard, Virginia had begun working on her first novel. The original title was Melymbrosia . After nine years and innumerable drafts, it was released in 1915 as The Voyage Out. Woolf used the book to experiment with several literary tools, including compelling and unusual narrative perspectives, dream-states and free association prose. Two years later, the Woolfs bought a used printing press and established Hogarth Press, their own publishing house operated out of their home, Hogarth House. Virginia and Leonard published some of their writing, as well as the work of Sigmund Freud, Katharine Mansfield and T.S. Eliot. 

A year after the end of World War I, the Woolfs purchased Monk's House, a cottage in the village of Rodmell in 1919, and that same year Virginia published Night and Day , a novel set in Edwardian England. Her third novel  Jacob's Room  was published by Hogarth in 1922. Based on her brother Thoby, it was considered a significant departure from her earlier novels with its modernist elements. That year, she met author, poet and landscape gardener Vita Sackville-West, the wife of English diplomat Harold Nicolson. Virginia and Vita began a friendship that developed into a romantic affair. Although their affair eventually ended, they remained friends until Virginia Woolf's death.

In 1925, Woolf received rave reviews for  Mrs. Dalloway , her fourth novel. The mesmerizing story interweaved interior monologues and raised issues of feminism, mental illness and homosexuality in post-World War I England. Mrs. Dalloway was adapted into a 1997 film, starring Vanessa Redgrave, and inspired The Hours , a 1998 novel by Michael Cunningham and a 2002 film adaptation. Her 1928 novel, To the Lighthouse , was another critical success and considered revolutionary for its stream of consciousness storytelling.The modernist classic examines the subtext of human relationships through the lives of the Ramsay family as they vacation on the Isle of Skye in Scotland. 

Woolf found a literary muse in Sackville-West, the inspiration for Woolf's 1928 novel Orlando , which follows an English nobleman who mysteriously becomes a woman at the age of 30 and lives on for over three centuries of English history. The novel was a breakthrough for Woolf who received critical praise for the groundbreaking work, as well as a newfound level of popularity.

In 1929, Woolf published A Room of One's Own , a feminist essay based on lectures she had given at women's colleges, in which she examines women's role in literature. In the work, she sets forth the idea that “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” Woolf pushed narrative boundaries in her next work, The Waves (1931), which she described as "a play-poem" written in the voices of six different characters. Woolf published  The Years , the final novel published in her lifetime in 1937, about a family's history over the course of a generation. The following year she published Three Guineas , an essay which continued the feminist themes of A Room of One's Own and addressed fascism and war.

Throughout her career, Woolf spoke regularly at colleges and universities, penned dramatic letters, wrote moving essays and self-published a long list of short stories. By her mid-forties, she had established herself as an intellectual, an innovative and influential writer and pioneering feminist. Her ability to balance dream-like scenes with deeply tense plot lines earned her incredible respect from peers and the public alike. Despite her outward success, she continued to regularly suffer from debilitating bouts of depression and dramatic mood swings.

Suicide and Legacy

Woolf's husband, Leonard, always by her side, was quite aware of any signs that pointed to his wife’s descent into depression. He saw, as she was working on what would be her final manuscript, Between the Acts  (published posthumously in 1941),that she was sinking into deepening despair. At the time, World War II was raging on and the couple decided if England was invaded by Germany, they would commit suicide together, fearing that Leonard, who was Jewish, would be in particular danger. In 1940, the couple’s London home was destroyed during the Blitz, the Germans bombing of the city. 

Unable to cope with her despair, Woolf pulled on her overcoat, filled its pockets with stones and walked into the River Ouse on March 28, 1941. As she waded into the water, the stream took her with it. The authorities found her body three weeks later. Leonard Woolf had her cremated and her remains were scattered at their home, Monk's House.

Although her popularity decreased after World War II, Woolf's work resonated again with a new generation of readers during the feminist movement of the 1970s. Woolf remains one of the most influential authors of the 21st century.

QUICK FACTS

• Name: Virginia Woolf
• Birth Year: 1882
• Birth date: January 25, 1882
• Birth City: Kensington, London, England
• Birth Country: United Kingdom
• Gender: Female
• Best Known For: English author Virginia Woolf wrote modernist classics including 'Mrs. Dalloway' and 'To the Lighthouse,' as well as pioneering feminist texts, 'A Room of One's Own' and 'Three Guineas.'
• Fiction and Poetry
• Journalism and Nonfiction
• Astrological Sign: Aquarius
• Death Year: 1941
• Death date: March 28, 1941
• Death City: Near Lewes, East Sussex, England
• Death Country: United Kingdom

CITATION INFORMATION

• Article Title: Virginia Woolf Biography
• Author: Biography.com Editors
• Website Name: The Biography.com website
• Url: https://www.biography.com/authors-writers/virginia-woolf
• Access Date:
• Publisher: A&E; Television Networks
• Last Updated: September 12, 2022
• Original Published Date: April 2, 2014
• I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.
• One of the signs of passing youth is the birth of a sense of fellowship with other human beings as we take our place among them.

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Virginia Woolf

AUTHORS (1882–1941); LONDON, ENGLAND

Best known for her highly imaginative and nonlinear novels like Mrs. Dalloway , Orlando , and  To the Lighthouse —and also perhaps because her name was borrowed for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? , Edward Albee's Tony Award-winning play (which was also nominated for a Pulitzer Prize)—writer Virginia Woolf lived her life as unabashedly as many of the characters in her novels. Find out what books she wrote, what quotes she said, and how she ultimately succumbed to a lifelong battle with mental illness.

1. Virginia Woolf's books rarely stuck to the status quo.

Author Virginia Woolf was born in London in 1882 and helped pioneer modern literature and feminist theory by refusing to adhere to the status quo on just about anything. Not only does she break the normal linear narrative structure in novels like Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse , but she also often presents complex characters who struggle to escape the confines of certain societal expectations of them—especially women.

2. Virginia Woolf’s novel The Waves is a prime example of her unconventional style of writing.

Though technically a novel, Virginia Woolf called The Waves a “play-poem”—and for good reason. It’s told from the perspectives of six different characters, but it doesn’t switch perspectives between chapters or otherwise relatively long segments. Instead, each character narrates their version of whatever’s happening (and their reaction to whatever’s happening) in quick succession, resulting in a piecemeal portrait of a very ambiguous plot. Their narration is punctuated with lyrical descriptions of the sea and sky, making it seem like a play at times, and a poem at others.

3. Virginia Woolf’s book Orlando: A Biography is based on her lover, Vita Sackville-West.

Orlando , a sweeping story that spans more than 400 years in the life of the slowly aging protagonist, is actually a novel, not a biography—though it is heavily inspired by Woolf’s female lover, the writer Vita Sackville-West, who sometimes dressed as a man and went by the name “Julian.”

“A biography beginning in the year 1500 and continuing to the present day, called Orlando . Vita; only with a change about from one sex to the other,” Woolf  wrote of the book in her diary. In the book, the main character, Orlando, begins the story as a man and ends it as a woman.

4. Virginia Woolf’s essay "A Room of One’s Own" imagines the life of a fictional sister of William Shakespeare.

At one point in "A Room of One’s Own," an extended essay based on two lectures Woolf gave at university literary societies in 1928, the author creates a character named Judith Shakespeare, who was “as adventurous, as imaginative, as agog to see the world” as her brother, William. However, while William gets to further his education and live up to his potential, Judith must stay at home and eventually marry for convenience. Interestingly enough, William Shakespeare did have a sister who lived into adulthood, but her name was Joan.

5. Virginia Woolf’s death by suicide was the result of a lifelong battle with mental illness.

In 1941, at 59 years old, Woolf filled her pockets with rocks and drowned herself in a river. She had lived through sexual abuse, both her parents’ premature deaths, nervous breakdowns, manic depression, hallucinations, and several suicide attempts.

“I feel certain I am going mad again. I feel we can’t go through another of those terrible times,” Woolf wrote in a heartbreaking suicide note to her husband, Leonard. “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 any longer.”

6. The author of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? got the inspiration for its title from graffiti in a bar bathroom.

In the early 1950s, playwright Edward Albee saw the question "Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" written in soap on the bathroom mirror of a Greenwich Village bar. Later, while writing the now-famous play , he recalled the phrase, thinking it a fitting pun on the song “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?” from Disney’s 1933 film The Three Little Pigs . In a 1966 interview with The Paris Review , Albee explained that it was meant as a “typical university, intellectual joke” about being afraid of “living life without false illusions.” In other words, it’s not actually about being afraid of Virginia Woolf herself, but of the authentic, unabashed life she championed in her life and works.

Famous Virginia Woolf Books

• The Voyage Out (1915)
• Night and Day (1919)
• Jacob’s Room (1922)
• Mrs. Dalloway (1925)
• To the Lighthouse (1927)
• Orlando: A Biography (1928)
• A Room of One’s Own (1929)
• The Waves (1931)
• Flush: A Biography (1933)
• The Years (1937)
• Roger Fry: A Biography (1940)
• Between the Acts (1941)

Famous Virginia Woolf Quotes

• “If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.”
• “When you consider things like the stars, our affairs don’t seem to matter very much, do they?”
• “Words do not live in dictionaries, they live in the mind.”
• “Humor is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue.”
• “Time, unfortunately, though it makes animals and vegetables bloom and fade with amazing punctuality, has no such simple effect upon the mind of man.”
• “One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.”
• “Nothing has really happened until it has been described.”
• “So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say.”
• “Fiction is like a spider’s web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners.”

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Virginia Woolf: A Biography Paperback – March 20, 1974

• Print length 576 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Mariner Books
• Publication date March 20, 1974
• Dimensions 5.25 x 1.44 x 8 inches
• ISBN-10 0156935805
• ISBN-13 978-0156935807
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Editorial Reviews

PRAISE FOR VIRGINIA WOOLF "An intelligent and well-researched new biography...[O]ffers astute insights into both Woolf and her work." — The New York Times Book Review "Briggs pulls together a high-wire act; biographer and subject seem to commingle on the page, the result being a joint effort of imaginative force." — The Atlanta Journal-Constitution —

About the Author

Product details.

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Mariner Books (March 20, 1974)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 576 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0156935805
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0156935807
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.3 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.25 x 1.44 x 8 inches
• #860 in Women Writers in Women Studies
• #9,402 in Author Biographies
• #19,150 in Women's Biographies

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Virginia Woolf Best Books 📚

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Virginia Woolf is best known for her masterpiece, ‘To the Lighthouse’ in which she employs the stream-of-consciousness style to examine and critique the lives of the Ramsays.

Article written by Charles Asoluka

Degree in Computer Engineering. Passed TOEFL Exam. Seasoned literary critic.

