Woolf, (Adeline) Virginia (1882–1941)

Novelist and essayist Virginia Woolf, one of the major English writers of the 20th century. She developed an experimental fiction, using her ‘stream of consciousness’ technique to capture the subtle, ceaseless flow of everyday experience. In several influential essays, she argued that women had to develop their own form of fiction.

English novelist and critic. In novels such as Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), and The Waves (1931), she used a ‘stream of consciousness’ technique to render inner experience. In A Room of One's Own (1929) (non-fiction), Orlando (1928), and The Years (1937), she examines the importance of economic independence for women and other feminist principles.

Her first novel, The Voyage Out (1915), explored the tensions experienced by women who want marriage and a career. After the death of her father, Leslie Stephen, she and her siblings moved to Bloomsbury, forming the nucleus of the Bloomsbury Group. She produced a succession of novels, short stories, and critical essays, included in The Common Reader (1925 and 1932). She was plagued by bouts of depression and committed suicide in 1941.

Virginia Woolf was born in London and was educated at home by her parents and tutors. In 1912 she married the writer Leonard Woolf (1880–1969), with whom she founded the Hogarth Press in 1917. Night and Day was published in 1919, but her first really characteristic work was Jacob's Room (1922). Woolf was a skilled critic, and her other writings include the essays The Death of the Moth and The Moment (both 1942) and a biography of Roger Fry (1940). A Room of One's Own lucidly describes the special problems of a woman writer, and A Writer's Diary (1953), edited by her husband, reveals a great deal about her working methods. Her last work was the novel Between the Acts (1941).