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VIRGINIA WOOLF

Born * 25th January 1882 in Middlesex, today United Kingdom

Deceased † 28th March 1941 in Sussex, today United Kingdom

Virginia Woolf, born Adeline Virginia Stephen, was a British author and publisher. She achieved both success and international fame towards the end of the 1920s. Her 1929 essay, A Room of One’s Own became one of the most cited texts of the new women’s movement. She has been considered an inspirational figure for the second wave of feminism, which started in 1968. Woolf was a pioneer of the narrative method called, “stream of consciousness“. In literature, stream of consciousness attempts to represent in writing the unordered thought processes of a person.

Woolf created carefully designed, androgynous female characters with multifaceted psychologies. In her novels Mrs. Dalloway, Orlando and The Waves she also played subtly with gender roles and identities.

Her works make her one of the most important authors of classical modernism. In 2015, 82 international literary critics and scholars named four of her works to their list of the 100 most important British novels.

She married the publisher and author Leonard Woolf in 1912. Virginia described her marriage as happy, although Leonard showed no physical attraction to her. Her husband was not bothered by her affectionate relations with women. Woolf’s relationship with the British author Vita Sackville-West was the inspiration for Orlando – one of Woolf’s most famous works.

Virginia Woolf suffered from severe depression, and took her own life on the 28th of March 1941.