Virginia Woolf

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. Name at birth: Adeline Virginia Stephen. Virginia Woolf, born in London on January 25, 1882, was the daughter of Julia Jackson Duckworth, a member of the Duckworth publishing family, and Leslie Stephen, a literary critic and founder of the Dictionary of National Biography . Woolf, growing up at the family estate at Hyde Park Gate, was educated at home by her father and she never went to school. Virginia was allowed uncensored access to her father’s extensive library, and from an early age determined to be a writer.

Despite her protected childhood, Woolf had a life infused with tragedy. Her mother died when she was in her early teens. Stella Duckworth, Woolf's half sister, died two years later. Leslie Stephen, her father, suffered a slow death from cancer. Following the death of her father in 1904, Woolf moved with her sister, Vanessa, and two brothers to the house in Bloomsbury, which would laster become central to the activities of the Bloomsbury Group, an elite, influential society that helped place Woolf at the center of literary scene of that time. She, later, married writer and fellow Bloomsbury member Leonard Woolf in 1912. according to various rumora, their marriage was unhappy, but her husband helped her, mostly as a friend.

In 1917 the Woolfs bought a printing press and founded the Hogarth Press, named for Hogarth House, their home in the London suburbs. In 1919 they bought a cottage in Rodmell village called Monk's House, where, away fron London scene, Virginia loved to spend   most of her free time. Her sister lived nearby

Virginia Woolf started to work as a tutor at Morley College in 1904 and wrote reviews for some books. From 1905 Woolf began to write for the Times Literary Supplement and over the years these and other essays were collected in a two-volume series called The Common...