One of the more significant novelists of the 20th century is thought to be Virginia Woolf. Along with modernists like Marcel Proust , Dorothy Richardson, and James Joyce , she was a pioneer of the use of stream of consciousness as a literary device. She is best known for her books like ‘Mrs. Dalloway’ (1925) , ‘To the Lighthouse’ (1927), and ‘Orlando’ (1928).

Woolf was also outspoken on a variety of hot-button issues, some of which are now viewed as progressive and others as reactionary. She was a fierce feminist in an era when women’s rights were hardly acknowledged and when chauvinism was in vogue, she was also anti-colonialist, anti-imperialist, and pacifist.

Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf’s 1925 novel ‘Mrs. Dalloway’ describes a day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, a fictitious upper-class woman living in post-First World War England. It is among Woolf’s most well-known books. Two short tales, “Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street” and the unfinished “The Prime Minister,” served as the basis for the novel. The evening’s party, as well as Clarissa’s preparations for it, are both covered in the book. Simple actions are taken by the title character, Clarissa Dalloway: she buys some flowers, strolls around a park, receives a visit from an old acquaintance, and throws a party. She converses with a man who formerly harbored feelings for her and still thinks she found peace by wedding her politician husband. She converses with a female acquaintance who she formerly had feelings for. She then learns of a wretched lost soul who threw himself from a doctor’s window onto a row of railings in the book’s last pages. The narrative moves backward and forwards in time from an internal viewpoint to create a picture of Clarissa’s life and the interwar social order. Through several interconnected anecdotes, the book discusses how time functions in personal experience.

It is an illustration of stream-of-consciousness storytelling because each scene closely follows a certain character’s fleeting ideas. Throughout the entire book, Woolf blurs the line between direct and indirect speech, freely switching between omniscient description, indirect interior monologue, and soliloquy. Woolf’s use of a stream-of-consciousness style offers readers access to the characters’ thoughts and emotions. Additionally, she adds a depth of psychological reality that Victorian novels were unable to. The mundane is seen in a new light as psychological processes are revealed in her work, memories vie for attention, thoughts pop into one’s head out of the blue, and the profoundly momentous and the insignificant are given equal weight. Woolf’s prose is incredibly poetic as well. She possesses a unique talent for making the typical ebb and flow of the mind sing.

To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

Mrs. Ramsay, a wife, mother of eight children, and hostess to the guests who fill the holiday home in the Hebrides where an expedition to the lighthouse may or may not happen are at the center of this world in the novel ‘To the Lighthouse’ , which is a portrait of a family’s vacation in the years before and after World War I. ‘To the Lighthouse’ is filled with Mrs. Ramsay’s spirit, which is no small effort given the circumstances. The Window, Time Passes, and The Lighthouse are the three divisions of ‘To the Lighthouse’ . The Ramsays have several friends and coworkers join them for their family holiday, which is depicted in the first portion as having conflicts. Section one is focused on a planned trip to the legendary lighthouse.

Early in the first section, we also get to know the painter Lily Briscoe. She is trying to create a painting of Mrs. Ramsay and James, but she is dubious of her abilities as an artist after Charles Tansley says that women are unable to write or paint. This thought will recur in Lily’s mind—or perhaps, say Virginia’s mind—for the rest of her life.

Woolf employs her method of many views and stream of consciousness once more. This makes reading To The Lighthouse feel like living in the pages, giving the reader a very personal experience.

The main theme of this book is human contact, which is also one of its most depressing messages. Although these individuals interact frequently and are constantly scrutinized by one another, they will never be able to fully comprehend one another. “She wouldn’t have met him.” He’d never meet her. She reasoned that all human relationships were like that, with male and female relationships being the worst. They all make an effort to leave their impressions on one another, but in the end, they are only left with their viewpoints and opinions about the others rather than a shared understanding of what drives their modern counterparts’ behavior and who they truly are on the inside.

With its numerous unique themes, ‘To the Lighthouse’ is an engrossing, engaging, and thought-provoking book that inspires unending study and reflection.

Orlando by Virginia Woolf

This book was particularly written by Woolf for her close “friend” and fellow author Vita Sackville-West, not for her readers. Because of this, Woolf writes in a way that is out of character for her; it is not at all serious and instead assumes the shape of a literary ode, paying respect to reading and writing.

Orlando, a young man from the Elizabethan era who is going to transform, is the protagonist of the first chapter. Orlando, a female writer from the 20th century, also appears toward the story’s conclusion. The entire book is a fictionalized account of Vita Sackville-West’s prior life as Orlando, which she is said to have led before she met Virginia Woolf.

Orlando’s heart was broken when he was very young, and it is now irreparably damaged as a result of being abandoned and left in ruins. Life must continue. He utilizes books and writing as tools to escape the horrors of reality and finds comfort in doing so. He starts with poetry, giving his self-pitying and woe-spawned ideas a suitable outlet. By honing his craft, he aspires to achieve recognition and celebrity. If he fails, if the idealized writer fails, suicidal and inferiority complexes start to follow him. And as such, he attempts to push forward. Indeed, that much so that he goes into womanhood.

‘Orlando’ is a satirical and bizarre read that continues to confound and befuddle readers to this day. Nonetheless, Woolf attempted to employ modernist styles to critique society and, as such, garnered rave reviews from critics.

What is a noteworthy aspect of Virginia Woolf’s ‘Mrs. Dalloway’ ?

Woolf’s literature is notable for its in-depth treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder. Even though documenting symptoms were prevalent in the 1940s when World War II veterans were being treated for “mental disorders,” the fact that Woolf goes into this subject as early as 1925 is very profound considering that PTSD was not officially acknowledged until the 1970s.

Was Virginia Woolf’s ‘Mrs. Dalloway’ a homage to James Joyce’s Ulysses ?

‘Mrs. Dalloway’ is frequently regarded as a response to James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’ , which is frequently cited as one of the greatest novels of the 20th century. However, Virginia Woolf denied any deliberate “method” to the book, writing in 1928 that the structure came about “without any conscious direction.”

Is ‘To the Lighthouse’ by Virginia Woolf autobiographical?

‘To the Lighthouse’ , many critics opine,  can be viewed as autobiographical in the same way James Joyce’s ‘Portrait of the Artist as a Young man’ is autobiographical. Virginia permeates ‘To the Lighthouse’ even though she isn’t there in any literal sense. Mr. and Mrs. Ramsey are representations of her parents. Although Lily Briscoe isn’t their daughter, Virginia Woolf’s transformation from a restrained Victorian girl to an inventive Edwardian lady is essentially what we read about Lily.

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Virginia Woolf Biography

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(1882-1941) British writer. Virginia Woolf became one of the most prominent literary figures of the early 20th century, with novels like Mrs. Dalloway (1925), Jacob's Room (1922), To the Lighthouse (1927), and The Waves (1931).

Birth and Early Life

Virginia Woolf was born Adeline Virginia Stephen on January 25, 1882, in London. Woolf was educated at home by her father, Sir Leslie Stephen, the author of the Dictionary of English Biography , and she read extensively. Her mother, Julia Duckworth Stephen, was a nurse, who published a book on nursing. Her mother died in 1895, which was the catalyst for Virginia's first mental breakdown. Virginia's sister, Stella, died in 1897, and her father died in 1904.

Woolf learned early on that it was her fate to be "the daughter of educated men." In a journal entry shortly after her father's death in 1904, she wrote: "His life would have ended mine... No writing, no books; — inconceivable." Luckily, for the literary world, Woolf's conviction would be overcome by her itch to write.

Virginia Woolf's Writing Career

Virginia married Leonard Woolf, a journalist, in 1912. In 1917, she and her husband founded Hogarth Press, which became a successful publishing house, printing the early works of authors such as E.M Forster, Katherine Mansfield, and T.S. Eliot, and introducing the works of Sigmund Freud . Except for the first printing of Woolf's first novel, The Voyage Out (1915), Hogarth Press also published all of her works.

Together, Virginia and Leonard Woolf were a part of the famous Bloomsbury Group, which included E.M. Forster, Duncan Grant, Virginia's sister, Vanessa Bell, Gertrude Stein , James Joyce , Ezra Pound, and T.S. Eliot.

Virginia Woolf wrote several novels which are considered to be modern classics, including Mrs. Dalloway  (1925),  Jacob's Room  (1922),  To the Lighthouse  (1927), and  The Waves  (1931). She also wrote A Room of One's Own (1929), which discusses the creation of literature from a feminist perspective.

Virginia Woolf's Death

From the time of her mother's death in 1895, Woolf suffered from what is now believed to have been bipolar disorder, which is characterized by alternating moods of mania and depression.

Virginia Woolf died on March 28, 1941 near Rodmell, Sussex, England. She left a note for her husband, Leonard, and for her sister, Vanessa. Then, Virginia walked to the River Ouse, put a large stone in her pocket, and drowned herself.

Virginia Woolf's Approach to Literature

Virginia Woolf's works are often closely linked to the development of feminist criticism , but she was also an important writer in the modernist movement. She revolutionized the novel with stream of consciousness , which allowed her to depict the inner lives of her characters in all too intimate detail. In A Room of One's Own Woolf writes, "we think back through our mothers if we are women. It is useless to go to the great men writers for help, however much one may go to them for pleasure."

Virginia Woolf Quotes

"I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman." - A Room of One's Own

"One of the signs of passing youth is the birth of a sense of fellowship with other human beings as we take our place among them." - "Hours in a Library"

"Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself." - Mrs. Dalloway

"It was an uncertain spring. The weather, perpetually changing, sent clouds of blue and purple flying over the land." - The Years

"What is the meaning of life?... a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years. The great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark." - To the Lighthouse

"The extraordinary irrationality of her remark, the folly of women's minds enraged him. He had ridden through the valley of death, been shattered and shivered; and now, she flew in the face of facts..." - To the Lighthouse

"Imaginative work... is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners.... But when the web is pulled askew, hooked up at the edge, torn in the middle, one remembers that these webs are not spun in midair by incorporeal creatures, but are the work of suffering, human beings, and are attached to the grossly material things, like health and money and the houses we live in." - A Room of One's Own

"When...one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even of a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet, of some mute and inglorious Jane Austen, some Emily Brontë who dashed her brains out on the moor or mopped and mowed about the highways crazed with the torture that her gift had put her to. Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman." - A Room of One's Own

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Virginia Woolf: A Biography

Virginia woolf (1882 –1941).

Virginia Woolf was an essayist, literary critic and, above all, a novelist, for which she was best known. She was a central figure in the literary and artistic community known as the Bloomsbury Group, a close-knit group that featured several English artists and writers of the early years of the twentieth century.

What distinguishes Virginia Woolf’s novels is her development of innovative ways in which the limitation of prose can be tested. Her story-telling departed from the conventions which had made fiction stylistically fixed in late Victorian and Edwardian fiction. She abandoned the straightforward narration and used something more like stream-of-conscious prose to focus on the inner lives of her characters.

