Virginia Woolf: The Life Story Behind the Modernist Pioneer
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Virginia Woolf changed the novel by changing what a novel was allowed to notice. Before her, a novel was mostly a story of events: a marriage, a journey, a death, a fortune won or lost. Woolf kept the events, but she moved the centre of the story inside, into the mind, into the passing minute, into the way a person hears a clock strike, sees light fall on a wall, remembers a summer long ago, and feels, in a single afternoon, the whole weight of a life. Mrs Dalloway takes place in one day in London. To the Lighthouse takes place, in its middle, in ten years that pass in a few pages, and in a single evening that takes a hundred. That way of writing, which we now call stream of consciousness, was not a trick for Woolf. It was a way of telling the truth about how life actually feels from the inside.
She was born into a large, book-filled, difficult family in London, she lost her mother when she was thirteen, she suffered from periods of serious mental illness throughout her life, she married Leonard Woolf, a writer and publisher, she founded a publishing house with him in their own home, and she wrote books that were, in her lifetime, admired by a small circle and, after her death, recognised as some of the greatest in English literature. She also wrote A Room of One’s Own, an essay that asked, plainly and angrily, why women had written so little in history, and what they would need, money and a room of their own, in order to write at all. That essay is still read, still argued about, and still quoted, a hundred years after it was written.
Woolf died in 1941, at the age of fifty-nine, in the middle of a war, after a life that was both brilliant and painful. This is her story, told as simply as I can tell it, about a woman who listened to the world more closely than almost anyone else, and who found, in that listening, a new way to write.
A London Childhood in a House Full of Books
Adeline Virginia Stephen was born on 25 January 1882 in London, in a tall house in Hyde Park Gate, in Kensington, a comfortable, literary part of the city. Her father, Leslie Stephen, was a well-known writer, editor and critic, a man of great learning and, by many accounts, a difficult temper, and her mother, Julia Stephen, was a beautiful, kind, capable woman who ran the household, cared for the children, visited the sick, and was, for Virginia, the centre of the world. Virginia was the third child of her parents’ marriage, with an older sister, Vanessa, who would become a painter, and an older brother, Thoby, who would die young, and with younger brothers and half-brothers and sisters from her parents’ earlier marriages, making a large, crowded, lively household.
The house was full of books, full of talk, full of visitors who were writers, artists and thinkers, and Virginia grew up listening to conversations that most children never hear. She was taught at home, by her parents and by tutors, rather than being sent to school in the formal way boys were, and she read widely, in English, in French, in Greek, and she began to write in her teens, keeping a diary, writing stories, and starting a family newspaper with her siblings. She was, from the start, a serious reader and a serious writer, a girl who understood that words were not only for school but for making sense of a life that was, even then, confusing and painful.
Her mother died in 1895, when Virginia was thirteen, and the loss changed her life completely. Julia Stephen had been the emotional centre of the house, the person who held it together, and without her, the household fell into sadness and disorder. Virginia suffered her first serious breakdown after her mother’s death, a period of illness that would, in different forms, return throughout her life. It is important to say, plainly, that Woolf suffered from mental illness, that she had periods of deep depression and of manic excitement, that she was treated by doctors of her time, and that those treatments, by modern standards, were often unhelpful. She lived with that illness, she wrote about it, indirectly, in her books, and she managed, for long periods, to live and work well despite it.
Two years after her mother’s death, her half-sister Stella died, and then, in 1904, her father died, and Virginia suffered another breakdown. The family, by then, had moved to Bloomsbury, a quieter, more bohemian part of London, and Virginia, Vanessa, Thoby and Adrian, her younger brother, began to build a new life there, a life centred on art, on books, on conversation, and on freedom from the strict, Victorian household they had grown up in. Thoby died in 1906, of typhoid, after a trip to Greece, and that loss, too, marked Virginia deeply. She had lost, by the age of twenty-four, her mother, her half-sister, her father and her brother, and she carried those losses with her for the rest of her life.
