Who was Virginia Woolf?
She was born Adeline Virginia Stephen in 1882 into a family with strong literary connections. Her mother, Julia, had previously been married to Herbert Duckworth, a barrister. (Their son, Gerald, went on to found the Duckworth publishing company.) Her father, Sir Leslie Stephen, a literary critic, had also been married before. Eight siblings and half-siblings shared the family home in London. Virginia was only 13 when her mother’s death triggered a nervous breakdown – the first of her many bouts of mental illness. After their father died in 1904, Virginia moved to a house in Bloomsbury with her two brothers and her sister, Vanessa, who was a painter. The siblings and their friends became the hub of an exclusive community of writers and artists referred to by critics as ‘the Bloomsbury Group’. At the end of that year, Virginia began writing reviews, initially for a clerical newspaper and then for the Times Literary Supplement. Her first novel, The Voyage Out, was completed in 1913, but
Woolf was born Adeline Virginia Stephen in 1882 into a family with strong literary connections. Woolf, along with some of her siblings, was later also a member of an exclusive community of writers and artists who became known as the Bloomsbury group. In 1912, Virginia married Leonard Woolf and together they set up a publishing business. In March 1941, Woolf committed suicide. She had suffered from bouts of mental illness all her life.
Novelist. Date and Place of Birth: 25th January 1882, London, England. Family Background: Christened Adeline Virginia Stephen. Daughter of Sir Leslie Stephen, writer and first editor of the Dictionary of National Biography and Julia. Both parents had been married before. Sir Leslie to one of Thackeray’s daughters. Both had children already. Education: Educated at home by her father. Chronology/Biography of Virginia Woolf: 1883: Virginia lived at Number 22 Hyde Park Gate, Kensington, London with the seven other children of the extended family which had been made up by both her parents previous marriages. 1890: The family spent many long holidays at this period at St.Ives in Cornwall and it was to become the setting of many of her novels and inspired “To the Lighthouse”. 1891: Started the “Hyde Park Gate News” a weekly newspaper which contained her first works of fiction. 1895: Death of her Mother. Virginia suffered her first mental breakdown. Her half sister Stella took on the running o
