Adeline Virginia Stephen was born in London, England on 25 January 1882, daughter of Sir Leslie Stephen (1832-1904), literary critic and first editor of the Dictionary of National Biography. Virginia's mother was Julia Prinsep Jackson Duckworth a sensitive and aristocratic woman (1846-1895) who had three children by her first husband, Herbert Duckworth: George, Stella, and Gerald Duckworth.

Virginia had two brothers, Thoby (1880-1906) and Adrian (1883-1948) who became a psychoanalyst. She was very close to her older sister Vanessa ‘Nessa' (1876-1961) who would become a painter.
Virginia and her sister were educated at home in their father's library. Young Virginia soon fell deep into the world of literature

The Stephens summered at ‘Talland House' in St. Ives, County Cornwall in the southwest of England. Virginia had vivid and fond memories of these times which often had an influence on her writing. However they ended when her mother died; she was just thirteen years old and suffered the first major breakdown of many that would afflict her for all her life. The death of her father in 1904 provoked her most alarming collapse and she was briefly institutionalised. Modern scholars (including her nephew and biographer, Quentin Bell) have suggested her breakdowns and depressive periods were also influenced by the sexual abuse to which she and her sister Vanessa were subjected by their half-brothers George and Gerald Duckworth. After father's death Vanessa then moved her sister and brothers to another neighborhood in London, Bloomsbury.

In 1906 Virginia, Vanessa and their brothers travelled to Europe, where Thoby contracted typhoid fever and died from in 1906. Back in England the Bloomsbury Group was flourishing, their home a meeting place for writers, scholars and artists including Clive Bell, artist and art critic, who Vanessa married 1907. They would not stay together for long. Virginia married political journalist, author and editor Leonard Woolf (1880-1969) on 10 August 1912. They would have no children. In 1914 when World War I broke out they were living in Richmond and Woolf was working on her first novel The Voyage Out (1915) a satirical coming-of-age story. Leonard and Virginia together founded the Hogarth Press in 1917.

However after completing the manuscript of her last (posthumously published) novel, Between the Acts, Woolf fell into a depression similar to that which she had earlier experienced. The World War II and the destruction of her London home worsened her condition until she was unable to work. Virginia Woolf died on 28 March 1941 when she drowned herself in the River Ouse near their home in Sussex. Woolf's body was not found until 18 April 1941.