What her childhood gave her, alongside the losses, was a deep knowledge of how a family works, how a house feels, how a mother’s presence shapes a child’s world, and how a father’s learning shapes a daughter’s mind. She also learned, from her father’s library, from the talk at the dinner table, and from her own reading, that a woman could think, could write, could have ideas, even in a world that did not expect her to. That knowledge, and that determination, would become the driving force of her adult life.
Bloomsbury, Friendship and a New Kind of Freedom
After her father’s death, Virginia and her siblings settled in Gordon Square, in Bloomsbury, and their house became a meeting place for a group of young men and women who would become known as the Bloomsbury Group. They were writers, artists, economists, philosophers and critics, including her brother Thoby’s friends from Cambridge, men such as Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell, John Maynard Keynes, E. M. Forster and Roger Fry, and women such as Vanessa, who married Clive Bell, and Virginia herself. They met in the evenings, they talked about art, about literature, about politics, about love, and they talked, unusually for their time, honestly and openly, without the formal manners of Victorian London.
Bloomsbury was, for Virginia, a liberation. In her parents’ house, there had been rules, expectations, and a sense that a young woman should be quiet, modest and domestic. In Bloomsbury, she could talk, she could argue, she could laugh, she could be clever, and she could be herself. She began to write for newspapers and magazines, to review books, to publish essays, and to think seriously about writing a novel. She was, by then, in her twenties, and she was, for the first time in her life, living among people who took her mind seriously.
She also began, in those years, to understand her own sexuality, and to form relationships that were, by the standards of her time, unconventional. She had a close, loving relationship with Vita Sackville-West, a writer and gardener, in the 1920s, a relationship that inspired Orlando, one of her most playful and most daring novels, and she had friendships with many women who understood her in ways that men, even kind men, sometimes did not. It is important to say this plainly, without gossip and without exaggeration, because it was a central part of her life, and because it shaped her writing about women, about love, and about freedom.
In 1912, she married Leonard Woolf, a writer, journalist and former colonial administrator who had worked in Ceylon, now Sri Lanka, and who had returned to England to write and to think about politics. Leonard was a steady, kind, intelligent man, and he loved Virginia deeply, and he understood, better than most people, the nature of her illness and the need to protect her from too much strain. Their marriage was, by all accounts, a partnership in the truest sense: they worked together, they lived together, they supported each other, and Leonard, in particular, took on the daily work of caring for Virginia when she was ill, of managing their household, and of making it possible for her to write. Without Leonard, it is unlikely that Woolf would have written as much as she did, or lived as long as she did.
They had no children, a decision that was, in part, shaped by doctors’ advice about Virginia’s health, and by Virginia’s own feeling that she was not suited to motherhood. It was a sad decision for both of them, in different ways, but it was a decision they made together, and it allowed Virginia to devote herself to writing, which was, for her, the most important work of her life.
The Voyage Out and the First Novels
Woolf’s first novel, The Voyage Out, was published in 1915, after years of work and revision, and after a breakdown that followed its completion. It tells the story of Rachel Vinrace, a young woman who travels by ship to South America, falls in love, becomes engaged, and dies of a fever, a story that is, in many ways, a portrait of a young woman discovering the world and discovering herself, only to have that discovery cut short. The novel is more conventional in form than Woolf’s later books, but it already shows her interest in the inner life, in the thoughts and feelings of a woman, and in the way a journey can change a person.
Her second novel, Night and Day, published in 1919, is also more conventional, a story of love and marriage in London, of two women, Katherine Hilbery and Mary Datchet, and the men they love, and it was, in some ways, a step back, a novel that Woolf herself later felt was too traditional, too much like the novels she had grown up reading. She was, by then, beginning to understand what she really wanted to do as a writer, and it was not to write traditional novels. It was to write something new, something that captured the flow of consciousness, the way a mind moves from one thought to another, from the present to the past, from a sound to a memory, without stopping.
The Hogarth Press, which she and Leonard founded in 1917, in their home in Richmond, was a crucial part of that discovery. They bought a small hand press, they learned to print, they published their own work and the work of friends, including T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, and they created a space where Woolf could publish what she wanted, how she wanted, without having to please a commercial publisher. The Press gave her freedom, and it gave her a practical, hands-on understanding of how a book is made, from the type to the paper to the binding. It also gave her and Leonard a shared project, a business they ran together, and a source of income, modest but real.
