Virginia Woolf is one of the great innovative novelists of the 20th century because she reacted against literary tradition and experimented with fiction.
Virginia Woolf was born in London. She grew up in a large and talented family, educating herself in her magnificent library. After her father's death in 1904 she settled with her sister and her brothers in Bloomsbury, district of London which later was to become associated with the group among whom she moved, the "Bloomsbury Group". When her sister, a notable painter, married she and her brother took another house in Bloomsbury, and there they entertained their literary and artistic friends.
Furthermore, Virginia was bisexual: thirteen years after her marriage to the journalist Leonard Woolf, she fell in love with the poet Victoria Sackville-West. But fortunately their marriage withstood this and other strains.
Mrs. and Mr. Woolf founded the Hogarth Press in 1917, a press that published some of the most interesting literature of our time.
Her suicide in March 1941 revealed that she had been subject to periods of nervous depression, particularly after finishing a book.
Woolf came naturally into the profession of writing because she moved among writers and artists. She rebelled against what she called "materialism" of such novelists and sought a more delicate rendering of those aspects of consciousness in which she felt that the truth of human experience really lay. She explores the possibility of moving between action and contemplation, between specific external events and delicate tracings of the flow of consciousness. These were technical experiments.
She was a skilled exponent of the stream of consciousness technique in her novels, exploring the personal identity and personal relationships, the conception of time, change, and memory.
Furthermore, Virginia Woolf was very concerned with the position of women and the constrictions they suffered under.