Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf was born in London in 1882 , her father Leslie Stephen was a prominent Victorian
scholar who raised her in a literary and intellectual atmosphere!
with free access to her father's library. Her childhood experience of her mother's death when she
was only 13 led to depression and mental illness, but also it is know that Virginia was sexually
abused by her step-brother in her youth. When her father died In 1904 she moved to Bloomsbury
and became a member of the Bloomsbury Group whose members were writers and painters who
rejected traditional morality and artistic conventions, sharing philosophies and indulging in a
sexual freedom which disregarded Victorian taboos. In 1905 Virginia started work as a reviewer for
the “Times Literary Supplement” and In 1912 she married Leonard Woolf and together they set up
a printing house in 1917, known as Hogarth Press.It promoted the publication of experimental and
controversial works she first attempted suicide by taking drugs, but on 28th march she put stones
in her pocket and drowned herself in the River near her home in Sussex. !
WORKS !
~Modern Fiction an essay that expresses the notion that the novelist needs to be liberated from
the traditional constraints and to experiment with truth . !
In particular Virginia developed her ideas of portraying the human psyche in her modernist novels
( Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse and The Waves) !
~Wolf was both pacifist and a feminist , her most important feminist works are A room of One’s
Own which examines the obstacles of female writers and Three Guineas which deals that
women’s education and equal employment opportunities.
