Life and intellectual context
Virginia Stephen was born in London in 1882 and later became known as Virginia Woolf. After her father’s death, she moved with her siblings to Bloomsbury, where they founded the Bloomsbury Group, a circle of writers, artists, and intellectuals that challenged Victorian conventions. In 1912 she married Leonard Woolf; together they founded the Hogarth Press, an independent publisher. Woolf died in 1941.
Modernist form and experience
A major figure of Modernism, Woolf shifted attention from external events to the mind’s changing thoughts, memories, and impressions. Her stream of consciousness is poetic and controlled, often guided by an unobtrusive third-person narrator. A Moment of Being is an intense insight that breaks through the routine Woolf called the cotton wool of daily life and can bring past, present, and future together in a moment of recognition.
Major works and feminist thought
- Mrs Dalloway follows Clarissa Dalloway during one day in London and contrasts her story with that of Septimus Smith. To the Lighthouse explores the Ramsay family and the passage of time; Orlando follows a character who lives for centuries and changes gender. In A Room of One’s Own, Woolf argues that women need financial independence and private space to write fiction. Her work links innovative narrative form with questions of memory, time, and gender.