Writer and Feminist Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf

“I have a deeply hidden and inarticulate desire for something beyond the daily life.” 

She was born Adeline Virginia Stephen on January 25, 1882, in London. She was an English writer, essayist and feminist. In her works she experimented with stream-of-consciousness, the underlying psychological as well as emotional motives of characters, and the various possibilities of fractured narrative and chronology,

From a young age, Virginia enjoyed telling stories, and she would regularly tell bedtime stories to other children about her neighbors. She also wrote in a journal everyday of her life.Virginia was home schooled by her father who was an author as well. Later she came to despise the way women were treated in society and the fact that her brother's got to go to college while she kept home. Virginia's mother was a nurse who also wrote a book. As a young girl, Virginia was curious, light-hearted and playful. Sadly, Virginia wouldn't stay that way for very long. 

Virginia was sexually abused by her half-brothers George and Gerald Duckworth. In 1895, at the age of 13, her mother died suddenly from rheumatic fever, which led to Virginia's first mental breakdown. Her half-sister Stella had become the head of the household, but died two years later.  A second severe breakdown followed the death of her father in 1904. During this time, Virginia first attempted suicide and was institutionalized. In 1905, she began writing professionally as a contributor for The Times Literary Supplement. A year later, Woolf's 26-year-old brother Thoby died from typhoid fever after a family trip to Greece. All of these events mixed with her bipolar disorder, fueled her course from literary expression and personal desolation that continued throughout the rest of her life.

Virginia and her brothers and sister moved to Bloomsbury, London and there they became members of a group of the artists called Bloomsbury Group. Here Virginia met writer Leonard Woolf, whom she married in August 1912. Together, they moved to Richmond, where they opened a publishing office called Hogarth House Press.

In 1915, her first novel, "The Voyage Out", was released.  In 1919, a year after the end of World War I, the Woolfs purchased a cottage in the village of Rodmell in, and that same year Virginia published her novel Night and Day. Her third novel Jacob's Room was published in 1922 and was based on her brother Thoby. That year, she met author, poet and landscape gardener Vita Sackville-West, the wife of English diplomat Harold Nicolson. Virginia and Vita began a friendship that developed into a romantic affair. Their affair eventually ended and they remained friends for the rest of her life.

In March 1941, Virginia was 59 years old when she put rocks in her pockets and drowned herself in the River Ouse, near her house. She left a suicide note: "I feel certain that I am going mad again: I feel we can't go through another of those terrible times. And I shan't recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and can't concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do. You have given me the greatest possible happiness... I can't fight it any longer, I know that I am spoiling your life, that without me you could work"

At the end of her life she had published nine novels and over 500 essays.