Virginia Woolf

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Key People

Clive Bell

Virginia's brother-in-law, husband to Vanessa. Like his wife, he was a painter. He was also an art and literary critic. Author of Art (1914), Since Cézanne (1922), Landmarks in Nineteenth-Century Painting (1927), and Proust (1929).
Julian Bell

Virginia's nephew (son of Vanessa and Clive Bell). Killed in the Spanish Civil War in 1937.
Quentin Bell

Virginia's nephew (son of Vanessa and Clive Bell) and biographer
Vanessa Bell

Virgina's beloved sister and a talented painter. Married to Clive Bell. The two sisters were extremely close-emotional and intellectual confidantes.
Violet Dickinson

Virginia's close friend and, according to biographer and nephew Quentin Bell, the first woman Virginia was in love with.
George Duckworth

Virginia's elder stepbrother. Sexually abused her beginning when she was thirteen.
Gerald Duckworth

Virginia's other half-brother. He published her first novels.
T.S. Eliot

Friend of Leonard and Virginia's. Was an unknown poet when he first brought his poetry to Hogarth House and was working in a bank by day to support himself. Best known for Prufrock and Other Observations (1917), Poems (1920), and The Waste Land (1922). Eliot won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948. He was also an extremely influential critic and a playwright. Leonard and Virginia were the first to publish him and were lifelong supporters of his work.
Roger Fry

A brilliant art critic and painter who was part of the table at Bloomsbury. He was particularly supportive and attuned to modern French painting, specifically the post-impressionists like Cézanne, Picasso and Matisse. Faced monstrous criticism and controversy when he opened the First Post-Impressionist Art Exhibit in London in 1910. He wrote His Vision and Design (1920), Transformations (1926), Cézanne (1927), and Last Lectures (1939).
Henry James

An American novelist and literary critic who spent most of his life in Britain. James was a technical innovator in prose and an exceptionally original stylist. His books include The Golden Bowl,The Aspern Papers,The Bostonians,The Europeans,Portrait of a Lady and The Art of Fiction.
John Maynard Keyes

English economist. His theories and philosophy-called Keynesian Economics-are widely considered to have the greatest influence on modern economics.
James Russell Lowell

Major New England poet and literary critic. He wrote books such as Fireside Travels (1864), Among My Books (1870), The Bigelow Papers (1848) and Poems (1844). In 1877 he was appointed minister to London, which is how he made the acquaintance of Virginia's father Leslie Stephen.
Katherine Mansfield

British author and considered one of the century's best practitioners of the short story. Her collections include Bliss (1920), The Garden Party (1922), Something Childish (1924) and her collected stories (1937). Was a friend and sometime foe of Virginia's.
Henri Matisse

A French painter and sculptor-considered one of the post-impressionists. Along with Picasso, considered one of the most influential artists of the Twentieth Century. He was one of the artists Roger Fry exhibited at the scandalous Post Impressionist Art Exhibits in London.
Pablo Picasso

Spanish painter and sculptor who worked in France. Together, with Matisse, Cézanne and other artists, he was part of the post-impressionist movement. He was one of the artists Roger Fry exhibited at the First Post Impressionist Art Exhibit.
Vita Sackville-West

One of Virginia's closest friends and, according to Bell, a lover. She was a beautiful, forceful, aristocratic woman, the wife of a British colonial counselor. She was also a writer, the author of The Edwardians (1930) and All Passion Spent (1931) as well as works of poetry and memoir.
Adrian Stephen

Virginia's younger brother.
Julia Duckworth Stephen

Virginia's mother, Leslie Stephen's second wife.
Laura Stephen

Sir Leslie Stephen's first daughter by Minny Thackeray. She was insane her whole life and died in an institution. Her madness made Virginia acutely aware of her own tendency towards mental instability.
Leslie Stephen

Virginia's illustrious father. He was the writer of Dictionary of National Biography, still considered a massively important work. He also was an ardent supporter of authors like Thomas Hardy, Henry James and Robert Louis Stephenson when they were unknowns. Also an avid mountain climber who wrote about the sport.
Thoby Stephen

Virginia's elder brother. The Thursday night get togethers he organized with his Cambridge buddies formed the nucleus of what was later to become, after his untimely death from Typhoid Fever, the Bloomsbury Circle.
Lytton Strachey

Luminous member of the Bloomsbury Group and great friend of Virginia's (there was talk of marriage, which was later dropped.) Although also a respected literary critic, Strachey is perhaps England's most famous biographer; the author, most famously, of Eminent Victorians (1918), Queen Victoria (1921) and Portraits in Miniature (1931).
William Makepeace Thackeray

English novelist and satirist. His daughter, Harriet (or Minny), was Virginia's father Sir Leslie Stephen's first wife.
Queen Victoria

Queen of England and Ireland from 1837–1901.
Leonard Woolf

Virginia's husband, and a novelist in his own right. He also was an economic critic, an active socialist and, with his wife, publisher of Hogarth Press.

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