WOOLF, (ADELINE) VIRGINIA (STEPHEN)
(January 25, 1882--March 28, 1941)

English novelist and critic, was born in London. Virginia Stephen was a member of an upper middle-class family, with interesting antecedents and connections. Her father was Sir Leslie Stephen, critic and first editor of the Dictionary of National Biography; her mother, Julia, widow of Herbert Duckworth and niece of the  pioneer photographer Julia Margaret Cameron, was his second wife. Virginia, known affectionately to her siblings as "the Goat," was the third of four children, preceded by Vanessa, later a painter and wife of the art critic Clive Bell, and Thoby, who died of typhoid fever in 1906, soon after taking his degree at Cambridge. Thoby's university friends formed the nucleus of the Bloomsbury group, which included the philosopher G. E. Moore, E. M. Forster, and many other notables. The youngest child was Adrian, who eventually became a physician. At one time or another the Stephen household also numbered Sir Leslie's daughter by his first wife, and the three Duckworth children, George, Stella, and Gerald (later the founder of Duckworth and Company Publishers)--who played key roles in Virginia Stephen's early life.

The two Stephen daughters were educated for the most part by their parents, at home, and in her adolescence Virginia was given the run of her father's library. Her hours of reading there were her real education, to some extent a substitute for the university courses she was denied because of her sex. Virginia Stephen's writing career may be said to have begun when she was nine years old and started a weekly paper, The Hyde Park Gate News, chroniciling family doings in their Kensington home and at Talland House in St. Ives, Cornwall, where they spent their summers from 1882 to 1894. Guests there included, besides family members in great numbers, her father's friends George Meredith, Ralph Waldo Emerson, James Russell Lowell, and Henry James. One of her news notes reports a trip to the nearby lighthouse, since "there was a prefect tide and wind for going there." As Quentin Bell, in his biography of his aunt, states: "St. Ives provided a treasury of reminiscent gold from which she drew again and again. . . . Cornwall was the Eden of her youth, an unfortgettable paradise." It was the setting for Jacob's Room, The Waves, and--above all--To the Lighthouse, though in the latter the summer home of the Ramsays becomes Skye. In Mrs. Ramsey, the woman who holds them all, family and friends, together, the novelist portrayed her mother. In 1895, when Virginia was thirteen, Julia Stephen died. It was at this time that she first suffered symptoms of her manic-depressive (or bi-polar) illness, which was to plague her life.

Woolf's illness, though diagnosable, was as individual as the most manifestations of manic-depression. She suffered from "mixed states" of depression and elation. Sometimes in these troubled years Virginia was disturbed further by the sexual advances of her half-brother George Duckworth. (He remained a tolerated but persistently troublesome presence in her life until she was in her twenties). The extent of his intrusion into her life has, however, been exaggerated by some critics. In the novel Mrs. Dalloway Woolf gives a graphic account of such a state, through the ramblings of Septimus Warren Smith, whose descent into madness weaves through the events of a summer day in London.

After Stella's death, Virginia was well enough later that year to start the serious study of Greek and Latin, first at King's College, London, then at home, that occupied her for many years. The death of her father in 1904, however, set off another breakdown--and a suicide attempt. "All that summer she was mad," is Quentin Bell's laconic comment.

But that year was, in other respects a watershed one; Vanessa, Virginia, and Adrian Stephen moved into their own home on Gordon Square, in Bloomsbury--the house to which their brother Thoby, in 1905, brought his Cambridge friends to visit. These first "Bloomsbury" gatherings included Clive Bell, Lytton Strachey, and the mysterious "wild man" Leonard Woolf. (The art critic Roger Fry and the novelist E. M. Forster, who became her particular friends, were drawn into the circle about 1910-11). Also in 1904, thanks to an introduction from her friend Violet Dickinson, Virginia Stephen began to do regular articles and reviews for the Guardian. Her first review, of William Dean Howells's The Son of Royal Langbrigh, appeared on December 14; an article on the Brontë parsonage appeared the following week. From about the age of fifteen she had been training herself to write professionally, keeping journal notebooks in which she described her round of activities and acquaintances. Seven of these journals (kept up until 1909) have been published under the title A Passionate Apprentice. In one of the later entries she declares that she intends in her writing to "achieve a symmetry by means of infinite discords, showing all the traces of the minds sic passage through the world. . . ." In 1905 she began to write reviews for the Times Literary Supplement, and did so for the rest of her life. Toward the end of that year, also, she was invited to teach at Morley College, an institute for working class men and women; until 1907 she lectured informally on English literature and history.

