The Duchess and the Jeweller

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) was an English novelist, essayist, biographer, and feminist. She was a key figure in the avant-garde literary life of London and was central to the bohemian Bloomsbury Group. Her commitment to capturing modern life, particularly the hidden life within individuals, led her to experiment and produce impactful innovations in the novel. Woolf is best known for her novels including Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), and Orlando (1928). In her time, she was also known as an essayist, critic, speaker, and publisher. Today, Virginia Woolf is recognized as one of the most important novelists of the 20th century.

Woolf was born Adeline Virginia Stephen on January 25, 1882, in Kensington, London, England. She was born into a privileged, extended family, the third child of Sir Leslie Stephen and Julia Duckworth, who had four children between them from previous marriages. Her parents were literary and artistic, and encouraged Virginia’s precocious writing talents. While her brothers were sent to Cambridge, Virginia and her sister Vanessa had no formal education. Instead, they had private tutors and read books from the family library. Woolf later criticized such educational inequality, condemning women’s lack of access to education and employment in her writing such as “Professions for Women” (1931). The family summered annually at Talland House, and the time in London and Cornwall would prove foundational to Virginia’s psyche. Her writing repeatedly returned to themes and symbols of the city and the coast.

Woolf experienced many personal traumas and struggled with mental health throughout her life. Virginia’s mother died of rheumatic fever in 1895, when Virginia was only 13. This sudden death led to Virginia’s first mental health crisis. She experienced a subsequent mental health crisis following the passing of her father in 1904. Vanessa moved the family from Kensington to Bloomsbury, and the Stephen siblings lived together, separate from their half-siblings. This separation allowed them greater intellectual and artistic freedom. They held weekly gatherings of free-thinking young people, who discussed radical ideas, experimented creatively, and had unconventional relationships. They were known as the Bloomsbury Group, and in addition to Virginia and Vanessa Stephen, the circle included important literary and artistic figures such as Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell, and John Maynard Keyes, and later Duncan Grant, Roger Fry, and E. M. Forster.

It was at these gatherings that she met Leonard Woolf. Wary of the emotional and sexual commitment of marriage, Virginia had refused many offers of marriage. In 1912, at age 30, Virginia married Leonard who became her life-long companion, fellow writer, and supporter. In 1917, Virginia and Leonard bought a printing press and established Hogarth Press from their home. They published their own work but also modernist work that could not find publication at more traditional presses. Making a significant cultural contribution, Hogarth Press printed some of modernism’s most important works, including the work of Sigmund Freud, Katherine Mansfield, and T. S. Eliot.

Woolf was a prolific writer across many genres, but she was best known for her novels. She completed her first novel, A Voyage Out in 1913, wherein she experimented with multiple narrative perspectives and unconventional prose. In 1919, she published a more traditional novel, Night and Day, but with her third novel, Jacob’s Room (1922), she returned to modern experimentation. In Mrs. Dalloway (1925), she mastered the technique of interior monologue and unconventional narrative perspectives. This was her breakthrough novel and it addressed themes of feminism, PTSD, and thwarted love. Her following novel, To the Lighthouse, was also a critical success and was feted as a triumph for its use of the stream-of-consciousness technique. Inspired by her friend and lover Vita Sackville-West, Orlando (1928) earned her critical praise and a broader readership. Pushing novelistic boundaries even further in The Waves (1931) her “play-poem” is told from the perspective of six characters. In 1937, Woolf published The Years, which was the final novel to be published in her lifetime.

Woolf continued to struggle with mental illness throughout her life. Her bouts of depression were recurrent and often precipitated by personal tragedies, or the publication of her novels. During an onset of an episode of mental illness, Woolf walked to the river near her home, filled her coat pockets with stones, and entered the water. She died by suicide on March 28, 1941, at age 59.