Roger Fry

Born in London in 1882, Virginia Woolf was the daughter of Sir Leslie Stephen, the first editor of The Dictionary of National Biography. After her father’s death in 1904, Virginia and her sister, the painter Vanessa Bell, moved to Bloomsbury, becoming central figures in ‘The Bloomsbury Group’. This informal collective of artists and writers, which included Lytton Strachey and Roger Fry, exerted a significant influence on early twentieth-century British culture.

In 1912, Virginia married Leonard Woolf, a writer and social reformer. Her first novel, The Voyage Out, was published three years later, followed by Night and Day (1919) and Jacob’s Room (1922). These early works showcase the development of Woolf’s distinctive and innovative narrative style. During this period, she and Leonard founded The Hogarth Press, publishing their co-authored Two Stories in 1917, hand-printed in their Surrey home.

Between 1925 and 1931, Virginia Woolf produced what are now considered her masterpieces, from Mrs Dalloway (1925) to the experimental novel The Waves (1931). She also maintained a prolific output of literary criticism, short fiction, journalism, and biography, including the playfully subversive Orlando (1928) and the passionate feminist essay A Room of One’s Own (1929). This intense creative productivity was often accompanied by periods of mental illness, which she had experienced since her mother’s death in 1895. On March 28, 1941, a few months before the publication of her final novel, Between the Acts, Virginia Woolf committed suicide.

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