Woolf, Adeline Virginia, née Stephen (1882-1941)

Woolf, Adeline Virginia, née Stephen (1882-1941)

English novelist and critic, a member of the Blommsbury Group, known for the delicacy and sensitivity of her style, the penetration of her psychological studies, especially of mature women of the English upper classes, her skill in evoking mood in her writing, the intensity of her preoccupation with time, experience, and relationships, and her experiments in the use of the techniques of Interior Monologue and Stream of Consciousness. Among her works are The Voyage Out ( 1915); Night and Day ( 1919); Monday or Tuesday ( 1921); Jacob's Room ( 1922); Mrs. Dalloway ( 1925); The Common Reader ( 1925), criticism; To the Lighthouse ( 1927); Orlando ( 1928), said to have been based on the personality of V. Sackvillve-West; A Room of One's Own ( 1929), essays on women; Beau Brummell ( 1930); The Second Common Reader ( 1932), criticism; The Waves ( 1931), regarded as her best work; A Letter to a Young Poet ( 1932), poetry; Flush, a Biography ( 1933), on the spaniel pet of E. B. Browning; The Years ( 1937); Three Guineas ( 1938), essays on the problems of peace; Roger Fry ( 1940), a biography; Between the Acts ( 1941); The Death of the Moth, And Other Essays ( 1942).

Virginia Woolf, considered one of the most important novelists of the 20th century, was the daughter of Sir Leslie Stephen, a wellknown biographer and literary critic, and was related to a number of the most distinguished scholarly families in England, such as the Darwins, the Symondses, and the Stracheys. She was raised in an atmosphere of literature and learning, receiving her education at home and as a young girl made the acquaintance of numerous outstanding authors of the day. The Bloomsbury Group had its inception in the gatherings of a group of former Cambridge University students and their friends which were held at the home of Virginia and her sister Vanessa. The novelist and her husband, Leonard Woolf, an author, editor, and literary critic, together founded the Hogarth Press, a successful publishing house, known for its limited editions of the works of a number of leading 20th-century English writers, which began as a single hand-press. Depressed at the vision of the world about her at war ( World War II), Mrs. Woolf committed suicide by drowning in 1941. For a study of her work, cf. Virginia Woolf, by David Daiches.