90 Facts About Virginia Woolf

Adeline Virginia Woolf was an English writer and one of the most influential 20th century modernist authors.

Virginia Woolf helped to pioneer the use of stream of consciousness narration as a literary device.

Virginia Woolf grew up in a blended family of eight that included her sister, modernist painter Vanessa Bell.

Virginia Woolf is known for her essays, such as A Room of One's Own.

Virginia Woolf became one of the central subjects of the 1970s movement of feminist criticism.

Virginia Woolf's works, translated into more than 50 languages, have attracted attention and widespread commentary for inspiring feminism.

Virginia Woolf has been the subject of plays, novels, and films.

Virginia Woolf is commemorated by statues, societies dedicated to her work, and a building at the University of London.

Virginia Woolf was born Adeline Virginia Stephen on 25 January 1882, in South Kensington, London, to Julia and Sir Leslie Stephen.

Virginia Woolf's father was a writer, historian, essayist, biographer, and mountaineer, while her mother was a noted philanthropist.

Originally named after her aunt Adeline, Virginia Woolf did not use her first name due to her aunt's recent death.

Virginia Woolf would run the Hyde Park Gate News until 1895.

In 1897, Virginia Woolf began her first diary, which she kept for the next twelve years.

Virginia Woolf married in April 1897 but remained closely involved with the Stephens, moving to a house very close to the Stephens to continue to support the family.

Virginia Woolf began a new diary at the start of 1897 and filled notebooks with fragments and literary sketches.

In February 1904 Leslie Stephen died, which caused Virginia Woolf to suffer another period of mental instability, lasting from April to September.

Virginia Woolf later described the period between 1897 and 1904 as "the seven unhappy years".

Virginia Woolf had unrestricted access to her father's vast library, exposing her to much of the literary canon.

Virginia Woolf introduced his sisters to this circle at the Trinity May Ball in 1900.

Virginia Woolf made some money from reviews, including some published in church paper The Guardian and the National Review, capitalising on her father's literary reputation in order to earn commissions.

Virginia Woolf resented the wealth that Vanessa's marriage had given her; Virginia Woolf and Adrian lived more humbly by comparison.

Virginia Woolf saw it as a new opportunity: "We are going to try all kinds of experiments", she told Ottoline Morrell.

Virginia Woolf soon found a property in nearby Firle, which she named "Little Talland House"; she maintained a relationship with that region for the rest of her life, spending her time either in Sussex or London.

In September 1911 she and Leonard Virginia Woolf found Asham House nearby, and she and Vanessa took a joint lease on it.

Virginia Woolf recorded the weekends and holidays she spent there in her Asham Diary, part of which was later published as A Writer's Diary in 1953.

Leonard Virginia Woolf was one of Thoby Stephen's friends at Trinity College, Cambridge, and had encountered the Stephen sisters in Thoby's rooms while visiting for May Week between 1899 and 1904.

Virginia Woolf recalled that in "white dresses and large hats, with parasols in their hands, their beauty literally took one's breath away".

In 1904 Leonard left Britain for a civil service position in Ceylon, but returned for a year's leave in 1911 after letters from Lytton Strachey, describing Virginia Woolf's beauty enticed him back.

Virginia Woolf had completed a penultimate draft of her first novel The Voyage Out before her wedding but made large-scale alterations to the manuscript between December 1912 and March 1913.

Virginia Woolf's illness led to Duckworth delaying the publication of The Voyage Out until 26 March 1915.

Many of Virginia Woolf's friends were against the war, and Virginia Woolf herself opposed it from a standpoint of pacifism and anti-censorship.

Leonard Virginia Woolf describes this view as being unchanged since the days of Chaucer.

On 14 December 1922 Virginia Woolf met the writer and gardener Vita Sackville-West, wife of Harold Nicolson.

Virginia Woolf remained close to her surviving siblings, Adrian and Vanessa.

Between 1924 and 1940 the Woolfs returned to Bloomsbury, taking out a ten-year lease at 52 Tavistock Square, from where they ran the Hogarth Press from the basement, where Virginia had her writing room.

Virginia Woolf wrote only one drama, Freshwater, based on her great-aunt Julia Margaret Cameron, and produced at her sister's studio on Fitzroy Street in 1935.

Virginia Woolf held fast to her pacifism and criticised her husband for wearing what she considered to be "the silly uniform of the Home Guard".

On 28 March 1941, Virginia Woolf drowned herself by walking into the fast-flowing River Ouse near her home, after placing a large stone in her pocket.

Virginia Woolf's husband buried her cremated remains beneath an elm tree in the garden of Monk's House, their home in Rodmell, Sussex.

However, Hermione Lee asserts that Virginia Woolf was not "mad"; she was merely a woman who suffered from and struggled with illness for much of her life, a woman of "exceptional courage, intelligence and stoicism", who made the best use, and achieved the best understanding she could, of that illness.

Yet just two years later, Stella too was dead, bringing on Virginia Woolf's first expressed wish for death at the age of fifteen.

Virginia Woolf spent time recovering at the house of Stella's friend Violet Dickinson, and at her aunt Caroline Stephen's house in Cambridge, and by January 1905, Savage considered her cured.

On Savage's recommendation, Virginia Woolf spent three short periods in 1910,1912, and 1913 at Burley House at 15 Cambridge Park, Twickenham, described as "a private nursing home for women with nervous disorder" run by Miss Jean Thomas.

Virginia Woolf's health became increasingly a matter of concern, culminating in her decision to end her life on 28 March 1941.

Virginia Woolf suffered many physical ailments such as headaches, backache, fevers and faints, which related closely to her psychological stress.

