Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf, whose original surname was Stephen, was born in 1882 in London in an upper
class family. She was mainly educated at home and she spent her summers in Cornwall
because she believed that the water was the only solution to any conflicts. At 13, her mother
died and Virginia experienced her first nervous breakdown. Then, she had a difficult
relationship with her father. When he died, she felt relieved and she moved to the Bloomsbury
area of London together with her sister. Here she joined the Bloomsbury Group, a group of
artists who lived and worked there and who questioned the conventional values of sexual and
personal relations. They were ostracised and ignored by the establishment they despised.
Through this group, Virginia met Leonard Woolf who would become her husband and in 1912
she published her first novel, “The Voyage Out”. The Woolfs founded their own publishing
house, the Hogarth Press. Next, Virginia wrote “Mrs Dalloway”, “To the Lighthouse” and
“Orlando”, dedicated to a friend of hers, Vita. Their friendship turned into a romantic affair.
In 1928, she published “A Room for One’s Own” that influenced the feminist movement of the
60s and 70s. Because of depression, she suicided drowning herself with rocks in the pocket in
the River Ouse in 1941.
