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Biography
British

Virginia Woolf

1882 — 1941

Virginia Woolf was a British novelist, essayist, and publisher who was a central figure of literary modernism. Her novels — including Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), Orlando (1928), and The Waves (1931) — pioneered the use of stream of consciousness and interior monologue. She is also one of the most important feminist thinkers of the twentieth century, through essays such as A Room of One's Own (1929).

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PeriodModern
NationalityBritish
1. Biography

A short life of the author

Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) was born Adeline Virginia Stephen on 25 January 1882 in London. Her father was Sir Leslie Stephen, the editor of the Dictionary of National Biography. She married Leonard Woolf in 1912, and together they founded the Hogarth Press in 1917.

Life and Career

Woolf’s early novels — The Voyage Out (1915) and Night and Day (1919) — are relatively conventional. Her modernist breakthrough came with Jacob’s Room (1922), followed by her three greatest novels.

Mrs Dalloway (1925) — which follows Clarissa Dalloway through a single day in London as she prepares for a party, intercut with the story of Septimus Warren Smith, a shell-shocked veteran — is her most widely read novel. To the Lighthouse (1927) — about the Ramsay family’s visits to their summer house in the Hebrides — is her most emotionally devastating work, drawing on her own parents and the loss of her mother. The Waves (1931) — six voices speaking in lyrical soliloquy from childhood to old age — is her most formally radical.

Orlando (1928) — a fantasy biography of a character who lives for centuries and changes sex, inspired by Vita Sackville-West — is her most exuberant novel. A Room of One’s Own (1929) — arguing that a woman needs money and a room of her own to write — is one of the foundational texts of feminism.

Woolf suffered from severe mental illness throughout her life. She died by suicide on 28 March 1941, walking into the River Ouse with stones in her pockets.

Major Works and Themes

Woolf wrote about consciousness, time, grief, gender, and the difficulty of communicating with other people. She is one of the greatest prose stylists in the English language.

Key Works

  • Mrs Dalloway (1925)
  • To the Lighthouse (1927)

Collecting Woolf

Hogarth Press first editions are the primary collected form. Mrs Dalloway (1925) brings $5,000–$15,000 in fine condition with dust jacket. To the Lighthouse (1927) brings $3,000–$10,000. Woolf died in 1941.

2. Works

Bibliography

4 on file
TitleYearPublisherLanguage
Mrs Dalloway
Virginia Woolf's fourth novel follows Clarissa Dalloway through a single June day in post-war London, pioneering the stream-of-consciousness technique in English fiction. Published by the Woolfs' own Hogarth Press in 1925, it is one of the central texts of literary modernism and a milestone in the representation of consciousness, time, and female interiority in the novel.
 1925 Hogarth Press English
Orlando: A Biography
Woolf's exuberant, genre-defying fantasia — a mock-biography spanning four centuries in which the protagonist changes sex from man to woman. Published by the Hogarth Press in 1928, inspired by Vita Sackville-West, and illustrated with photographs.
 1928 Hogarth Press English
The Waves
Woolf's most formally radical novel — six voices speaking in poetic soliloquies from childhood to old age, punctuated by descriptions of waves breaking on a shore. Published by the Hogarth Press in 1931, it represents the furthest reach of modernist prose fiction.
 1931 Hogarth Press English
To the Lighthouse
Woolf's autobiographical masterpiece about the Ramsay family's summers on a Scottish island — a meditation on time, loss, memory, and art that revolutionised the English novel. Published by the Hogarth Press in 1927, it is among the most valuable modernist firsts.
 1927 Hogarth Press English