The 1970s feminist criticism movement focused on her work and gave her credit for inspiring feminism. Her novels have been translated into more than fifty languages. Her life and career have fascinated the literary establishment for a century and have been the subject of plays, films and novels.

Her best-known works include the novels Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), and Orlando (1928). She is also known for her essays. Here are some notes about her top three novels:

• Mrs Dalloway (1925)

Set in post-First World War London, details a day in the life of an upper-class woman, Clarissa Dalloway, The novel depicts her preparations for a party she will be hosting in the evening. The story is told mainly through the thoughts of the protagonist, which are always evident, even when she is interacting with other characters. The story goes forward and back in time and in and out of the character’s mind to construct an image of Clarissa’s life and of the inter-war social structure. In October 2005, Mrs Dalloway was included in Time Magazine’s list of the 100 best English-language novels written since Time ’s first edition in 1923.

To the Lighthouse  (1927)

Centres on the Ramsay family’s visits to the Isle of Skye in Scotland between 1910 and 1920. In this novel philosophical introspection is more important than the plot. There is very little dialogue and less direct action. Most of the prose consists of the characters’ thoughts and observations. The style has been cited as a prime example of the literary technique of ‘multiple focalization’ –  the novel evokes childhood emotions and focuses on adult relationships in that light. It has multiple themes, including the nature of art, the problem of perception and the pain of loss.

In 1998 the Modern Library named the novel number fifteen on its list of the 100 best English language novels of the twentieth century. In 2005 it was included in Time Magazine’s list of the 100 best English-language novels written since Time ’s 1923.

Orlando: A Biography 1928.

Orlando is a satirical novel inspired by Virginia Woolf’s friend, the poet and novelist, Vita Sackville-West. It is a romp through the history of English literature. It depicts the adventures of a poet who changes gender from male to female and lives for several centuries, during which she meets an assortment of literary figures. The novel is considered a feminist classic and is studied particularly by scholars of gender and transgender studies. It has been adapted for the stage and screen, and been the subject of two significant operas.

Here is a list of Virginia Woolf’s works:

• The Voyage Out (1915)
• Night and Day (1919)
• Jacob’s Room (1922)
• To the Lighthouse (1927)
• Orlando (1928)
• The Waves (1931)
• The Years (1937)
• Between the Acts (1941)

Short Fiction Collections

• Two Stories (1917)
• Monday or Tuesday (1921)
• A Haunted House and Other Stories (1944)
• Mrs Dalloway’s Party (1973)
• The Complete Shorter Fiction (1985)

Non-Fiction Collections

• Modern Fiction (1919)
• The Common Reader (1925)
• The London Scene (1931)
• The Common Reader: Second Series (1932)
• The Death of the Moth and Other Essays (1942)
• The Moment and Other Essays (1947)
• The Captain’s Death Bed and Other Essays (1950)
• Granite and Rainbow (1958)
• Collected Essays (1967)
• Books and Portraits (1978)
• Women and Writing (1979)

See a full list of Virginia Woolf books in order of publication.

Quotes from Virginia Woolf Novels

For if it is rash to walk into a lion’s den unarmed, rash to navigate the Atlantic in a rowing boat, rash to stand on one foot on top of St. Paul’s, it is still more rash to go home alone with a poet. The Waves

She did in her own heart infinitely prefer boobies to clever men who wrote dissertations. To the Lighthouse

Our hands touch, our bodies burst into fire. The chair, the cup, the table-nothing remains unlit. All quivers, all kindles, all burns clear. The Waves

To whom can I expose the urgency of my own passion? The Waves

She could be herself, by herself. And that was what now she often felt the need of – to think; well not even to think. To be silent; to be alone. To the Lighthouse

Come, pain, feed on me. Bury your fangs in my flesh. Tear me asunder. I sob, I sob. The Waves

Things have dropped from me. I have outlived certain desires; I have lost friends, some by death, others through sheer inability to cross the street. The Waves

There was only the sound of the sea. To the Lighthouse

I have had my vision To the Lighthouse

Stepping through fields of flowers and taking to her breast buds that had broken and lambs that had fallen; with the stars in her eyes and the wind in her hair— He took her bag. To the Lighthouse

These selves of which we are built up, one on top of another, as plates are piled on a waiter’s hand, have attachments elsewhere, sympathies, little constitutions and rights of their own, call them what you will (and for many of these things there is no name) so that one will only come if it is raining, another in a room with green curtains, another when Mrs Jones is not there, another if you can promise it a glass of wine —and so on; for everybody can multiply from his own experience the different terms which his different selves have made with him—and some are too wildly ridiculous to be mentioned in print at all. Orlando