In 1922, she published Jacob’s Room, a novel about a young man, Jacob Flanders, who dies in the First World War, told not through a straightforward story but through fragments, through the impressions of people who knew him, through rooms he lived in, through objects he left behind. It was a breakthrough, a novel that showed Woolf had found her own form, a form that was not about plot but about presence, about the way a person exists in the world even when he is not there. It was also a novel about loss, about a generation lost in war, and about a mother who loses a son, themes that were close to Woolf’s own experience of loss.
Mrs Dalloway and One Day in London
Mrs Dalloway, published in 1925, is Woolf’s most famous novel, and it is, in many ways, her most perfect. It takes place on a single day in June, in London, in the years after the First World War, and it follows Clarissa Dalloway, a middle-aged woman, the wife of a Member of Parliament, as she prepares for a party she is giving that evening. She walks through London, she buys flowers, she meets old friends, she remembers a summer long ago, she thinks about a man she once loved, Peter Walsh, who has returned from India, and she thinks about her life, about the choices she made, about the woman she might have been. At the same time, the novel follows Septimus Warren Smith, a young veteran of the war, who is suffering from shell shock, who hears voices, who is terrified, and who, at the end of the day, kills himself, an event that Clarissa hears about at her party, and that makes her think, with a sudden clarity, about life and death.
The novel is written in a style that moves, without warning, from one mind to another, from Clarissa to Septimus, from Peter to a stranger on the street, following the flow of thought as it moves through a city. The sound of a car backfiring, the sight of an aeroplane writing in the sky, the striking of Big Ben, all of these small events connect the characters, and they connect the reader to the city itself. It is a novel about London, about the war, about mental illness, about marriage, about love, and about the way a single day can contain a whole life. It is also a novel that shows Woolf’s great gift: the ability to make the ordinary, a woman buying flowers, a man walking in a park, feel like the most important thing in the world.
Mrs Dalloway was a success, and it established Woolf as one of the leading writers of her time. It was read, it was praised, it was discussed, and it has been read ever since, in schools, in universities, in book clubs, and by ordinary readers who find, in Clarissa’s day, a mirror of their own days, their own choices, their own regrets. The novel has been adapted for film, for the stage, for the opera, and it has inspired other writers, most famously Michael Cunningham, whose novel The Hours, about Woolf herself and about three women reading Mrs Dalloway, won the Pulitzer Prize and was made into a film.
Woolf herself was, by the time Mrs Dalloway was published, a well-known writer, a central figure in Bloomsbury, and a woman who was, for the first time, financially secure, thanks to the Hogarth Press and to the success of her books. She bought a house in Sussex, Monk’s House in Rodmell, where she and Leonard spent weekends and summers, and where she wrote many of her later books. She was, in her forties, at the height of her powers, and she knew it, and she worked, with great discipline, to make the most of the time she had.
To the Lighthouse and the Art of Time
To the Lighthouse, published in 1927, is, for many readers, Woolf’s greatest novel, and it is certainly her most personal. It tells the story of the Ramsay family, who spend summers on the Isle of Skye, in Scotland, and who plan, again and again, to go to the lighthouse, a trip that is delayed, first by weather, then by war, then by death, and that finally happens, ten years later, when the children are grown and the parents are dead. The novel is in three parts: the first, a single evening, in which Mrs Ramsay, the mother, holds the family together with her warmth and her care; the second, a short, devastating section called Time Passes, in which the First World War happens, Mrs Ramsay dies, two of her children die, and the house falls into decay; and the third, a morning, ten years later, in which Mr Ramsay and his children finally sail to the lighthouse, and Lily Briscoe, a painter who has been trying, for ten years, to finish a painting, finally finishes it, with a single line down the centre.
The novel is, in many ways, a portrait of Woolf’s own parents: Mrs Ramsay is based on her mother, Julia, and Mr Ramsay is based on her father, Leslie, and the house on Skye is based on the house in Cornwall where Woolf spent summers as a child. It is a novel about a mother who dies, about a father who is difficult and loving at the same time, about children who grow up and leave, and about art, about the attempt to make something that lasts, a painting, a book, a memory, in a world where everything passes. It is also a novel about time itself, about how ten years can pass in a few pages, and how a single evening can take a hundred, and how the past is never really past, but lives on in the present, in the way we remember.
