Virginia Woolf
AUTHOR

Virginia Woolf

Tap the gear icon above to manage new release emails.
Virginia Woolf is now recognized as a major twentieth-century author, a great novelist and essayist and a key figure in literary history as a feminist and a modernist. Born in 1882, she was the daughter of the editor and critic Leslie Stephen, and suffered a traumatic adolescence after the deaths of her mother, in 1895, and her step-sister Stella, in 1897, leaving her subject to breakdowns for the rest of her life. Her father died in 1904 and two years later her favourite brother Thoby died suddenly of typhoid. With her sister, the painter Vanessa Bell, she was drawn into the company of writers and artists such as Lytton Strachey and Roger Fry, later known as the Bloomsbury Group. Among them she met Leonard Woolf, whom she married in 1912, and together they founded the Hogarth Press in 1917, which was to publish the work of T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster and Katherine Mansfield as well as the earliest translations of Freud. Woolf lived an energetic life among friends and family, reviewing and writing, and dividing her time between London and the Sussex Downs. In 1941, fearing another attack of mental illness, she drowned herself. Her first novel, The Voyage Out, appeared in 1915, and she then worked through the transitional Night and Day (1919) to the highly experimental and impressionistic Jacob's Room (1922). From then on her fiction became a series of brilliant and extraordinarily varied experiments, each one searching for a fresh way of presenting the relationship between individual lives and the forces of society and history. She was particularly concerned with women's experience, not only in her novels but also in her essays and her two books of feminist polemic, A Room of One's Own (1929) and Three Guineas (1938). Her major novels include Mrs Dalloway (1925), the historical fantasy Orlando (1928), written for Vita Sackville-West, the extraordinarily poetic vision of The Waves (1931), the family saga of The Years (1937), and Between the Acts (1941). All these are published by Penguin, as are her Diaries, Volumes I-V, and selections from her essays and short stories.
Read more Read less
You're getting a free audiobook


You're getting a free audiobook.

$14.95 per month after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

A Quote by Virginia Woolf

And all the lives we ever lived and all the lives to be are full of trees and changing leaves.


Virginia Woolf
To the Lighthouse

Discover more great inspirational quotes.

Orlando

Featured Listen

First published in 1928, Virginia Woolf's Orlando: A Biography is a seminal work that transcends conventional narrative forms to offer a satirical history of English life, gender roles, and literary tradition. The novel follows the life of its protagonist, Orlando, who undergoes a sex change from male to female and exists across several centuries.

Read more

Featured Article: 45+ Quotes About Writing from Famous Writers


No matter how passionate you are about it, writing can be difficult. Whenever you’re struggling with writer’s block, rejection, competition, insecurity, or any of the countless obstacles that wordsmiths encounter daily, it can help to get encouragement from those who have successfully overcome the very same challenges. If you're looking for inspiration to start your next project, these quotes about writing from writers themselves are sure to be welcome reading!

Best Sellers

Product List
  • Regular price: $19.95 or 1 credit

    Sale price: $19.95 or 1 credit

  • Regular price: $17.12 or 1 credit

    Sale price: $17.12 or 1 credit

    Included in Plus membership
  • Regular price: $8.40 or 1 credit

    Sale price: $8.40 or 1 credit

  • Regular price: $23.24 or 1 credit

    Sale price: $23.24 or 1 credit

  • Regular price: $22.23 or 1 credit

    Sale price: $22.23 or 1 credit

  • Regular price: $13.22 or 1 credit

    Sale price: $13.22 or 1 credit

    Included in Plus membership
  • Regular price: $16.35 or 1 credit

    Sale price: $16.35 or 1 credit

  • Regular price: $15.56 or 1 credit

    Sale price: $15.56 or 1 credit

    Included in Plus membership
  • Regular price: $21.49 or 1 credit

    Sale price: $21.49 or 1 credit

    Included in Plus membership
  • Regular price: $20.49 or 1 credit

    Sale price: $20.49 or 1 credit

  • Regular price: $17.90 or 1 credit

    Sale price: $17.90 or 1 credit

    Included in Plus membership
  • Regular price: $6.20 or 1 credit

    Sale price: $6.20 or 1 credit

  • Regular price: $20.00 or 1 credit

    Sale price: $20.00 or 1 credit

  • Regular price: $23.24 or 1 credit

    Sale price: $23.24 or 1 credit

  • Regular price: $15.29 or 1 credit

    Sale price: $15.29 or 1 credit

  • Regular price: $20.00 or 1 credit

    Sale price: $20.00 or 1 credit

  • Regular price: $21.86 or 1 credit

    Sale price: $21.86 or 1 credit

  • Regular price: $12.78 or 1 credit

    Sale price: $12.78 or 1 credit

  • Regular price: $19.41 or 1 credit

    Sale price: $19.41 or 1 credit

Are you an author?

Help us improve our Author Pages by updating your bibliography and submitting a new or current image and biography.