Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf was an English novelist, essayist and publisher who became one of the central figures of literary modernism. Born in 1882, she was closely associated with the Bloomsbury Group and, with her husband Leonard Woolf, founded the Hogarth Press. Her fiction moved away from conventional plots towards interior thought, memory and shifting points of view, allowing her to examine how individuals experience social change. Woolf wrote particularly perceptively about women’s limited opportunities, class distinctions, mental illness, marriage, war and the pressures of public respectability in late Victorian and early twentieth-century Britain.

Many of Woolf’s novels give readers a detailed understanding of the society in which they are set. Night and Day explores Edwardian marriage, women’s work and the suffrage movement, while Jacob’s Room portrays the generation whose lives were interrupted by the First World War. Mrs Dalloway examines postwar London, shell shock, class and medical authority during a single day in 1923, and To the Lighthouse contrasts prewar family life with the losses and changes caused by war. The Years follows a family from 1880 into the 1930s, tracing changes in politics, gender and domestic life, while Between the Acts captures rural England’s anxiety on the eve of the Second World War. Orlando: A Biography ranges more widely across English history from the Elizabethan age to the 1920s, using fantasy to explore gender, literature and social transformation.