The Extraordinary Life of Virginia Woolf

Whether you’re an avid reader, a writer, or a book collector, you’re probably familiar with author Virginia Woolf, a writer who remains highly influential in the literature world and beyond. On what would be her 143rd birthday, we’re taking a look at the life and accomplishments of one of the most innovative writers of the 20th century.

From Bookish Beginnings

Born Adeline Virginia Stephen, Woolf was the daughter of literary critic and editor Leslie Stephen and Julia Jackson Duckworth of the Duckworth Publishing family. At the young age of 13, Woolf suffered the loss of her mother’s passing, and then less than a decade later, her father, who had educated her throughout her school years and during a time period it wasn’t considered “proper” for a woman to receive a formal education, also passed away leaving a young Virginia Woolf with no parents.

Suffering two great losses one right after the other, led Woolf into a much-documented bout of depression. Following her father’s death, Woolf moved to Bloomsbury to live with her sister and two brothers. While the move may sound mundane, or forced even, the house she moved to served as an integral part of her blooming literary career as it was an early meeting place for a number of artists and writers that would inspire and encourage Woolf, including Clive Bell, Maynard Keynes, Leonard Woolf, and many more.

The Early Writing Years

In 1905 Woolf began writing reviews for the Times Literary Supplement. Unfortunately by 1906, Woolf suffered another great loss with the passing of her brother Thoby, then in 1912, she married literary critic and economics writer, Leonard Woolf. By 1915 Woolf published her first novel The Voyage Out.

While it seems things were looking up for Woolf who had experienced so much heartache at such a young age, it’s important to note the timeline of the publication. Woolf had been working on this piece since 1908, then completed it in 1913, but because of another emotional breakdown following her marriage, publication had been delayed two whole years. Two novels soon followed, Night and Day in 1919 and Jacob’s Room in 1922.

Signature Style

The year was 1925 and Woolf published the acclaimed Mrs. Dalloway which can now be credited as the reveal of what would come to be known as Woolf’s signature modernist style.

The unique narrative weaves the everyday lives and thoughts of the main character, and with this new technique, Woolf aimed to express her own experience as both an author and woman in a way that was vastly different than the male authors before her.

Woolf continued to develop this technique in later works such as The Lighthouse and The Waves. The result of these characters was unprecedented access to their free-flowing and completely unedited thoughts. Woolf, along with James Joyce and Ernest Hemingway, dropped the flowery prose that was popular at the time and opted for a writing style that novelists had been adhered to for the past 200+ years.

A Room of One’s Own

In 1929 Woolf published her best-known non-fiction piece, A Room of One’s Own, which was developed out of two lectures made at women’s colleges in Cambridge during which Woolf deep dives into the history of women’s writing in both social and economic terms.

In the book, Woolf famously wrote “Therefore I would ask you to write all kinds of books, hesitating at no subject however trivial or however vast. By hook or by crook, I hope that you will possess yourselves of money enough to travel and to idle, to contemplate the future or the past of the world, to dream over books and loiter at street corners and let the line of thought dip deep into the stream.”

A Tragic End

Woolf continued to live in Bloomsbury throughout the 1930s, but the group of artists and writers who she had surrounded herself with for so many years eventually quit meeting and she spent the better part of the decade working on The Years and Three Guineas. While she worried about how these pieces might be perceived by the public, The Years went on to outsell any of her previous works.

By the end of the decade, Woolf was working on both her autobiography and Between the Acts which was ultimately published posthumously by her husband. On March 28, 1941, at the age of 59, Woolf drowned herself in the Ouse River. Two suicide notes were later found one to her sister Vanessa, the other to her husband Leonard.

A Lasting Legacy

Virginia Woolf is now considered to be one of the most prolific icons of the 20th century, being celebrated for both her fiction and non-fiction works. Her unique method and encouragement of women writers have resulted in a literature legacy that has and will continue to inspire readers, writers, and collectors for years to come.