Woolf wrote To the Lighthouse quickly, by her standards, in a burst of energy, and she was proud of it, though she also doubted it, as she doubted all her books. It was a success, and it confirmed her reputation as a great writer, a writer who had, in her forties, found a form that was entirely her own. It is still read today, still taught, still loved, and it is still, for many readers, the book that shows, more clearly than any other, what Woolf could do: take a family, a house, a summer, and make them into a meditation on life, on death, on art, and on the way we try, and fail, and try again, to understand each other.
In the same period, Woolf wrote Orlando, published in 1928, a playful, fantastical novel about a young man who lives for three hundred years, who changes sex, who becomes a woman, who lives through the centuries, and who, in the end, becomes a writer. The novel was inspired by Vita Sackville-West, and it is a love letter to her, a book that plays with time, with gender, with history, and with the idea that a person can be many things in one life. It was a popular success, more popular than her other novels, and it showed a lighter, funnier side of Woolf that many readers had not seen before.
A Room of One’s Own and the Question of Women
In 1929, Woolf published A Room of One’s Own, based on lectures she had given at Cambridge, in which she asked a simple question: why have women written so little, and what would they need in order to write more? Her answer, in the famous phrase that gives the book its title, was that a woman needs money and a room of her own, a place where she can work without interruption, and an income that gives her independence. She imagined, in the book, a sister of Shakespeare, Judith Shakespeare, a woman as talented as her brother, who is not allowed to go to school, who is married off, who runs away to London, who is laughed at, who becomes pregnant, and who kills herself. It is a powerful, angry, sad image, and it is one that has stayed with readers for a hundred years.
The essay is not only about money and rooms. It is about the history of women’s writing, about the ways women have been silenced, about the ways they have written in secret, in the margins, in letters, in diaries, and about the ways they have, despite everything, written great books. Woolf writes about Jane Austen, about the Brontes, about George Eliot, and she writes, with great warmth, about the women who came before her, and about the women who will come after her. It is a book that is both a piece of literary history and a call to action, and it is still, today, one of the most important feminist texts ever written.
Woolf continued to write novels in the 1930s, including The Waves in 1931, a novel told in the voices of six friends, from childhood to old age, in a style that is almost like poetry, and The Years in 1937, a novel about a family over fifty years, from the 1880s to the 1930s. Both books were successful, though neither was as loved as Mrs Dalloway or To the Lighthouse, and Woolf herself was, by then, tired, ill, and worried about the world. The 1930s were a dark decade in Europe, with fascism rising in Italy and Germany, with war coming, and Woolf, who was Jewish by marriage, who had friends who were Jewish, who hated war and hated fascism, wrote about those fears in her work, most directly in Three Guineas, published in 1938, an essay about war, about patriarchy, and about the need for women to refuse to support war.
She was, in her fifties, a famous writer, a respected figure, and a woman who was, increasingly, exhausted by the effort of writing, by the effort of living with her illness, and by the effort of watching the world she loved fall apart. She and Leonard lived in London during the Blitz, the German bombing of London in 1940 and 1941, and their house in London was damaged, their home in Sussex became their refuge, and the war, which had seemed distant, became close, loud and terrifying.
The Final Years, the War and a Quiet River
In the last years of her life, Woolf worked on a final novel, Between the Acts, a book about a village pageant, about a summer’s day in England, about the past and the present, about art and about war, a book that she finished, in draft, in early 1941, and that was published after her death. She was, by then, very ill, suffering from another breakdown, hearing voices, feeling that she was a burden to Leonard, feeling that she could not write anymore, and feeling that the war would never end. She wrote a letter to Leonard, a loving, clear, heartbreaking letter, in which she said that she felt she was going mad again, that she could not go through another of those terrible times, and that she was doing what seemed the best thing to do.