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Virginia Woolf

by Jessica Svendsen and Pericles Lewis Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) was an English novelist, essayist, biographer, and feminist. Woolf was a prolific writer, whose modernist style changed with each new novel. [1] Her letters and memoirs reveal glimpses of Woolf at the center of English literary culture during the Bloomsbury era. Woolf represents a historical moment when art was integrated into society, as T.S. Eliot describes in his obituary for Virginia. “Without Virginia Woolf at the center of it, it would have remained formless or marginal…With the death of Virginia Woolf, a whole pattern of culture is broken.” [2] Virginia Adeline Stephen was the third child of Leslie Stephen, a Victorian man of letters, and Julia Duckworth. The Stephen family lived at Hyde Park Gate in Kensington, a respectable English middle class neighborhood. While her brothers Thoby and Adrian were sent to Cambridge, Virginia was educated by private tutors and copiously read from her father’s vast library of literary classics. She later resented the degradation of women in a patriarchal society, rebuking her own father for automatically sending her brothers to schools and university, while she was never offered a formal education. [3] Woolf’s Victorian upbringing would later influence her decision to participate in the Bloomsbury circle, noted for their original ideas and unorthodox relationships. As biographer Hermione Lee argues “Woolf was a ‘modern’. But she was also a late Victorian. The Victorian family past filled her fiction, shaped her political analyses of society and underlay the behaviour of her social group.” [4] Mental Illness In May 1895 , Virginia’s mother died from rheumatic fever. Her unexpected and tragic death caused Virginia to have a mental breakdown at age 13. A second severe breakdown followed the death of her father, Leslie Stephen, in 1904. During this time, Virginia first attempted suicide and was institutionalized. According to nephew and biographer Quentin Bell, “All that summer she was mad.” [5] The death of her close brother Thoby Stephen, from typhoid fever in November 1906 had a similar effect on Woolf, to such a degree that he would later be re-imagined as Jacob in her first experimental novel Jacob’s Room and later as Percival in The Waves . These were the first of her many mental collapses that would sporadically occur throughout her life, until her suicide in March 1941. Though Woolf’s mental illness was periodic and recurrent, as Lee explains, she “was a sane woman who had an illness.” [6] Her “madness” was provoked by life-altering events, notably family deaths, her marriage, or the publication of a novel. According to Lee, Woolf’s symptoms conform to the profile of a manic-depressive illness, or bipolar disorder. Leonard, her dedicated lifelong companion, documented her illness with scrupulousness. He categorized her breakdowns into two distinct stages: “In the manic stage she was extremely excited; the mind race; she talked volubly and, at the height of the attach, incoherently; she had delusions and heard voices…she was violent with her nurses. In her third attack, which began in 1914, this stage lasted for several months and ended by her falling into a coma for two days. During the depressive stage all her thoughts and emotions were the exact opposite of what they had been in the manic stage. She was in the depths of melancholia and despair; she scarcely spoke; refused to eat; refused to believe that she was ill and insisted that her condition was due to her own guilt; at the height of this stage she tried to commit suicide.” [7] During her life, Woolf consulted at least twelve doctors, and consequently experienced, from the Victorian era to the shell shock of World War I, the emerging medical trends for treating the insane. Woolf frequently heard the medical jargon used for a “nervous breakdown,” and incorporated the language of medicine, degeneracy, and eugenics into her novel Mrs. Dalloway . With the character Septimus Smith, Woolf combined her doctor’s terminology with her own unstable states of mind. When Woolf prepared to write Mrs. Dalloway , she envisioned the novel as a “study of insanity and suicide; the world seen by the sane and the insane side by side.” When she was editing the manuscript, she changed her depiction of Septimus from what read like a record of her own experience as a “mental patient” into a more abstracted character and narrative. However, she kept the “exasperation,” which she noted, should be the “dominant theme” of Septimus’s encounters with doctors. [8] In 1924 , during the heyday of literary modernism, Virginia Woolf tried to account for what was new about “modern” fiction. She wrote that while all fiction tried to express human character, modern fiction had to describe character in a new way because “on or about December, 1910, human character changed.” Her main example of this change in human character was the “character of one’s cook.” Whereas the “Victorian cook lived like a leviathan in the lower depths,” modern cooks were forever coming out of the kitchen to borrow the Daily Herald and ask “advice about a hat.” Woolf’s choice of December, 1910 as a watershed referred above all to the first Post-Impressionist Exhibition, organized by her friend Roger Fry in collaboration with her brother-in-law Clive Bell. The exhibition ran from November 8, 1910 to January 15, 1911 and introduced the English public to developments in the visual arts that had already been taking place in France for a generation. More broadly, however, Woolf was alluding to social and political changes that overtook England soon after the death of Edward VII in May, 1910, symbolized by the changing patterns of deference and class and gender relations implicit in the transformation of the Victorian cook. Henry James considered that the death of Edward’s mother Victoria meant the end of one age; Edward’s reign was short (1901-1910), but to those who lived through it, it seemed to stand at the border between the old world and the new. This sense of the radical difference between the “modern” world and the “Edwardian” one, or more broadly the world before and after the First World War, became a major theme of Woolf’s fiction. In 1911, the year after human character changed, Virginia decided to live in a house in the Bloomsbury neighborhood near the British Museum with several men, none of whom was her husband. Some of her relatives were shocked, and her father’s old friend Henry James found her lifestyle rather too Bohemian. Her housemates were her brother Adrian, John Maynard Keynes, Duncan Grant, and Leonard Woolf, whom she married a year later. Grant and Keynes were lovers, and the heterosexual members of the group too were known for their unconventional relationships. Virginia’s sister, the painter Vanessa Bell, lived for much of her life with Grant, who was also her artistic collaborator, and the two had a daughter. Throughout all this, Vanessa remained married to Clive Bell, who early in marriage had a flirtatious relationship with Virginia, while Duncan had a series of homosexual love affairs. Most of the men in the Bloomsbury group had gone to Cambridge, and many had belonged to an intellectual club called the Apostles, which, under the influence of the philosopher G. E. Moore, emphasized the importance of friendship and aesthetic experience, a more earnest form of Oscar Wilde’s aestheticism. A typical Bloomsbury figure, Lytton Strachey , wrote his best-known book, Eminent Victorians ( 1918 ), in a satirical vein, debunking the myths surrounding such revered figures as Florence Nightingale. Strachey was the most open homosexual of the group, and Woolf vividly recalled his destruction of all the Victorian proprieties when he noted a stain on Vanessa’s dress and remarked, “Semen”: “With that one word all barriers of reticence and reserve went down.” Feminist Critiques Woolf wrote extensively on the problem of women’s access to the learned professions, such as academia, the church, the law, and medicine, a problem that was exacerbated by women’s exclusion from Oxford and Cambridge. Woolf herself never went to university, and she resented the fact that her brothers and male friends had had an opportunity that was denied to her. Even in the realm of literature, Woolf found, women in literary families like her own were expected to write memoirs of their fathers or to edit their correspondence. Woolf did in fact write a memoir of her father, Leslie Stephen, after his death, but she later wrote that if he had not died when she was relatively young (22), she never would have become a writer. Woolf also concerned herself with the question of women’s equality with men in marriage, and she brilliantly evoked the inequality of her parents’ marriage in her novel To the Lighthouse ( 1927 ). Woolf based the Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay on her parents. Vanessa Bell immediately decoded the novel, discovering that Mrs. Ramsay was based on their mother, Julia Duckworth Stephen. Vanessa felt that it was “almost painful to have her so raised from the dead.” [10] Woolf’s mother was always eager to fulfill the Victorian ideal that Woolf later described, in a figure borrowed from a pious Victorian poem, as that of the “Angel in the House.” Woolf spoke of her partly successful attempts to kill off the “Angel in the House,” and to describe the possibilities for emancipated women independently of her mother’s sense of the proprieties. The disparity Woolf saw in her parents’ marriage made her determined that “the man she married would be as worthy of her as she of him. They were to be equal partners.” [11] Despite numerous marriage proposals throughout her young adulthood, including offers by Lytton Strachey and Sydney Waterlow, Virginia only hesitated with Leonard Woolf, a cadet in the Ceylon Civil Service. Virginia wavered, partly due to her fear of marriage and the emotional and sexual involvement the partnership requires. She wrote to Leonard: “As I told you brutally the other day, I feel no physical attraction in you. There are moments—when you kissed me the other day was one—when I feel no more than a rock. And yet your caring for me as you do almost overwhelms me. It is so real, and so strange.” [12] Virginia eventually accepted him, and at age 30, she married Leonard Woolf in August 1912. For two or three years, they shared a bed, and for several more a bedroom. However, with Virginia’s unstable mental condition, they followed medical advice and did not have children. Related to the unequal status of marriage was the sexual double standard that treated lack of chastity in a woman as a serious social offense. Woolf herself was almost certainly the victim of some kind of sexual abuse at the hands of one of her half-brothers, as narrated in her memoir Moments of Being . More broadly, she was highly conscious of the ways that men had access to and knowledge of sex, whereas women of the middle and upper classes were expected to remain ignorant of it. She often puzzled about the possibility of a literature that would treat sexuality and especially the sexual life of women frankly, but her own works discuss sex rather indirectly. If much of Woolf’s feminist writing concerns the problem of equality of access to goods that have traditionally been monopolized by men, her literary criticism prefigures two other concerns of later feminism: the reclaiming of a female tradition of writing and the deconstruction of gender difference. In A Room of One’s Own ( 1929 ), Woolf imagines the fate of Shakespeare’s equally brilliant sister Judith (in fact, his sister’s name was Joan). Unable to gain access to the all-male stage of Elizabethan England, or to obtain any formal education, Judith would have been forced to marry and abandon her literary gifts or, if she had chosen to run away from home, would have been driven to prostitution. Woolf traces the rise of women writers, emphasizing in particular Jane Austen, the Brontës, and George Eliot, but alluding too to Sappho, one of the first lyric poets. Faced with the question of whether women’s writing is specifically feminine, she concludes that the great female authors “wrote as women write, not as men write.” She thus raises the possibility of a specifically feminine style, but at the same time she emphasizes (citing the authority of Coleridge) that the greatest writers, among whom she includes Shakespeare, Jane Austen, and Marcel Proust , are androgynous, able to see the world equally from a man’s and a woman’s perspective. The Effect of War The theme of how to make sense of the changes wrought in English society by the war, specifically from the perspective of a woman who had not seen battle, became central to Woolf’s work. In her short story “Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street” ( 1922 ), Woolf has her society hostess, Clarissa Dalloway, observe that since the war, “there are moments when it seems utterly futile…—simply one doesn’t believe, thought Clarissa, any more in God.” Although her first novel, The Voyage Out ( 1915 ) had tentatively embraced modernist techniques, her second, Night and Day ( 1919 ), returned to many Victorian conventions. The young modernist writer Katherine Mansfield thought that Night and Day contained “a lie in the soul” because it failed to refer to the war or recognize what it had meant for fiction. Mansfield, who had written a number of important early modernist stories, died at the age of 34 in 1923, and Woolf, who had published some of her work at the Hogarth Press , often measured herself against this friend and rival. Mansfield’s criticism of Night and Day as “Jane Austen up-to-date” stung Woolf, who, in three of her major modernist novels of the 1920s, grappled with the problem of how to represent the gap in historical experience presented by the war. The war is a central theme in her three major modernist novels of the 1920s: Jacob’s Room (1922), Mrs. Dalloway (1925), and To the Lighthouse (1927). Over the course of the decade, these novels trace the experience of incorporating the massive and incomprehensible experience of the war into a vision of recent history. Hogarth Press In 1915, Leonard and Virginia moved to Hogarth House, Richmond, and two years later, brought a printing press in order to establish a small, independent publishing house. Though the physical machining required by letterpress exhausted the Woolfs, the Hogarth Press flourished throughout their careers. Hogarth chiefly printed Bloomsbury authors who had little chance of being accepted at established publishing companies. The Woolfs were dedicated to publishing the most experimental prose and poetry and the emerging philosophical, political, and scientific ideas of the day. They published T.S. Eliot , E.M. Forster , Roger Fry , Katherine Mansfield , Clive Bell , Vita Sackville-West, and John Middleton Murry, among numerous others. Though they rejected publishing James Joyce ’s Ulysses , they printed T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and the first English translations of Sigmund Freud. Hogarth additionally published all of Woolf’s novels, providing her the editorial freedom to do as she wished as a woman writer, free from the criticism of a male editor. J.H. Willis explains that Woolf “could experiment boldly, remaking the form and herself each time she shaped a new fiction, responsible only to herself as writer-editor-publisher…She was, [Woolf] added triumphantly, ‘the only woman in England free to write what I like.’ The press, beyond doubt, had given Virginia a room of her own.” [13] Female Relations Woolf’s liberated writing parallels her relationships with women, who gave her warm companionship and literary stimulus. In her girlhood, there was Violet Dickinson; in her thirties, Katherine Mansfield; and in her fifties, there was Ethel Smyth. But none of these women emotionally aroused Virginia as did Vita Sackville-West. They met in 1922, and it developed into the deepest relationship that Virginia would ever have outside her family. [14] Virginia and Vita were more different than alike; but their differences in social class, sexual orientation, and politics, were all were part of the attraction. Vita was an outsider to Bloomsbury and disapproved of their literary gatherings. Though the two had different intellectual backgrounds, Virginia found Vita irresistible with her glamorous and aristocratic demeanor. Virginia felt that Vita was “a real woman. Then there is some voluptuousness about her; the grapes are ripe; & not reflective. No. In brain & insight she is not as highly organised as I am. But then she is aware of this, & so lavishes on me the maternal protection which, for some reason, is what I have always wished from everyone.” [15] Though Vita and Virginia shared intimate relations, they both avoided categorizing their relationship as lesbian. Vita rejected the lesbian political identity and even Woolf’s feminism. Instead, Vita was well-known in her social circles as a “Sapphist.” Virginia, on the other hand, did not define herself as a Sapphist. She avoided all categories, particular those that categorized her in a group defined by sexual behavior. [16] Woolf’s relationship with Vita ultimately shaped the fictional biography Orlando , a narrative that spans from 1500 to the contemporary day. It follows the protagonist Orlando who is based on “Vita; only with a change about from one sex to another.” [17] For Virginia, Vita’s physical appearance embodied both the masculine and the feminine, and she wrote to Vita that Orlando is “all about you and the lusts of your flesh and the lure of your mind.” Though Virginia and Vita’s love affair only lasted intermittently for about three years, Woolf wrote Orlando as an “elaborate love-letter, rendering Vita androgynous and immortal, transforming her story into a myth.” [18] Indeed, Woolf’s ideal of the androgynous mind is extended in Orlando to an androgynous body. When it was published in October 1928, Orlando immediately became a bestseller and the novel’s success made Woolf one of the best-known contemporary writers. In the same month, Woolf gave the two lectures at Cambridge, later published as A Room of One’s Own (1929), and actively participated in the legal battles that censored Radclyffe Hall’s lesbian novel, The Well of Loneliness . Despite this concentrated period of reflection on gender and sexual identities, Woolf would wait until 1938 to publish Three Guineas , a text that expands her feminist critique on the patriarchy and militarism. Woolf clearly expressed her reasons for committing suicide in her last letter to her husband Leonard: “I feel certain that I am going mad again: I feel we cant go through another of those terrible times. And I shant recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and cant concentrate.” [20] On March 18, she may have attempted to drown herself. Over a week later on March 28, Virginia wrote the third of her suicide letters, and walked the half-mile to the River Ouse, filled her pockets with stones, and walked into the water. [21] Virginia’s body was found by some children, a short way down-stream, almost a month later on April 18. An inquest was held the next day and the verdict was “Suicide with the balance of her mind disturbed.” Her body was cremated on April 21 with only Leonard present, and her ashes were buried under a great elm tree just outside the garden at Monk’s House, with the concluding words of The Waves as her epitaph, “Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death!” [22] The last words Virginia Woolf wrote were “Will you destroy all my papers.” [23] Written in the margin of her second suicide letter to Leonard, it is unclear what “papers” he was supposed to destroy—the typescript of her latest novel Between the Acts ; the first chapter of Anon, a project on the history of English literature; or her prolific diaries and letters. If Woolf wished for all of these papers to be destroyed, Leonard disregarded her instructions. He published her novel, compiled significant diary entries into the volume The Writer’s Diary , and carefully kept all of her manuscripts, diaries, letters, thereby preserving Woolf’s unique voice and personality captured in each line. ↑ Spender, Stephen. “Virginia Woolf’s Obituary Notice.” Listener. 10 April 1941. ↑ Eliot, T.S. “Virginia Woolf’s Obituary.” Horizon. May 1941. ↑ Nicolson, Nigel. Introduction to The Letters of Virginia Woolf: Volume One: 1888-1912. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1975. ↑ Lee, Hermione. Virginia Woolf. New York: Vintage, 1990. 55 ↑ Bell, Quentin. Virginia Woolf: A Biography. London: Hogarth Press, 1990. ↑ Lee, Hermione. Virginia Woolf. New York: Vintage, 1990. 171. ↑ Ibid 174. ↑ Ibid 188. ↑ Nicolson, Nigel. The Letters of Virginia Woolf: Volume One: 1888-1912. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1975. 183. ↑ Ibid 572. ↑ Woolf, Virginia. The Letters of Virginia Woolf: Volume One: 1888-1912. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1975. 1 May 1912. ↑ Willis, J. H. Leonard and Virginia Woolf As Publishers: The Hogarth Press, 1917-41. Charlottesville, Virginia: University Press of Virginia, 1992. 400. ↑ Nicolson, Nigel. Introduction to The Letters of Virginia Woolf: Volume Three: 1923-1928. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1977. ↑ Woolf, Virginia. The Diary of Virginia Woolf: Volume 3: 1925-1930. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1980. 51. ↑ Lee, Hermione. Virginia Woolf. New York: Vintage, 1990. 484. ↑ Woolf, Virginia. The Diary of Virginia Woolf: Volume 3: 1925-1930. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1980. 428. ↑ Nicolson, Nigel. Introduction to The Letters of Virginia Woolf: Volume Six: 1936-1941. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1980. ↑ Ibid 486. ↑ Ibid 481. ↑ Ibid 487. 10 Best Books by Virginia Woolf | TheReviewGeek Recommends Virginia Woolf, one of the most renowned female authors of all time, was a central figure in the modernist literature movement of the early 20th century. Her distinct and innovative writing style, characterized by stream-of-consciousness narrative and introspective focus, has left an indelible mark on literature. In her honour, we present ten of her best works that have made significant contributions to English literature. As usual, you can drop your thoughts in the comments below: ‘To the Lighthouse’ First published on May 5, 1927, “To the Lighthouse” is widely considered a masterpiece of Woolf’s oeuvre. The novel explores the lives and perspectives of three members of the Ramsay family living in a house on the Scottish coast. Woolf’s impeccable prose and profound understanding of human emotions make this novel deeply impactful. She effectively delves into the human fear of change, rendering it in a compelling novelistic form. Her vivid descriptions bring to life the characters and their experiences, making the book hard to put down. This book firmly established Woolf as one of the leading voices of modernism. ‘Mrs. Dalloway’ If you’re just starting to explore Woolf’s remarkable body of work, “Mrs. Dalloway”, first published in 1925, is one of the best books to begin with. The narrative brings to life a day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, a high-society English woman living in post-World War I London. As Clarissa prepares for a party she will host in the evening, Woolf paints an evocative image of society at the time. The novel employs a stream-of-consciousness narrative, immersing readers into the inner world of its protagonist. Its influence on literature is such that it was adapted into a film in 1997. ‘Orlando’ “Orlando: A Biography”, published in 1928, is another notable work in Woolf’s collection. Not strictly a novel, this ‘biography’ straddles the line between fiction and non-fiction to create a unique narrative experience. It tells the story of the eponymous character who embarks on a journey through centuries of English history. Orlando is a work that defies conventions and constantly challenges reader expectations. It is seen as another testament to Woolf’s groundbreaking narrative techniques and her ability to experiment with literary forms. ‘A Room of One’s Own’ Published in 1929, “A Room of One’s Own” is an influential feminist text that explores the societal obstacles women face in expressing their creativity and genius. In this essay, Woolf argues for the necessity of a woman having her own money and space – a room of her own – to be able to write. To illustrate her point, Woolf creates an imaginary character, Shakespeare’s sister, who, despite possessing a talent equivalent to her brother’s, ultimately commits suicide out of frustration with her stifled creativity in a male-dominated world. This work remains a must-read for feminist scholars and readers interested in gender studies. ‘The Waves’ “The Waves”, another of Woolf’s highly acclaimed works, further cemented her status as a leading modernist writer. Much like her other works, this novel showcases Woolf’s characteristic stream-of-consciousness narrative and her focus on internal psychological perspective rather than linear plot development. The book’s innovative structure and its exploration of complex topics such as individual identity and the nature of human relationships make it a challenging yet rewarding read. ‘Jacob’s Room’ “Jacob’s Room”, Woolf’s third novel, was published in 1922. Following the success of her short story collection ‘Monday or Tuesday,’ Woolf wrote “Jacob’s Room” to test if she could translate her impressionistic style to a full-length novel. The book follows Jacob Flanders’ life from childhood to maturity, but its unconventional narrative technique makes it a classic example of Woolf’s unique storytelling style. Despite a seemingly conventional plot, the novel is far from traditional and is pure Woolf in its execution. ‘Between the Acts’ “Between the Acts”, Woolf’s last work, was published posthumously. Set against the backdrop of looming World War II in an unspecified location in England, the novel revolves around a village hosting its annual show where villagers enact important moments of English history. Here, Woolf cleverly uses a play-within-a-play structure to explore various themes, prominently the rise of fascism. This topic was of particular significance to Woolf, given her husband’s Jewish heritage and her inclusion in Hitler’s UK blacklist. ‘The Voyage Out’ Published in 1915, “The Voyage Out” marked the beginning of Woolf’s illustrious writing career. While more conventional than her later works, this novel still bears Woolf’s signature style of introspective narration and rich character development. It also provides early insights into Woolf’s evolving narrative style, making it an interesting read for those keen on studying her creative growth. ‘Night and Day’ “Night and Day”, Woolf’s second novel published in 1919, offers a fascinating look at her earlier, more traditional narrative style. Despite being less experimental than her later novels, its insightful exploration of love, marriage, and the role of women makes it a valuable addition to any Woolf reading list. ‘The Years’ Last but not least, “The Years” is the longest novel by Woolf and was the best-selling book during her lifetime. Published in 1937, it traces the lives of the Pargiter family from the 1880s to the ‘present day’ in the mid-1930s. Although less experimental in form than her other works, the novel is still marked by Woolf’s penetrating examination of characters and her sharp critique of society. There we have it, our list 0f 10 best books by Virginia Woolf. What do you think about our picks? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below: Leave a comment Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. 5 Must-Read Virginia Woolf Books: The Ultimate List We recommend starting with one of these five great books. Virginia Woolf is one of the most important authors of the twentieth century.  She was a major innovator in the use of stream-of-consciousness as a narrative technique, and her novels are known for their insight into the interior lives of their characters.  If you’re interested in reading Virginia Woolf books, you might be wondering where to start.  There are so many great books to choose from, and it can be hard to know where to begin.  So in this article, I will recommend five must-read Virginia Woolf books and help you decide where to start reading her work.  