☰ Biography

Adeline Virginia Stephen grew up in a household where, instead of school, her classroom was the library of her father, Leslie Stephen—the literary historian and first editor of the Dictionary of National Biography. Unlike her brothers, who went to Cambridge, Virginia and her sister Vanessa were never permitted a formal university education, a deprivation that later became central to the argument of A Room of One's Own. Her mother's death in 1895, when Virginia was thirteen, precipitated her first mental breakdown; her father's death in 1904 precipitated a second. This pattern—loss, severe mental illness, and a return to writing—recurred throughout her life. After their father's death, Virginia and her siblings moved to London's Bloomsbury district. Their home became a meeting place for their brother Thoby's Cambridge friends, a circle later known as the Bloomsbury Group that included Lytton Strachey, John Maynard Keynes, and Leonard Woolf. Virginia married Leonard in 1912, and five years later they founded the Hogarth Press. It began as a therapeutic pastime, using the manual work of printing to calm Virginia's nerves, but soon became an influential publisher of writers including T. S. Eliot and Katherine Mansfield. It also allowed Woolf to publish her novels without traditional intermediaries and with complete control over the text. Woolf's friendship and romantic relationship with the writer and gardener Vita Sackville-West during the 1920s inspired Orlando (1928), a fictional biography of a character who lives for centuries and changes sex midway through the story. A year later, Woolf developed A Room of One's Own from two lectures delivered to women students at Newnham and Girton Colleges, Cambridge. She struggled throughout her life with recurring periods of severe mental illness. On 28 March 1941, amid a new episode and the Second World War, she drowned herself in the River Ouse near the couple's Sussex home. In the letter she left for Leonard, she wrote of fearing the return of an illness that she believed she would not survive this time.

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.

Woolf still matters because she showed what the novel can do with consciousness, time, and gender—and because her own life, from the father's library that sent her brothers to Cambridge but not its daughters to the small printing room that became T. S. Eliot's publisher, embodied the argument she made in her work. Stream-of-consciousness and lyrical interiority after her are not mere techniques; they are ways of taking women's intellectual life and everyday perception seriously. A Room of One's Own remains a living argument about money, space, and authorship, which is why her page must answer not only who she was, but why modernist form and feminist criticism still pass through her.