On 28 March 1941, she walked to the River Ouse, near Monk’s House in Rodmell, Sussex, put stones in her pockets, and drowned herself. She was fifty-nine years old. Her body was found weeks later, and Leonard, who had loved her for almost thirty years, buried her ashes under an elm tree in their garden. It is a sad ending, and it is important to tell it plainly, without sensational detail, and without turning it into a simple story about a writer who could not cope. Woolf had coped, for decades, with an illness that would have defeated many people, and she had written great books while coping with it. Her death was a tragedy, but it was not the whole of her life, and it should not be the only thing we remember about her.
Leonard lived for almost thirty more years, and he devoted much of that time to preserving Woolf’s work, to publishing her diaries, her letters, her unfinished writings, and to making sure that the world would not forget her. He was, in that work, as faithful as he had been in life, and the world owes him a great debt for it. Without Leonard, many of Woolf’s writings, including her diaries, which are now recognised as a major part of her work, might have been lost.
Today, Woolf is read more widely than ever before. Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando, A Room of One’s Own, The Waves, and her diaries are taught in schools and universities, they are read in book clubs, they are adapted for film and for the stage, and they are loved by readers who find, in her work, a way of seeing the world that is both beautiful and true. She is recognised, now, as one of the great modernist writers, alongside Joyce, Proust and Kafka, and as one of the great feminist writers, alongside Mary Wollstonecraft and Simone de Beauvoir. Her house in Sussex, Monk’s House, is open to visitors, and people come from all over the world to see where she wrote, to walk in her garden, and to stand by the river where she died, and to remember a woman who changed the novel forever.
My Take:
I think Virginia Woolf is the writer I have learned the most from about paying attention, and I do not mean that in a vague, poetic way. I mean it in a practical way. When I read Mrs Dalloway, I notice, for days afterwards, the sound of a clock, the light on a wall, the way a person I pass in the street is thinking about something I will never know. Woolf taught me that a life is not only the big events, the wedding, the job, the death, but the small moments in between, the moments when you are buying flowers, when you are waiting for a bus, when you are remembering a summer from twenty years ago. Those moments are, for most of us, most of life, and Woolf is one of the few writers who took them seriously.
What I admire most about her is her courage in breaking the rules of the novel. In her time, a novel was supposed to have a plot, to have a beginning, a middle and an end, to tell you what happened and why. Woolf said, in effect, that life does not happen like that. Life happens in fragments, in thoughts, in memories, in the way a mind jumps from one thing to another, and a novel that wants to be true to life has to follow that jump, even if it confuses the reader. That was a brave thing to do, because readers, publishers and critics did not always like it, and Woolf knew that. She did it anyway, because she believed that honesty mattered more than ease, and that belief is, I think, the mark of a great artist.
I also think about her childhood, and about how much loss she carried, and I wonder how she managed to write at all. She lost her mother at thirteen, her half-sister at fifteen, her father at twenty-two, her brother at twenty-four, and she lived with an illness that returned, again and again, for the rest of her life. Many people, with that much loss and that much illness, would have given up, or would have lived a small, safe life. Woolf did the opposite. She built a life in Bloomsbury, she married a kind man, she founded a press, she wrote books that changed literature, and she did it while living with a mind that, at times, turned against her. That is not a small achievement. It is an extraordinary one, and it is one that deserves more respect than it usually gets, because we tend to remember the end of her life and forget the decades of work that came before it.
Her marriage to Leonard is the part of her story I return to most, because it shows what love can look like when it is not romantic in the simple sense, but practical, patient and daily. Leonard did not write her books for her, and he did not cure her illness, but he made a life in which she could write, in which she could be ill and still be loved, in which she could work and still be cared for. He managed their press, he managed their money, he managed their household, and he watched, carefully, for the signs that she was becoming ill again, and he acted, when he could, to protect her. That is not a glamorous kind of love, but it is a real kind, and it is the kind that lasts. I think many marriages could learn from Leonard and Virginia, not because their marriage was perfect, but because it was honest, because they knew each other’s faults and loved each other anyway.
