Meet the Author
Virginia Woolf
British · 1882–1941 · Novelist, essayist, and publisher
Portrait: Unknown author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
The modernist who followed the mind moment by moment and turned a single ordinary day into a novel.
2 StoryBites Editions2 Big Books2 Full texts
Why read Virginia Woolf?
Woolf wrote fiction from the inside of her characters’ heads, where memory, worry, and small pleasures run together. Mrs Dalloway follows one London day in June, and To the Lighthouse stretches a family’s story across ten years and a war. Read her for sentences that catch the way a mind actually moves.
A life in six dates
- 1882Born Adeline Virginia Stephen in London
- 1912Marries the writer Leonard Woolf
- 1915Publishes her first novel, The Voyage Out
- 1917Founds the Hogarth Press with Leonard Woolf
- 1925Publishes Mrs Dalloway
- 1927Publishes To the Lighthouse
- 1929Publishes the essay A Room of One’s Own
- 1941Dies in Sussex, England
Themes across the collection
The StoryBites Editions
Context that actually matters
The Bloomsbury GroupWoolf was at the center of a London circle of writers, artists, and thinkers who questioned Victorian rules.
Stream of consciousnessHer novels trace thoughts as they happen, one of the defining techniques of modernist fiction.
Women and writingA Room of One’s Own argued that a woman needs money and a room of her own to write fiction.
Influence
Echoes of Virginia Woolf run through Toni Morrison, Michael Cunningham, among many others.