Principal Works: (Note: All of her works remain available and have been extensively reprinted); Fiction--The Voyage Out, 1915, Night and Ay, 1919; Monday or Tuesday, 1921Short stories--Jacob's Room, 1922; Mrs. Dalloway; To the Lighthouse, 1927; Orlando, a Biography, 1928; The Waves, 1931; The Years, 1937; Between the Acts, 1941; A Haunted House and Other Short stories (Foreword by L. Woolf) 1943; Mrs. Dalloway's Party: A Short Story Sequence (ed. S. McNichol) 1973; The Pargiters: The Novel--Essay Portion of "The Years" (ed. M. A. Leaska) 1977; Pointz Hall: The Earlier and later Transcripts of "Between the Acts" (ed. M. A. Leaska) 1981; Melymbrosia: An Early Version of "The Voyage Out" (ed. L. DeSalvo) 1982; The Complete Shorter Fiction (ed. S. Dick) 1985. Nonfiction--The Common Reader, 1925; A Room of One's Own, 1929; The Common Reader: Second Series, 1932 (in U.S.: The Second Common Reader); Flush, a Biography, 1933; Three Guineas, 1938; Roger Fry, a Biography, 1940; The Death Death of the Moth, and Other Essays (ed. L. Woolf) 1942; The Moment, and Other Essays (ed. L. Woolf) 1947; The Captain's Death Bed, and Other Essays, 1950; A Writer's Diary: Being Extracts from the Diary of Virginia Woolf (ed. L. Woolf) 1953; Letters: Virginia Woolf and Lytton Strachey (ed. L. Woolf and J. Strachey) 1956; Granite and Rainbow: Essays, 1958; Contemporary Writers (pref. by J. Guiguet) 1965; Collected Essys, 4 vols., 1967; The Letters of Virginia Woolf, 6 vols. (ed. N. Nicolson, with J. Trautmann) 1975-80 (vol. 1: 1888-1912, The Flight of the Mind; Vol 2: 1912-1922; Vol 3: 1923-1928.

About: Bell, C. Old Friends: personal Recollections, 1957; Bell, Q. Bloomsbury Recalled, 1996; Bell Q. Virginia Woolf: A Bilgraphy 2 vols., 1972; Bloom, H. (ed.) Virginia Woolf, 1986; DeSalvo, L. Virginia Woolf's First Voyage: A Novel in the Making, 1980; Dictionary of Literary Biography 36, 1985, 100, 1990, 112, 1991; Dictionary of National Biography 1941-1950, 1959; Dunn, J. A Very Close Conspiracy: Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf, 1990; Edel, L. Bloomsbury: A House of Lions, 1979; Encyclopedia of World Literature in the Twentieth Century vol. 4, 1984; Forster, E. M. Virginia Woolf, 1941 (the Rede Lecture . . . Cambridge, May 29, 1941); Haule, J. M. (with P. H. Smith, Jr.) A Concordance to the Novels of Virginia Woolf, 3 vols., 1991; Homans, M. Virginia Woolf: A Collection of Critical Essays, 1993; Leaska, M. A. The Novels of Virginia Woolf from Beginning to End, 1977; Lee, H. The Novels of Virginia Woolf, 1977; Lehmann, J. Thrown to the Woolfs, 1978; Lehmann, J. Virginia Woolf and Her World, 1976; Lewis, T.S.W. (ed.) Virginia Woolf: A Collection of Criticism, 1975 (Contemporary Studies in Literature); Marcus J. Virginia Woolf A Feminist Slant, 1983; Marcus, J. Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury: A Centenary Celebration, 1987; Morris, J. Time and Timelessness in Virginia Woolf, 1977; Nicolson, N. Portrait of a Marriage, 1973; Nobel J. r. (ed.) Recollections of Virginia Woolf by Her Contemporaries (introd. by M. Holroyd) 1975, 1989; O'Brien, Edna. Virginia: A Play. 1981; Pippett, A. The Moth and the Star: A Biography of Virginia Woolf, 1955; Poole, R. The Unknown Virginia Woolf, 4th ed. 1996; Radin, G. Virginia Woolf's "The Years": The Evolution of a Novel, 1981; Raitt, S. Vita and Virginia: The Work and Friendship of V. Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf, 1993; Richter, H. Virginia Woolf: The Inward Voyage, 1970; Rosenman, E. b. The Invisible Presence: Virginia Woolf and the Mother-Daughter Relationship, 1986; Ruddick. L. C. The Seen and the Unseen: Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, 1977; Sackville-West, V. The Letters of Vita Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf (eds. L. A. DeSalvo and M. A. Leaska) 1985; Sharma, V. L. Virginia Woolf as Literary Critic: A Revaluation, 1977; Silver, B. R. Virginia Woolf's Reading Notebooks, 1983.