A Room of One’s Own is the book I would give to any young woman who wants to write, or to any young person who wants to make art and feels that the world is against them. Woolf’s argument is simple, and it is still true: you need money, and you need a room, and you need time, and without those things, talent is not enough. It is not a romantic argument, and it is not a comforting one, because it says, plainly, that art needs material conditions, that a writer who is hungry, who is interrupted, who has no place to work, will find it very hard to write. That is a hard truth, but it is a useful one, because it tells us what to fight for, not only for ourselves but for others: money for women, rooms for women, time for women, and, by extension, money, rooms and time for anyone who has been told that their art does not matter.
I also want to say something about her illness, because it is often talked about in a way that makes it sound like the whole of her, or like the reason for her genius, and I do not think either of those things is true. Woolf was ill, and her illness shaped her life, and it shaped her writing, but it was not her genius. Her genius was her attention, her language, her ability to see the world clearly, and those things were hers, not her illness’s. To say that she wrote well because she was ill is to diminish her work, and to say that she died because she was weak is to misunderstand her life. She was strong, for decades, in a way that most people are not, and her death, sad as it was, was the end of a long struggle, not a sign that she had never struggled well.
To the Lighthouse is the book I love most, and I love it for a reason that is, I think, very personal. My own mother is, for me, the centre of my early life, as Julia Stephen was for Virginia, and the portrait of Mrs Ramsay, a woman who holds a family together with her warmth, her care, her ability to make a house feel like a home, is a portrait I recognise. Mrs Ramsay dies in the middle of the novel, in a few lines, in brackets, almost as an afterthought, and that is, I think, the most honest thing Woolf ever wrote about death: that a person who was the centre of your world can die, and the world goes on, and the house falls into decay, and ten years pass, and you are still trying to understand what you lost. That is not a dramatic death. It is a real death, and it is why the novel still moves me every time I read it.
I think about Lily Briscoe, the painter in To the Lighthouse, a lot, because she is, in many ways, Woolf herself. Lily tries, for ten years, to finish a painting, she doubts it, she puts it aside, she returns to it, and in the end, she finishes it with a single line down the centre, and she has, as Woolf puts it, her vision. That is a perfect image for what it is to make art: you work, you doubt, you wait, you return, and one day, if you are lucky, you see, clearly, what you were trying to do, and you do it. It does not have to be perfect. It has to be true. Lily’s painting is not a masterpiece in the usual sense. It is a painting that is finished, and that, for Woolf, was enough. I find that comforting, because it suggests that finishing is, in itself, a kind of success.
Orlando is the book that makes me smile, because it is playful, because it is funny, because it is a love letter to Vita Sackville-West, and because it shows that Woolf was not always serious. She could be witty, she could be daring, she could write about a man who becomes a woman, who lives for three hundred years, who writes a poem, and she could do it with a lightness that is rare in her work. I think it is important to remember that lightness, because Woolf is often presented as a sad, serious writer, and she was, but she was also a woman who loved, who laughed, who gardened, who walked, who enjoyed a joke. Orlando reminds me of that, and I am grateful for it.
If I am honest, I do not love every Woolf novel equally. The Waves is, for me, beautiful and hard, a book that I admire more than I enjoy, and The Years is, for me, long and, at times, slow. I say that not to be unkind, but because I think it is important to be honest about a writer’s work. Woolf was at her best when she was writing about a single day, a single evening, a single family, and she was at her weakest when she tried to write about a whole lifetime, or about many lives at once. That is true of most writers, and it is especially true of Woolf, because her gift was for the small, the precise, the moment, not for the large, the sweeping, the epic.
Her death is the part of her story I find hardest to write about, and I have thought about it a great deal while writing this. I do not want to turn it into a lesson, and I do not want to turn it into a warning. I want to say, plainly, that she was ill, that she was tired, that she was afraid, that she loved Leonard, that she wrote him a letter, and that she walked to a river and died. That is a tragedy, and it is a loss, and it is also, in the end, a choice she made, in a moment of great pain, and I do not feel that I have the right to judge that choice from a distance, in a different time, with different medicine, with different understanding. What I do feel I have the right to say is that her life was more than her death, that her books are more than her illness, and that the woman who wrote Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse deserves to be remembered for her work, not only for her ending.
