Virginia Woolf Biography

Virginia Woolf is remembered as both a feminist and a modernist whose novels often ignored traditional plots to follow the inner lives and musings of her characters. As a young woman Woolf moved with her siblings to Gordon Square, Bloomsbury. The house became a gathering place for writers, artists and intellectuals and this “Bloomsbury Group” is remembered as an incubator of modern artistic thought. She married writer and fellow Bloomsbury member Leonard Woolf in 1912, and they founded the small Hogarth Press. Her first major published work was The Voyage Out (1915); other books included Jacob’s Room (1922), Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), and Orlando (1928). Her 1929 book A Room of One’s Own collected her lectures and meditations on the place of women in literature. Her diaries also have been widely reprinted. Woolf suffered from depression and fits of mental illness for much of her life, and finally committed suicide by drowning herself in the river Ouse near Sussex, England.