Virginia Woolf's experiences informed her work, such as the character of Septimus Warren Smith in Mrs Dalloway, who, like Woolf, was haunted by the dead, and ultimately takes his own life rather than be admitted to a sanitorium.

Leonard Virginia Woolf relates how during the 30 years they were married, they consulted many doctors in the Harley Street area, and although they were given a diagnosis of neurasthenia, he felt they had little understanding of the causes or nature.

Virginia Woolf's remedy was simple: to retire to bed in a darkened room, following which the symptoms slowly subsided.

Many of Virginia Woolf's symptoms, including persistent headache, insomnia, irritability, and anxiety, resembled those of her father's.

Virginia Woolf herself hinted that her illness was related to how she saw the repressed position of women in society when she wrote A Room of One's Own.

Stephen Trombley describes Virginia Woolf as having a confrontational relationship with her doctors, and possibly being a woman who is a "victim of male medicine", referring to the lack of understanding, particularly at the time, about mental illness.

Virginia Woolf had several affairs with women, the most notable being with Vita Sackville-West.

Madge Symonds was described as one of Virginia Woolf's early loves in Sackville-West's diary.

Virginia Woolf fell in love with Violet Dickinson, although there is some confusion as to whether the two consummated their relationship.

Virginia Woolf initially declined marriage proposals from her future husband, Leonard.

Virginia Woolf even went so far as to tell him that she was not physically attracted to him, but later declared that she did love him, and eventually agreed to marriage.

Virginia Woolf is considered to be one of the most important 20th-century novelists.

Virginia Woolf's reputation was at its greatest during the 1930s, but declined considerably following the Second World War.

Virginia Woolf submitted her first article in 1890, to a competition in Tit-Bits.

Virginia Woolf transitioned from juvenilia to professional journalism in 1904 at the age of 22.

In 1905, Virginia Woolf began writing for The Times Literary Supplement.

Virginia Woolf would go on to publish novels and essays as a public intellectual to both critical and popular acclaim.

Hermione Lee's 1996 biography Virginia Woolf provides a thorough and authoritative examination of Woolf's life and work, which she discussed in an interview in 1997.

Virginia Woolf's fiction has been studied for its insight into many themes including war, shell shock, witchcraft, and the role of social class in contemporary modern British society.

Virginia Woolf examined her own position as someone who would be considered an elitist snob but attacked the class structure of Britain as she found it.

Virginia Woolf concluded she was, and subsequent critics and supporters have tried to deal with the dilemma of being both elite and a social critic.

Virginia Woolf researched the life of her great-aunt, the photographer Julia Margaret Cameron, publishing her findings in an essay titled "Pattledom", and later in her introduction to her 1926 edition of Cameron's photographs.

Virginia Woolf had begun work on a play based on an episode in Cameron's life in 1923 but abandoned it.

Virginia Woolf directed it herself, and the cast were mainly members of the Bloomsbury Group, including herself.

Virginia Woolf wrote a body of autobiographical work and more than 500 essays and reviews, some of which, like A Room of One's Own were of book-length.

Shortly after her death, Leonard Virginia Woolf produced an edited edition of unpublished essays titled The Moment and other Essays, published by the Hogarth Press in 1947.

Virginia Woolf had taken up book-binding as a pastime in October 1901, at the age of 19.

In 1938 Virginia Woolf sold her share of the company to John Lehmann, who had started working for Hogarth Press seven years previously.

Virginia Woolf saw a link between international politics and feminism, publishing a biography of Indian feminist activist Saroj Nalini Dutt and the memoirs of suffragette Elizabeth Robins.

Sybil Oldfield examines Virginia Woolf's convinced pacifism, its sources and its expression in her life and works.

In contrast to her objections to Dostoyevsky's "exaggerated emotional pitch", Virginia Woolf found much to admire in the work of Anton Chekhov and Leo Tolstoy.

Virginia Woolf admired Chekhov for his stories of ordinary people living their lives, doing banal things and plots that had no neat endings.

From Tolstoy, Virginia Woolf drew lessons about how a novelist should depict a character's psychological state and the interior tension within.

Virginia Woolf described her mother as an "invisible presence" in her life, and Ellen Rosenman argues that the mother-daughter relationship is a constant in Woolf's writing.

Virginia Woolf describes how Woolf's modernism needs to be viewed in relationship to her ambivalence towards her Victorian mother, the centre of the former's female identity, and her voyage to her own sense of autonomy.

Virginia Woolf addressed undergraduate women at the ODTAA Society at Girton College, Cambridge, and the Arts Society at Newnham College, with two papers that eventually became A Room of One's Own.

Virginia Woolf was an ardent feminist at a time when women's rights were barely recognised, and anti-colonialist, anti-imperialist, anti-militarist and a pacifist when chauvinism was popular.

Virginia Woolf has been the recipient of considerable homophobic and misogynist criticism.

Virginia Woolf stated in her private letters that she thought of herself as an atheist.

Virginia Woolf thought there were no Gods; no one was to blame; and so she evolved this atheist's religion of doing good for the sake of goodness.

Virginia Woolf was happily married to an irreligious Jewish man who had no connection with or knowledge of his people while she generally characterised Jewish characters with negative stereotypes.

Virginia Woolf's 1938 book Three Guineas was an indictment of fascism and what Woolf described as a recurring propensity among patriarchal societies to enforce repressive societal mores by violence.

Virginia Woolf is known for her contributions to 20th-century literature and her essays, as well as the influence she has had on literary, particularly feminist criticism.

Virginia Woolf's image is ubiquitous and can be found on products ranging from tea towels to T-shirts.

Busts of Virginia Woolf have been erected at her home in Rodmell, Sussex and at Tavistock Square, London, where she lived between 1924 and 1939.