Bloomsbury lost Fry, in 1934, and Lytton Strachey before him, in January 1932, to early deaths. The loss of Stracheywas compounded by Carrington’s suicide just two months after, in March. Another old friend, Ka Cox,...

The daughter of the literary biographer Leslie Stephen, and close friend of the innovative biographer of the Victorians, Lytton Strachey, Woolf herself put forward, in ‘The New Biography’ (1927) (reviewing work by another biographer acquaintance,...

Woolf turned her back on a number of tokens of her rising eminence in the 1930s, including an offer of the Companion of Honour award, an invitation from Cambridge University to give the Clark lectures,...

Reading Virginia Woolf will change your life, may even save it. If you want to make sense of modern life, the works of Virginia Woolf remain essential reading. More than fifty years since her death,...

In 1925 Woolf began an affair with Sackville-West, who was married to Harold Nicolson, the diplomat and writer, and the development of their close relationship, which does not seem to have undermined either woman’s marriage,...

The 1990s to the present: feminism, historicism,postcolonialism, ethicsThere has never been a better time to study Virginia Woolf. Woolf studies, in the 1990s and in the new millennium, has continued to flourish and diversifyin all...

In 1922 Woolf met the writer Vita Sackville-West, who was to join Vanessa Bell and Leonard Woolf as the most significant people in her life.

Woolf ’s control over the production of her own work is a significant factor in her genesis as a writer. The Hogarth Press became an important and influential publishing house in the decades that followed....

The 1980s: feminism, postmodernism, sexual/textual politicsWhile it might be tempting to generalise that Woolf ’s writing was being discussed almost in two separate camps during the 1980s, formalists on the one hand, and feminists on...

In January 1912 Leonard proposed marriage. She was unable to answer directly and he pressed further in a passionate letter: ‘It isn’t, really it isnt, merely because you are so beautiful – though of course...

The 1970s and 1980s: feminism, androgyny, modernism, aestheticsIn the 1970s and 1980s, Woolf studies expanded in a number of directions,most notably in relation to feminism. Critical interest in Woolf developed at the same time as...

Leonard and Virginia married in August 1912. Virginia was 30. Soon after her marriage she suVered another breakdown and her mental health declined sporadically over the following year, culminating in a suicide attempt in September...

The 1950s and 1960s: philosophy, psychology, mythThere was considerable critical interest in Woolf ’s life and work in this period, fuelled by the publication of selected extracts from her diaries, in A Writer’s Diary (1953),...

Leonard Woolf was two years older than Virginia, whom he had first met in 1901 in the rooms of her brother Thoby at Cambridge. He went from St Paul’s School to Trinity College on a...

Woolf criticism has not evolved smoothly, and it would be misleading to say that any one approach or interpretation has ever prevailed to the exclusion of others. There are continuities and discontinuities in trends and...

Woolf drew on her memories of her holidays in Cornwall for To the Lighthouse, which was conceived in part as an elegy on her parents. Her father was a vigorous walker and an Alpinist of...

Modernism and feminism are two broad axes on which Woolf criticism turns, and there are many other categories that reflect the range of positions available in literary criticism more generally, such as postmodernist, psychoanalytical,historicist, materialist,...

Leslie Stephen died in 1904. In that year his children retreated to Wales for a period and then travelled in Italy. Vanessa and Virginia went on to Paris, where they met up with Clive Bell....

Like James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), Woolf ’s first novel is a self-conscious meditation on the formation of an emergent intellectual and artist (a Ku¨nstlerroman).

By the close of the nineteenth century her studies with her father were being supplemented by tuition in the classics from Dr Warr of King’s College, Kensington, and from Clara Pater, sister of the English...

There are numerous biographies of Woolf. Biography has been highly influential in shaping the reception ofWoolf ’s work, and her life has been as much debated as her writing. I would recommend the following three...

It is important to recognise Woolf ’s acknowledgement of her father’s dually formative influence. The domesticdictator was also an intellectual who powerfully shaped her developing intellect, even if, at times, antithetically so: ‘just as a...