Virginia Woolf

Woolf in 1902

Virginia Woolf (born Adeline Virginia Stephen, January 25, 1882, London; died March 28, 1941, Rodmell, East Sussex) was an English novelist, short story writer, essayist and publisher. She is today considered one of the most significant writers of the Twentieth Century; as a fiction writer, one of the "major figures of literary modernism", and a "pioneering" writer of essays on "artistic theory, literary history, women’s writing, and the politics of power."^[1] Woolf's friend and colleague E. M. Forster said that "she pushed the light of the English language a little farther against darkness."^[2]

During the Dreadnought hoax, Woolf and several associates from the Bloomsbury group put on blackface and costumes like what an Abyssinian representative would wear. They successfully boarded a British battleship.^[3]

Politics[edit]

Virginia Woolf actively supported women's suffrage, a member of the Fabian Society,^[4][5] and joined organizations advocating for the right to vote for women. However, Woolf was typical of the early women's movement in that she held many of the more reasonable positions of women's rights without the more extremist positions of contemporary feminism. For instance her lesser known essays focus on such anachronistic principles as the immorality of women eating sausages sold by street vendors and of petting an acquaintance's terrier without a proper introduction. ^[6]

Her husband Leonard Woolf was also a Fabian.

Selected Bibliography[edit]

Novels[edit]

• The Voyage Out (1915)
• Night and Day (1919)
• Jacob's Room (1922)
• Mrs. Dalloway (1925)
• To the Lighthouse (1927)
• Orlando (1928)
• The Waves (1931)
• Flush (1933)
• The Years (1937)
• Between the Acts (1941)

Nonfiction[edit]

• The Common Reader (1925)
• A Room of One's Own (1929)
• The Common Reader: Second Series (1932)
• Three Guineas (1938)
• Roger Fry: A Biography (1940)

Collections[edit]

• The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf (ed. Susan Dick)
• The Diary of Virginia Woolf (5 vols.)
• The Essays of Virginia Woolf (4 vols. through 1928)
• The Letters of Virginia Woolf (6 vols.)

References[edit]

External links[edit]

• Works by Virginia Woolf - text and free audio - LibriVox