VIRGINIA WOOLF BIOGRAPHY

Adeline Virginia Woolf was born in London in 1882. Her father was a Victorian critic, philosopher, biographer and scholar. She grew up as a member of a large and talented family, educating herself in her father's magnificent library.

After her father's death in 1904 she, her sister Vanessa and her brothers settled in Bloomsbury, a district of London. The sisters plunged headfirst into the Bloomsbury Group, that started out as a weekly gathering of old college friends.

However, as time passed, it became an intense salon of ideas, philosophy, and theories on art and politics. Virginia and Vanessa were both important members of the group. For the first time, Virginia Woolf was around people who didn't seem to care that she was a woman, and who expected her to contribute to the group both in conversation and in deed. Though her old friends were scandalized by the company she was keeping (the Bloomsbury Group was famous, even in its own time, and its members were considered rude, unkempt and depraved), she felt at ease among her new friends, and flourished in their company.

With this encouragement, she began writing. First she began publishing short journalistic pieces, and then longer reviews. Woolf came naturally into the profession of writing. She moved among writers and artists, and her world was from the beginning the cultured world of the middle-class and upper-middle-class London Intelligentsia.

She rebelled against what she called "materialism" of such novelist as Arnold Bennett and John Galsworthy.

After two novels cast in traditional form, she developed her own style, which handled the stream of consciousness with a carefully modulated poetic flow and brought into prose fiction something of the rhythms and the imagery of Lyric poetry.

Her suicide in March 1941, resulting from her dread of World War II and her fear that she was about to lose her mind and become a burden on her husband, first revealed to the public that she had been subject to periods of nervous depression, particularly after finishing a book, and that underneath the liveliness and wit so well known among the Bloomsbury Group lay disturbing psychological tensions.

Virginia Woolf was fortunate to have a husband as supportive emotionally as he was intellectually.

To conclude through her often difficult but nearly always brilliant novels, she became one of the most important Modernist writers, along with James Joyce and T.S. Eliot.