So whether you’re a longtime fan or just getting started, these five titles are a great place to start! About Virginia Woolf Why is virginia woolf so famous. Virginia Woolf is so famous primarily due to her distinctive narrative style and innovative approach to storytelling. She was one of the pioneers of the literary technique known as “stream of consciousness,” which attempts to depict the continuous flow of thoughts, feelings, and impressions in the human mind. Her novels are filled with profound insights into her characters’ interior lives, breaking away from traditional narrative structures, thus revolutionizing the modern novel. Additionally, Woolf was a significant figure in the feminist movement with works like “A Room of One’s Own” and “Three Guineas,” which challenged the societal constraints on women of her time. Her profound impact on literary and feminist fields maintains her reputation as one of the most important writers of the twentieth century. What was Virginia Woolf suffering from? Virginia Woolf suffered from what is now believed to be bipolar disorder, a mental condition marked by alternating periods of elation and depression. Throughout her life, she experienced frequent bouts of debilitating depression and nervous breakdowns. Unfortunately, mental health was not well understood during her time, and she did not receive the treatment that would have been available to her today. What happened to Virginia Woolf? Virginia Woolf tragically passed away by suicide on March 28, 1941. Suffering from a severe bout of depression and fearing she was on the brink of a mental breakdown, she filled her pockets with stones and walked into the River Ouse near her home in Sussex, England. In a poignant suicide note left for her husband, Leonard Woolf, Virginia expressed her deep love for him, and her conviction that she could not face another episode of mental illness. Since her death, she has remained an enduring figure in the literary world, her legacy living on through her groundbreaking works. Plus, Woolf’s open discussion of her mental health in her personal writings has since served to open up conversations about mental health. About Virginia Woolf Books What is virginia woolf’s most famous book. While all of Virginia Woolf’s works are highly regarded and have made significant contributions to literature, her most famous book is arguably “Mrs. Dalloway.” This novel has become an enduring classic due to its experimental narrative style, themes of identity and society, and powerful portrayal of a woman’s inner thoughts and feelings. It has been adapted into multiple forms, including film and stage productions, further solidifying its status as a renowned work of literature. Moreover, “Mrs. Dalloway” was one of the key novels that established Woolf’s reputation as a groundbreaking modernist writer. It remains a must-read for anyone interested in the works of Virginia Woolf. What is Virginia Woolf’s masterpiece? Virginia Woolf’s masterpiece is often considered to be “To the Lighthouse,” published in 1927. This novel is a remarkable example of Woolf’s innovative narrative technique, employing a stream-of-consciousness style to delve deep into the thoughts and feelings of its characters. By exploring human consciousness so intimately, Woolf was able to challenge traditional narrative structures and probe the complex nature of human relationships and the passage of time. The profound influence of “To the Lighthouse” on subsequent literature and its ongoing relevance to modern readers make it a standout work in Woolf’s distinguished oeuvre. What is the best Virginia Woolf book to start with? For beginners looking to immerse themselves in the works of Virginia Woolf, “Mrs. Dalloway” is an excellent starting point. This novel is not just one of Woolf’s most popular works, but it also introduces readers to her innovative stream-of-consciousness narrative style. With its exploration of a single day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, the novel provides deep insights into the thoughts and emotions of its main character, offering an enriching literary experience without overwhelming complexity. Reading “Mrs. Dalloway” will pave the way for understanding the thematic depth and narrative techniques found throughout Virginia Woolf’s body of work. The 5 Must-Read Virginia Woolf Books Now that you know more about Virginia Woolf and her work, let’s talk more about her five must-read books: Mrs. Dalloway To the Lighthouse A Room of One’s Own Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf If you’re new to Virginia Woolf, we recommend starting with one of her most famous novels, Mrs. Dalloway.  This book tells the story of a day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, a wealthy Londoner who is throwing a party.  The novel follows Mrs. Dalloway as she goes about her preparations for the party, and also flashbacks to moments from her past.  Mrs. Dalloway is full of beautiful prose and insights into human nature.  It’s one of Virginia Woolf’s most accessible novels and is a great introduction to her work. BUY FROM AMAZON OR BOOKSHOP I did a mini-deep dive into Mrs. Dalloway, so check out my article: Unraveling the Layers of “Mrs. Dalloway” by Virginia Woolf . To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf Another great option is To the Lighthouse, which tells the story of a family vacationing on the Isle of Skye.  The novel follows the family over ten years and chronicles their relationships with each other and the landscape around them.  To the Lighthouse is Virginia Woolf at her best, exploring themes of memory, time, and art.  This book is Virginia Woolf’s fifth novel, her most autobiographical work of fiction, and it’s considered one of her most important works. I did a mini-deep dive into To the Lighthouse, so check out my article: The Luminous Depths of Virginia Woolf’s “To The Lighthouse” . Orlando: A Biography by Virginia Woolf If you’re looking for something a little different, try Orlando: A Biography.  This novel tells the story of Orlando, a nobleman who lives for centuries and changes gender over the course of his lifetime.  Orlando is Virginia Woolf’s most playful novel, and it’s full of wit and humor.  This book is a great choice if you’re looking for something a little lighter than some of Virginia Woolf’s other works. The Waves by Virginia Woolf If you’re looking for something short and sweet, try The Waves.  The Waves is Virginia Woolf’s most experimental novel, and it tells the story of six friends through their thoughts and conversations.  The novel doesn’t have a traditional plot but instead explores themes of childhood, friendship, love, and death.  The Waves is a beautiful and challenging book, and it’s Virginia Woolf at her most innovative.  If you’re looking for something different, this is the book for you. A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf Finally, we recommend A Room of One’s Own.  This is Virginia Woolf at her most political, and the book is a feminist classic.  In it, Woolf argues that women need their own space and income in order to create great art.  This book is required reading for anyone interested in Virginia Woolf, feminist literature, or literary criticism.  It’s one of Virginia Woolf’s most important works and it’s sure to spark some interesting conversations. More About Virginia Woolf Books & Life What are the major novels of virginia woolf. Virginia Woolf authored numerous novels that have come to be regarded as major works in the English literary canon. Here are some of her most significant novels: Mrs. Dalloway (1925) : This novel is among Woolf’s most famous works and is noted for its innovative narrative structure, using the stream-of-consciousness technique. The story takes place in a single day, exploring the inner thoughts and feelings of Clarissa Dalloway as she prepares for a high-society party in London. To the Lighthouse (1927) : This is another of Woolf’s highly acclaimed novels, providing deep insights into the Ramsay family’s dynamics and their experiences during their visits to the Isle of Skye in Scotland over a decade. Orlando: A Biography (1928) : In this novel, Woolf explores themes of gender, sexuality, and identity through the life of Orlando, a character who changes sex and lives through several centuries. A Room of One’s Own (1929) : Although not a novel, this extended essay has become one of Woolf’s most influential works. It is a significant feminist text, where Woolf asserts that “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction”. The Waves (1931) : This novel stands out for its experimental form, being composed of soliloquies spoken by its six main characters. The book explores the interior lives of these characters from childhood to old age. Between the Acts (1941) : Woolf’s last novel, it is an introspective examination of English character and civilization leading up to World War II. The narrative weaves together poetic descriptions, character monologues, and scenes of theatrical performance. Why is Virginia Woolf considered a feminist? Virginia Woolf is widely recognized as a feminist due to her groundbreaking work on issues of women and writing. “A Room of One’s Own” has become foundational to feminist literary theory, as it argues for both a literal and metaphorical space for women writers within a literary tradition dominated by men. Woolf’s argument that a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction signifies a call for social and economic independence for women. In another influential work, “Three Guineas,” she denounces the societal structures that enforce women’s inferiority and advocates for women’s access to education and professions. Besides these works, the theme of women’s liberation and the critique of gender norms run throughout her novels, making her a significant figure in feminist literature. How did Virginia Woolf change the world? Virginia Woolf significantly transformed the literary landscape and contributed to the feminist movement, making her integral to the cultural and social shifts of the 20th century. As a writer, she pioneered the stream-of-consciousness technique in her novels, breaking away from traditional narrative forms and offering readers a new way to experience the inner lives of characters. This innovative storytelling approach has profoundly influenced writers and artists to this day. As a feminist, Woolf’s essays, ‘A Room of One’s Own’ and ‘Three Guineas,’ challenged the societal norms and expectations imposed on women, specifically in the realms of education and profession. Her assertion that “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction” brought attention to the economic and social barriers hindering women’s creative and intellectual expression. Woolf’s influence extends beyond literature, impacting cultural discussions on gender equality, mental health, and societal norms, thereby changing the world by encouraging critical thought and progressive dialogues. What do you think about these Virginia Woolf books? Have you read any books by Virginia Woolf?  Are any of these books or her other works on your TBR?   What book by Virginia Woolf is your favorite?  What books would you add to this list?  Let us talk all about Virginia Woolf in the comments below. 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Leave a Reply Cancel reply Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked * Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. Corrections 7 of Virginia Woolf’s Most Notable Works Best remembered for her novels, Virginia Woolf was an icon of literary modernism and one of the greatest writers of all time. Here are 7 of her most notable works. Born Adeline Virginia Stephen in London in 1882, the writer who the world would come to know as Virginia Woolf came from a distinguished artistic and literary family. Her father was the respected Victorian man of letters Sir Leslie Stephen, and her mother, Julia, had been a model for the Pre-Raphaelites and for her aunt, the photographer Julia Margaret Cameron . As an adult, Virginia Woolf followed in her father’s footsteps by cleaving to the literary side of her heritage. However, she developed a distinctive writing style and voice that was entirely her own. From her debut to her last novel, here we explore just seven of her most notable novels… 1. The Voyage Out , 1915 The Voyage Out was Virginia Woolf’s debut novel, published in 1915, which, in itself, makes this one of her most notable novels. It tells the story of Rachel Vinrace, a young woman who has led a fairly sheltered life until she embarks on a journey to South America with her aunt and uncle. Her aunt, Helen, in particular, becomes a mentor figure for Rachel, helping her to explore more of life than she has hitherto seen from her father’s house. Together, Rachel and Helen meet more English tourists staying at a hotel. Among the guests is Terence Hewet, with whom Rachel falls in love. The novel, therefore, seems conventional enough: a romantic novel constructed around the holiday abroad trope, such as fellow Bloomsbury member E.M. Forster uses in his novel A Room with a View (1908). However, unlike Forster, Woolf has chosen a more tropical destination for her heroine than the beauty spots of Europe. As Peter Fifield has argued, this allows Woolf to subvert our expectations of a seemingly conventional narrative by adding an element of danger. Will Rachel and Terence – and their burgeoning relationship – survive in this new climate? Another notable feature of The Voyage Out is the cameo appearance made by Richard and Clarissa Dalloway at the start of the novel. These, of course, are characters Woolf would return to in her short fiction and in a later, more famous novel. Get the latest articles delivered to your inbox Please check your inbox to activate your subscription, 2. jacob’s room , 1922. Virginia Woolf followed up The Voyage Out with her second novel, Night and Day , in 1919. Stylistically, Night and Day has much in common with The Voyage Out ; both are fairly conventional realist novels. It was not until the publication of Jacob’s Room in 1922 – that seminal year for literary modernism, in which T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” and James Joyce’s Ulysses were also published – that Woolf found her own distinctive, experimental style of writing. This was facilitated when, in 1917, Virginia and her husband, Leonard, set up the Hogarth Press. Previously, Virginia Woolf’s novels had been published by her half-brother Gerald Duckworth’s Duckworth Press. Woolf later revealed that, as a child and as an adolescent, she had been sexually abused by both Gerald and George Duckworth. And she also felt pressured to write novels that would be commercially successful in order to continue being published by Duckworth Press, preventing her from trying more experimental modes of writing. However, with the establishment of the Hogarth Press, she was free to write exactly as she chose – precisely what she did in writing Jacob’s Room . Jacob’s Room might be considered an interrupted bildungsroman, cut short by the First World War . (One criticism of Night and Day that had particularly wounded Woolf was Katherine Mansfield’s observation that Woolf had failed to make any mention of the war. In Jacob’s Room , Woolf rights that wrong.) The reader follows the eponymous Jacob from childhood through to his studies at Cambridge and early adulthood, including trips to Italy and Greece. Despite the emphasis on Jacob, however, he is largely presented through the perspectives of other characters and often in an elegiac vein. The horrors of the Great War would recur throughout her later fiction, beginning with Jacob’s Room . 