Virginia Woolf (1882-1941)

Adeline Virginia Stephen was born at 22 Hyde Park Gate, London into the social and intellectual elite of Victorian England or, as she herself wrote, ‘a very communicative, literate, letter writing, visiting, articulate, late nineteenth century world’. Her parents were Julia (née Jackson) and Leslie Stephen, both of whom had been widowed. Virginia was educated at home by her father, as well as by herself, with a rigorous devotion to reading which continued throughout her life. Leslie Stephen, the first editor of the Dictionary of National Biography, emphasised precision and discrimination in writing, this ideal of conveying what was most important in as few words as possible becoming central to his daughter’s own work. Julia Stephen was a model, writer, and freethinker, who had been initially drawn to her husband on account of his writings on agnosticism; a position she shared. As Sybil Oldfield has written:

It is strange but true that had not Leslie Stephen and Julia Duckworth found a bond in atheism, there would have been no Virginia Woolf.

Virginia Woolf inherited the humanism of her parents and, believing in neither God nor afterlife, emphasised instead the primacy of the present moment. Like Mrs Dalloway (from Woolf’s novel of 1925), hers was an ‘atheist’s religion of doing good for the sake of goodness.’ Accepting that with death she would ‘cease completely’, Clarissa Dalloway anticipated her afterlife as being in the memories of others:

laid out like a mist between the people she knew best, who lifted her on their branches as she had seen the trees lift the mist.

A sense of life’s fragility  – and the ongoing resonances of those who have died – was emphasised by the deaths of Virginia’s mother, half-sister Stella, father, and elder brother Thoby between 1895-1906.

Virginia Woolf was a visionary writer, and one of the most influential novelists of the 20th century. She was also a lifelong humanist, whose writings embody an acute sensitivity to the difficulties and possibilities of human life. In A Room of One’s Own (1929) and Three Guineas (1938), Woolf challenged the limitations placed on women in a patriarchal society, not least in the realms of writing and education, and both essays remain classics of feminist writing today. A powerful sense of injustice pervaded these works, but so too did the capacity for shrewd observation and transformative creativity which underpinned all of her writing. Woolf created a body of work which changed the landscape of the modern novel, and cultivated a circle of friends and collaborators who remain the subject of fascination and inspiration. Despite her own personal tragedies and mental ill health, as Sybil Oldfield has written:

[Woolf’s] imaginative creativity was rooted in a lifelong mourning which she did not allow to paralyse her. Instead, she transmuted her memories of her dead, through infinite effort, into life-giving words that would not die. The only immortality she could believe in.