Arts & Literature
A legendary life
Virginia Woolf
Adeline Virginia Woolf (née Stephen)
January 25, 1882 – March 28, 1941
English modernist whose innovative novels and feminist essays reshaped twentieth-century literature.
Her story
A life that changed history
Virginia Woolf developed nonlinear, interior forms of narration in novels such as Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and The Waves. She and her husband Leonard founded the Hogarth Press, which published modernist literature and much of her own work. Her extended essay A Room of One’s Own became a foundational examination of women, economic independence, and authorship.
“A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.”
A Room of One’s Own (1929), chapter 1