I think her legacy is, in the end, a simple one: she taught us to pay attention, to listen to the mind, to notice the small things, and to believe that a woman’s life, a woman’s thoughts, a woman’s art, matter as much as a man’s. That last point is, I think, the most important, because in her time, it was not believed, and in our time, it is still not believed as fully as it should be. Woolf fought for it, in her books, in her essays, in her life, and she won, in a way that is still unfolding, in every woman who writes, who paints, who thinks, who asks for a room of her own. That is a legacy that is still alive, and it is a legacy that I, as a reader, am grateful for every day.
I would recommend Woolf to a new reader by starting with Mrs Dalloway, because it is short, because it is clear, and because it shows, in one day, what she could do. Then I would read To the Lighthouse, slowly, without rushing, and I would let it take its time, as Woolf took her time writing it. Then I would read A Room of One’s Own, because it is short, because it is angry, and because it is still, a hundred years later, one of the most useful books ever written about what it takes to make art. That is not a long reading list, but it is a rich one, and it is a list that will, I think, change the way you see the world, and the way you see your own life, which is, after all, what great books are for.
I also think about Monk’s House, her home in Sussex, and about how important a place can be for a writer. She bought it with Leonard, she gardened there, she walked there, she wrote there, and it was, for her, a refuge from London, from the Blitz, from the noise, a place where she could be quiet, where she could work, where she could, for a few days, be herself without interruption. That is, in many ways, the room of one’s own that she wrote about, not only a room in a house, but a house in a village, a place that is yours, where you can think, where you can write, where you can be alone with your thoughts. I think everyone who wants to make art needs a place like that, even if it is only a corner of a room, a desk, a chair, a few hours a day, and Woolf, who fought for that place, who wrote about it, who lived it, is a reminder that a place matters, that time matters, and that money, modest as it was for her, matters too.
Her diaries are the part of her work I return to when I want to understand her as a person, not only as a novelist, because they are honest, they are funny, they are sad, they are, in short, a record of a life lived day by day, of a woman who wrote about the weather, about a walk, about a book she was reading, about a dinner, about her illness, about her work, and who, in doing so, created a portrait of herself that is more complete, more human, than any biography could be. I recommend her diaries to anyone who loves Woolf, because they show, in a way her novels do not, the daily effort of writing, of living with illness, of being married, of being a woman in a world that did not always take women seriously, and of doing it anyway, with grace, with humour, and with a stubborn determination to keep going.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Virginia Woolf best known for writing?
She is best known for Mrs Dalloway from 1925, about one day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway in London, and To the Lighthouse from 1927, about the Ramsay family and a delayed trip to a lighthouse, both written in her stream of consciousness style.
What does stream of consciousness mean in Virginia Woolf’s novels?
It means writing that follows the flow of a character’s thoughts, memories and feelings as they happen, moving from the present to the past and back again, instead of telling a story only through outside events in order.
Who was Leonard Woolf and how did he help her?
Leonard Woolf was her husband from 1912, a writer and publisher who cared for her during her periods of mental illness, managed their household, and founded the Hogarth Press with her in 1917, which published her books and gave her freedom to write as she wished.
What is A Room of One’s Own about?
It is an essay from 1929 arguing that a woman needs money and a room of her own in order to write, and it imagines a talented sister of Shakespeare who is denied education and opportunity, showing how history has silenced women writers.
What was the Bloomsbury Group?
It was a circle of writers, artists and thinkers in London, centred on Virginia and her siblings in Bloomsbury after 1904, including Lytton Strachey, E. M. Forster, John Maynard Keynes and Roger Fry, who met to talk openly about art, literature and life.
Did Virginia Woolf suffer from mental illness?
Yes, she suffered from periods of serious mental illness throughout her adult life, including deep depression and times of great agitation, beginning after her mother’s death when she was thirteen, and she was treated by doctors of her time, though their treatments were often unhelpful by modern standards.
When and how did Virginia Woolf die?
She died on 28 March 1941, at the age of fifty-nine, in the River Ouse near her home in Rodmell, Sussex, during the Second World War, after a period of serious illness, and Leonard Woolf later buried her ashes in their garden.
