Virginia Woolf was born Virginia Stephen
in 1882 into a prominent and
intellectually well-connected family. Her formal education was limited,
but she grew up reading voraciously from the vast library of her
father, the critic Leslie Stephen. Her youth was a traumatic one, including
the early deaths of her mother and brother, a history of sexual
abuse, and the beginnings of a depressive mental illness that plagued
her intermittently throughout her life and eventually led to her
suicide in 1941.
After her father's death in 1904,
Virginia and her sister (the painter Vanessa Bell) set up residence
in a neighborhood of London called Bloomsbury, where they fell into
association with a circle of intellectuals that included such figures
as Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell, Roger Fry, and later E.M. Forster.
In 1912, Virginia
married Leonard Woolf, with whom she ran a small but influential
printing press. The highly experimental character of her novels,
and their brilliant formal innovations, established Woolf as a major
figure of British modernism. Her novels, which include To the
Lighthouse, Mrs. Dalloway,
and The Waves, are particularly concerned with
the lives and experiences of women.
In October 1928,
Virginia Woolf was invited to deliver lectures at Newnham College
and Girton College, which at that time were the only women's colleges
at Cambridge. These talks, on the topic of Women and Fiction, were
expanded and revised into A Room of One's Own, which
was printed in 1929.
The title has become a virtual cliché in our culture, a fact that
testifies to the book's importance and its enduring influence. Perhaps
the single most important work of feminist literary criticism, A
Room of One's Own explores the historical and contextual
contingencies of literary achievement.