3. Mrs Dalloway , 1925 The next novel Woolf published after Jacob’s Room was Mrs Dalloway , and here she is in full stylistic command. Though Woolf famously (and conceivably with more than a hint of jealousy) thought James Joyce an overrated writer, she did take inspiration from his circadian novel Ulysses , set on 16th June 1904. Likewise, in writing Mrs Dalloway , Woolf chose to set the events of her novel on one day in June (possibly 13th June). And, also just as Ulysses has inspired the celebration of “Bloomsday” every year, so too is Mrs Dalloway celebrated every June. Mrs Dalloway centers around the different yet strangely interconnected lives of Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Warren Smith. While Clarissa prepares for the party she is to hold that night and reminisces about old friendships, Septimus struggles with shellshock following his experiences as a soldier during the First World War. United by the city of London, their lives are at once separated by wealth and class, and yet Woolf draws them together into an interconnected narrative. Mrs Dalloway is a novel of great beauty and humanity and remains one of her most famous works the world over. 4. To the Lighthouse , 1927 Published just two years after Mrs Dalloway , in 1927 , To the Lighthouse is perhaps Virginia Woolf’s most accomplished novel. The novel is comprised of a tripartite structure: the first section is titled “The Window,” the second “Time Passes,” and the third “The Lighthouse.” Following the Ramsey family across a period of ten years in which beloved family members are lost, and war breaks out across the world, the novel begins at the family’s holiday home on the Isle of Skye, modeled closely on Talland House, where Woolf herself spent many happy summers as a child, in St. Ives, Cornwall. Set over a single day, “The Window” follows the Ramseys and their guests going about their day before Mrs. Ramsey holds a dinner party. The social cohesion achieved through this moment of commensality is, however, soon broken, as “Time Passes” charts the degradation of the holiday home (which has been left to stand unoccupied) over a period of roughly ten years, during which family members die, and the First World War breaks out. This middle section is a wildly experimental piece of writing. The human focus is removed, allowing Woolf to range among viewpoints and present human suffering within a wider non-human context, thus challenging our anthropocentric presumptions without ever minimizing the reality of human pain. The novel’s final section shows a depleted Ramsey family returning to their holiday home on the Isle of Skye, along with their guest, the artist Lily Briscoe, from the novel’s beginning. While the Ramseys make the long-delayed trip over water to the nearby lighthouse, Lily Briscoe paints in the garden. A meditation on love, family, and female artistic vision , To the Lighthouse is a novel as elegant as it is heartfelt. 5. Orlando , 1928 Having finished To the Lighthouse , Woolf wrote that she felt “the need of an escapade after these serious poetic experimental books, […] to kick up my heels & be off.” The “escapade” she then went on was to write Orlando , a novel-cum-mock-biography in which the eponymous Orlando lives for centuries, during which time they transition from male to female. The inspiration behind Orlando came from Vita Sackville-West, a fellow writer and Virginia’s friend and lover. Sackville-West came from an aristocratic family and grew up at Knole, a country house and former archbishop’s palace in Kent. As a woman, Sackville-West could not inherit the property, though she felt strongly attached to it throughout her life. By having Orlando transition from male to female, Woolf points out the ridiculous nature of outdated inheritance laws. At the same time, however, Woolf writes Knole into her novel and so gives Vita a literary version of her beloved childhood home. Both an intimate love letter to Vita Sackville-West and an important novel about gender fluidity and queer love, Orlando is at once whimsical, philosophical, and stylish. 6. The Waves , 1931 If Woolf felt the need for a break from writing “these serious poetic experimental books” before writing Orlando , it is interesting to note that the next novel she wrote was even more poetic and experimental than any she had written before. The Waves centers around six friends: Bernard, Neville, Louis, Jinny, Susan, and Rhoda. Told via their interlinked consciousnesses, the reader follows them from childhood to adulthood and the individual struggles they face. Louis, for example, is the most intelligent of the group but is unable to attend university and feels out of place as an Australian in England, and Rhoda struggles with anxiety and her self-esteem. At the center is their mutual friend, Percival, who (crucially) never speaks. Throughout her work, Woolf explored human interiority, though nowhere does she explore it so thoroughly as in The Waves . 7. Between the Acts , 1941 Focusing on the lead-up to and performance of a pageant play as part of a festival in a small village in southern England shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War , Between the Acts captures a moment of calm before the storm. Like Mrs Dalloway before it, the novel is set over a single day, on which the village’s annual pageant play is to be performed. While the pageant plays typically depict and celebrate English history, Miss La Trobe (the writer and artistic director of this year’s play) has subverted this format, and the play ends with a scene titled “Ourselves,” in which the players direct mirrors and other reflective objects at the audience. This, however, does not go down well with the audience, and Miss La Trobe feels the play has been a failure, though she is also hopeful for next year’s play… Virginia Woolf, however, did not live to see the end of the war, and Between the Acts had to be published posthumously. Disappointed by the reception of her biography of Roger Fry and feeling unmoored and uncertain following the destruction of her London homes during the Blitz, she fell into a depression and suffered what was to be her final breakdown. On March 28th, 1941, she waded into the River Ouse, with her pockets weighed down with stones, and drowned herself. She was 59 years old. She had suffered mental breakdowns throughout her life since her mother’s death, and she feared that she would not be able to survive another. Though her life was thus cut tragically short, she created a remarkable body of work – as the seven novels listed here attest. 7 Pre-Raphaelites & Their Famous Artworks By Catherine Dent MA 20th and 21st Century Literary Studies, BA English Literature Catherine holds a first-class BA from Durham University and an MA with distinction, also from Durham, where she specialized in the representation of glass objects in the work of Virginia Woolf. In her spare time, she enjoys writing fiction, reading, and spending time with her rescue dog, Finn. Frequently Read Together Julia Margaret Cameron Described in 7 Facts and 7 Photographs 9 Times Virginia Woolf Made a Lasting Impact on Art 10 Banned Literary Classics You Might Not Know 9 Best Virginia Woolf Books – Novels, Short Stories & Essays If you are a literature enthusiast, chances are high that you have come across the name Virginia Woolf. Widely regarded as one of the most influential writers of the 20th century, her works continue to captivate readers even today. In this article, we’ll take a closer look at the best Virginia Woolf books, which should be on your reading list. A Brief Introduction to Virginia Woolf Before we delve into her books, it’s essential to understand who Virginia Woolf was and her impact on literature. Born in 1882 in London, Woolf was a novelist, essayist, and critic. She was part of the Bloomsbury Group, a collective of artists, writers, and intellectuals who challenged traditional societal norms. Woolf’s style of writing, which was characterized by the use of stream of consciousness and references to everyday events and actions, was revolutionary. Her works explored themes of gender, sexuality, and mental health, which were considered taboo at the time. Who was Virginia Woolf? Virginia Woolf was a British writer known for her contributions to modernist literature. Her unique writing style, marked by stream-of-consciousness narration and poetic language, has earned her a place as one of the most important literary figures of the 20th century. Woolf was born into a privileged family and was educated at home by her parents. Her father was a writer and critic, and her mother was a talented artist. Woolf’s upbringing was unconventional for the time, and she was encouraged to read widely and explore her creativity. Despite her privileged upbringing, Woolf struggled with mental health issues throughout her life. She experienced bouts of depression and anxiety, which were exacerbated by the death of her mother when she was just 13 years old. Woolf’s struggles with mental health are evident in her writing, and her works often explore the inner workings of the human mind. The impact of Virginia Woolf on literature Virginia Woolf’s influence on literature cannot be understated. Her writing challenged the very foundations of conventional storytelling, and her works are still studied today by literary scholars. Woolf’s feminist beliefs and her treatment of female characters in her novels were at the forefront of literary gender politics, and she remains an important figure for readers who seek a deeper understanding of the modernist literary movement. Woolf’s most famous works include “ Mrs. Dalloway ,” “ To the Lighthouse ,” and “ Orlando .” These novels are characterized by their experimental narrative structures, which often incorporate flashbacks, inner monologues, and multiple perspectives. Woolf’s writing style was a departure from the traditional linear narrative structure of the time, and her works continue to inspire writers today. The Bloomsbury Group Virginia Woolf was a central figure in the Bloomsbury Group, an influential association of writers, artists, and intellectuals who were renowned for their unconventional and avant-garde beliefs. Woolf’s close friends included E.M. Forster, John Maynard Keynes, and Lytton Strachey, who were all members of the group. The Bloomsbury Group was known for its progressive views on sexuality, gender, and politics. They rejected the traditional Victorian values of their parents’ generation and embraced a more liberal and experimental approach to life. The group’s impact on British culture and society cannot be overstated, and their legacy continues to be felt today. Overall, Virginia Woolf’s contributions to literature and her role in the Bloomsbury Group have cemented her place as one of the most important cultural figures of the 20th century. Her unique writing style and her exploration of taboo themes continue to inspire and challenge readers today. The Must-Read Virginia Woolf Novels Virginia Woolf is considered one of the most important writers of the 20th century. Her works are known for their stream of consciousness narration, lyrical prose, and exploration of themes such as mental illness, feminism, and societal constraints. She produced several works in her lifetime; however, there are a few that stand out and are considered her best. Here are the top Virginia Woolf novels that are a must-read: Mrs. Dalloway First published in 1925, Mrs. Dalloway follows a day in the life of a high-society woman in post-World War I England. The novel explores themes such as mental illness, the effects of war, and the constraints of society. The protagonist, Clarissa Dalloway, is a complex character who struggles with the expectations placed upon her by society. She is a woman who is expected to be a perfect hostess, wife, and mother, but who also yearns for something more. The novel is a poignant exploration of the human condition and the struggle for self-expression. To the Lighthouse To the Lighthouse is considered one of Woolf’s masterpieces. The novel centers around a family’s trip to their summer home on the Isle of Skye and the dynamics of their relationships. The novel is known for its lyrical prose and intimate characterizations. The novel explores themes such as the passage of time, the nature of memory, and the complexities of human relationships. The character of Mrs. Ramsay, the matriarch of the family, is a particularly poignant portrayal of a woman who is expected to be the emotional center of her family, but who also struggles with her own desires and aspirations. Orlando: A Biography Orlando is a satirical look at gender roles, chronicling the experiences of a man who transforms into a woman and lives for hundreds of years. This novel is Woolf’s most playful and imaginative work, offering fantastic elements that earned her comparisons to James Joyce and other modernist writers. The novel is a commentary on the fluidity of gender and the limitations placed upon individuals by societal norms. The character of Orlando is a fascinating exploration of the human experience and the struggle to find one’s place in the world. The Waves is a novel that explores the interconnected lives of six friends from childhood to adulthood. The novel is famous for its use of stream of consciousness narration and its innovative storytelling structure. The novel is a poetic exploration of the nature of identity, memory, and the passage of time. The novel is a meditation on the human experience and the struggle to find meaning in a world that is constantly changing. The Years is a novel that spans the period from 1880 to 1937, following the lives of a middle-class family in England. The novel explores themes such as societal changes, women’s roles, and feminism. The novel is a poignant exploration of the human experience and the struggle for self-expression. The character of Eleanor, the matriarch of the family, is a particularly poignant portrayal of a woman who struggles with the limitations placed upon her by society and the desire to find her own voice. Virginia Woolf’s works are a must-read for any serious student of literature. Her novels are a testament to the power of the written word and the ability of literature to explore the complexities of the human experience. Exploring Woolf’s Short Stories and Essays Virginia Woolf was a prolific writer who produced a range of literary works throughout her career. Her writing style was characterized by her use of stream-of-consciousness narration, which allowed her to delve deep into the psyche of her characters. Her works explored themes like love, death, and the supernatural, making her a prominent figure in modernist literature. A Haunted House and Other Short Stories A Haunted House is a collection of some of Woolf’s most notable short stories. The collection features works like “ A Haunted House ,” “ The Mark on the Wall ,” and “ The New Dress .” These stories showcase Woolf’s ability to capture the essence of human emotions and experiences. “A Haunted House,” for instance, explores the idea of love transcending death, while “The Mark on the Wall” is a meditation on the nature of time and memory. Monday or Tuesday Monday or Tuesday is a collection of eight short stories that Woolf wrote early in her career. The stories are characterized by their experimental style and their exploration of a range of themes. “Kew Gardens,” for instance, is a lyrical meditation on the beauty of nature, while “An Unwritten Novel” is a metafictional exploration of the creative process. A Room of One’s Own A Room of One’s Own is one of Woolf’s most famous works. The extended essay is a feminist text that argues for the importance of women having their own independent means of living and financial security. Woolf famously argues that “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” The essay has become an important part of feminist literature and continues to inspire women to pursue their creative dreams. Three Guineas Three Guineas is another famous essay that explores Woolf’s feminist beliefs and her opposition to war. The essay is a scathing critique of the patriarchal ruling class and their policies. Woolf argues that women have a unique perspective on war, having been excluded from the decision-making process. The essay is a powerful call to action for women to take a more active role in shaping the future of society. Overall, Woolf’s works continue to inspire readers and writers alike. Her exploration of themes like love, death, and feminism has made her a prominent figure in modernist literature and a feminist icon. Her legacy continues to live on through her writing, inspiring new generations to explore the complexities of the human experience. The Bottom Line In conclusion, Virginia Woolf was undoubtedly one of the most influential writers of the 20th century. Her works still resonate with readers today, and her contributions to modernist literature are unparalleled. If you are interested in contemporary literature, we strongly recommend immersing yourself in the world of Virginia Woolf. Reading her books and essays is a great way to gain a deeper appreciation for her talent and influence on the literary world. Was Virginia Woolf the best female author of the 20th century? Virginia Woolf is known as one of the most prolific and influential writers of the 20th century. However, during this period many female authors were successful, so it’s difficult to label her as the best. What did Virginia Woolf write? She is famous for books like Mrs. Dalloway, A Room of One’s Own, To the Lighthouse, and Orlando. What happened to Virginia Woolf? It is widely acknowledged that Virginia Woolf suffered from mental health issues, particularly with severe depression. In 1941, she drowned herself at her home in England at the age of 59. Recent Posts The 11 Best Books About Cats You Should Read - January 16, 2024 The 9 Best Books on Building Confidence - January 16, 2024 Discover the 10 Best Books on the Brain - January 16, 2024 Related Posts: Novels to Change Your Whole Life Books with Movie Adaptations The Greatest Novels Ever Written The Most Overrated Books Ever The Best Novelists of All Time Books Everyone Should Read Books No One Ever Finishes Books Everyone Lies About Reading The Best Works by Stephen King The Greatest Fantasy Book Series The Best Horror Books of All Time The Best Science Fiction Novels Badly Written Best-Selling Books, Ranked By Fru... The Greatest Books You Were Forced to Read 17 BookTok Books That Are Actually Worth Readin... The Best Virginia Woolf Books List of the best Virginia Woolf books, ranked by voracious readers in the Ranker community. With commercial success and critical acclaim, there's no doubt that Virginia Woolf is one of the most popular authors of the last 100 years. An English writer, Woolf is considered one of the most important modernist authors of the 20th century and is unarguably one of the best female writers of all time. If you're a huge fan of her work, then vote on your favorite novels below and make your opinion count. This poll is also a great resource for new fans of Virginia Woolf who want to know which novels they should start reading first. With memorable characters and excellent storytelling, there's no reason why you shouldn't check out her work if you're a big reader. First Published : 1931-10-08 Subjects : Literary, Literature, Classics, Friendship, Literary criticism Genres (Book) : Fiction, Reference, Experimental literature Original Language : English Language Mrs Dalloway First Published : 1925-05-14 Subjects : Literary, Literature, Classics, English Language, England Genres (Book) : Fiction, Novel To the Lighthouse First Published : 1927-05-05 Subjects : Marriage, Literature, Classics, English Language, Scotland Genres (Book) : Children's literature, Fiction, Novel A Room of One's Own First Published : 1929-10-24 Subjects : Feminism Genres (Book) : Non-fiction, Essay A Writer's Diary First Published : 1937 Subjects : Gender studies, Literature, Classics, Family, History Todd May's 6 favorite books that offer philosophical insight The philosopher recommends works by Virginia Woolf, William Shakespeare, and more Newsletter sign up Newsletter 'Memoirs of Hadrian' by Marguerite Yourcenar (1951) 'the sound and the fury' by william faulkner (1929), 'in search of lost time' by marcel proust (1913-27), 'to the lighthouse' by virginia woolf (1927), 'invisible cities' by italo calvino (1972), 'king lear' by william shakespeare (1606). When you make a purchase using links on our site, The Week may earn a commission. All reviews are written independently by our editorial team. Philosopher Todd May was an adviser for NBC's acclaimed sitcom "The Good Place" and is the author of 18 books of philosophy. His latest, " Should We Go Extinct? ," explores whether Earth would be better off without human beings.  The greatest novel most people have never heard of. The Roman emperor Hadrian dictates a letter to his successor, Marcus Aurelius, detailing what he has learned in life. Every line is a bit of poetry that one is reluctant to let go of. One example: "The lover who leaves reason in control does not follow his god to the end." Buy it here .  Subscribe to The Week Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives. Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox. This is a book you'll read twice before you understand it, and that you'll want to read twice more when you do. The first section — fittingly, a tale told by an idiot — signals the decline of a Southern family and the transformation of the South itself. This is prose at its most intense. Buy it here .  Seven volumes of the most meticulously observed human behavior in the history of literature. Following the life journey of its unnamed narrator, the novel details the character of a specific time, and the lives that inhabited it, in ways that will bring to mind people you know, and who you are. Buy it here .  Woolf is the virtuoso of internal dialogue. A simple planned trip to a lighthouse across the way reveals the complex relationships in a family as well as the ravages of the passing of time. The husband in this novel is a failed philosopher — too close to home for me? Buy it here .  In this brief but extraordinary novel, Kublai Khan and Marco Polo sit together at twilight, the latter telling the former about the cities he has visited. But the cities he describes, bearing names such as Theodora and Zaira and Euphemia, are not actual places; instead, each one captures a moment of our world in metaphor, love, or grief. The world the pair speaks of is a dream, but a dream of the real. Buy it here . Sign up for Today's Best Articles in your inbox A free daily email with the biggest news stories of the day – and the best features from TheWeek.com The essential Shakespeare play, notwithstanding Hamlet and Macbeth being perennial contenders. Pride before the fall; unrecognized love;  Shakespearean irony; and a fool wiser than the wise men. Lear has it all. Buy it here . This article was first published in the latest issue of The Week magazine. If you want to read more like it, you can try six risk-free issues of the magazine here . 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Full 7th Floor, 130 West 42nd Street, New York, NY 10036. 426 COMMENTS The Best Virginia Woolf Books The best books by Virginia Woolf, one of the giants of 20th century literature, recommended by her biographer, Hermione Lee Virginia Woolf Virginia Woolf was a British novelist and essayist who explored modernism, feminism and mental health in her works. The Best Virginia Woolf Books Virginia Woolf wrote just nine novels, but she also left a number of volumes of non-fiction, an important volume of short stories, and an unusual work of biography, among countless essays and reviews. But what are Woolf's best books? Virginia Woolf by Hermione Lee Buy on Amazon. While Virginia Woolf--one of our century's most brilliant and mercurial writers--has had no shortage of biographers, none has seemed as naturally suited to the task as Hermione Lee. Subscribing to Virginia Woolf's own belief in the fluidity and elusiveness of identity, Lee comes at her subject from a multitude of perspectives ... Virginia Woolf Virginia Woolf, English writer whose novels, through their nonlinear approaches to narrative, exerted a major influence on the genre. Best known for her novels Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, she also wrote pioneering essays on artistic theory, literary history, women's writing, and the politics of power. What a New Virginia Woolf Biography Reveals About Her Life A new biography of Virginia Woolf looks at the impact of sexual abuse during her childhood and adolescence, and why this is relevant today Beholding Virginia Woolf Through the Women in Her Life Gillian Gill's new biography, "Virginia Woolf: And the Women Who Shaped Her World," traces the influences of her female family members and friends on the author's career. Virginia Woolf English author Virginia Woolf wrote modernist classics including 'Mrs. Dalloway' and 'To the Lighthouse,' as well as pioneering feminist texts, 'A Room of One's Own' and 'Three Guineas.' Virginia Woolf Virginia Woolf - Modernist, Feminist, Novelist: At the beginning of 1924, the Woolfs moved their city residence from the suburbs back to Bloomsbury, where they were less isolated from London society. Soon the aristocratic Vita Sackville-West began to court Virginia, a relationship that would blossom into a lesbian affair. Having already written a story about a Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf thought of a ... Virginia Woolf Hermione Lee is a biographer, critic, teacher of literature, and president of Wolfson College, University of Oxford. Among her many works are literary biographies of Willa Cather, Virginia Woolf and Edith Wharton, and Penelope Fitzgerald, which won the James Tait Black Prize and the Plutarch Award for the best biography of 2014. Virginia Woolf Biography & Facts: Books, Quotes, and Death Find out more about Virginia Woolf's best books, quotes, and the fascinating life she led. Virginia Woolf: A Biography by Quentin Bell Read 118 reviews from the world's largest community for readers. The first full-scale biography of the eminent British writer, written by her nephew. Index… Virginia Woolf: A Literary Icon of Modernism Virginia Woolf was a literary pioneer and arguably the greatest English writer of the modernist period. Virginia Woolf is one of the great prose stylists of English literature and has become something of a literary icon. A society beauty in her youth, a prodigiously talented author, and a pioneer of the feminist movement, Virginia Woolf's ... Virginia Woolf: A Biography Review PRAISE FOR VIRGINIA WOOLF "An intelligent and well-researched new biography... [O]ffers astute insights into both Woolf and her work." —The New York Times Book Review "Briggs pulls together a high-wire act; biographer and subject seem to commingle on the page, the result being a joint effort of imaginative force." 3 of Virginia Woolf's Best Books, Ranked Virginia Woolf is best known for her masterpiece, 'To the Lighthouse' in which she employs the stream-of-consciousness style to examine and critique the lives of the Ramsays. Biographical Profile of Virginia Woolf Virginia Woolf was born Adeline Virginia Stephen on January 25, 1882, in London. Woolf was educated at home by her father, Sir Leslie Stephen, the author of the Dictionary of English Biography, and she read extensively. Her mother, Julia Duckworth Stephen, was a nurse, who published a book on nursing. Virginia Woolf Overview: A Biography Of Virginia Wolf Virginia Woolf (1882 -1941) Virginia Woolf was an essayist, literary critic and, above all, a novelist, for which she was best known. She was a central figure in the literary and artistic community known as the Bloomsbury Group, a close-knit group that featured several English artists and writers of the early years of the twentieth century. Virginia Woolf Virginia Woolf. by Jessica Svendsen and Pericles Lewis. Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) was an English novelist, essayist, biographer, and feminist. Woolf was a prolific writer, whose modernist style changed with each new novel. [1] Her letters and memoirs reveal glimpses of Woolf at the center of English literary culture during the Bloomsbury era ... 10 Best Books by Virginia Woolf Virginia Woolf, one of the most renowned female authors of all time, was a central figure in the modernist literature movement of the early 20th century. 5 Must-Read Virginia Woolf Books: The Ultimate List If you are interested in reading Virginia Woolf books, I share a list of her five must-read books and share a beginner's starting point. 7 of Virginia Woolf's Most Notable Works Best remembered for her novels, Virginia Woolf was an icon of literary modernism and one of the greatest writers of all time. Here are 7 of her most notable works. 9 Best Virginia Woolf Books Virginia Woolf pushes the boundaries of literature with her best books, transporting you to realms of introspection, feminism, and artistic genius. The Best Virginia Woolf Books List of the best Virginia Woolf books, ranked by voracious readers in the Ranker community. With commercial success and critical acclaim, there's no doubt that Virginia Woolf is one of the most popular authors of the last 100 years. An English writer, Woolf is considered one of the most important... Todd May's 6 favorite books that offer philosophical insight The philosopher recommends works by Virginia Woolf, William Shakespeare, and more assignment essay homework paper phd report resume review thesis