Virginia Woolf Books, Quotes, Biography, Novels

Virginia Woolf Books, Quotes, Biography, Novels
Virginia Woolf (born Adeline Virginia Stephen, 25 January 1882 – 28 March 1941) was an English novelist, essayist, and publisher, and one of the central figures of literary modernism. She pioneered stream-of-consciousness fiction, helped run the Hogarth Press, and wrote some of the most influential feminist criticism in English.

Born in London into a high Victorian literary household. Her father, Sir Leslie Stephen, edited the Dictionary of National Biography; her mother, Julia Jackson Stephen, was a noted beauty and informal nurse with ties to the Pre-Raphaelites. Woolf was educated at home among books, not at university. Childhood summers in St Ives, Cornwall, later fed To the Lighthouse.

Her mother died in 1895, when Woolf was 13; her father died in 1904. She suffered repeated breakdowns, heard voices, and was sexually abused by half-brothers George and Gerald Duckworth. After Leslie Stephen’s death the Stephen children moved to Bloomsbury. There, with Vanessa (the painter Vanessa Bell), brother Thoby, and Cambridge friends, the Bloomsbury Group formed—Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell, Maynard Keynes, E. M. Forster, Leonard Woolf, and others.

She married Leonard Woolf in 1912. In 1917 they founded the Hogarth Press in their dining room; it published Woolf, T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, and English translations of Freud. She had a long, intense relationship with Vita Sackville-West, which inspired Orlando.

In March 1941, fearing another breakdown as war closed in and her London homes were bombed, she drowned herself in the River Ouse near Monk’s House, Rodmell. She was 59. Leonard buried her ashes in the garden.

Interior life over plot. Time folds; consciousness jumps from person to person. Big Ben, the sea, a lighthouse, or a party hold a whole social world. She dropped conventional plot machinery after Jacob’s Room (1922) and wrote as if painting with words.

Virginia Woolf Most Popular Books
To the Lighthouse (1927)
Often ranked her masterpiece. The Ramsay family at a Hebridean summer house, then a middle section that swallows years and deaths in a few pages, then the survivors return. Memory, art (Lily Briscoe’s painting), and the vanished Victorian parents. Closest to her own childhood.
Mrs Dalloway (1925)
One June day in London. Clarissa Dalloway prepares a party; Septimus Warren Smith, a shell-shocked veteran, unravels. Their lives never meet, but the book holds them together. Best single-day novel in English after Ulysses, and far shorter.
A Room of One’s Own (1929)
Not a novel: a long essay from lectures. Women need money and a room of their own to write. Shakespeare’s imaginary sister. Still the most quoted piece of feminist literary argument she wrote. Pair with Three Guineas (1938) if you want the later, angrier politics.
Orlando (1928)
A love letter to Vita: a young man lives for centuries, becomes a woman, and watches English history and fashion go by. Funniest, lightest Woolf; also a satire of biography and gender.
The Waves (1931)
Six voices from childhood to death, braided with interludes of sun and sea. Closest she came to a “play-poem.” Hardest of the major novels; some readers put it first.

The best places to find Virginia Woolf books online are:
eBay Books
Amazon.com Books