Content Warning: This section of the guide refers to death by suicide.

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) was an English writer who is well known for her modernist and feminist writings. She grew up in a well-to-do, intellectually inclined family in Kensington, London. Her father, Leslie Stephen, was a prominent literary critic. Woolf was homeschooled as a child, and from an early age, she read voraciously. She studied classics and history at King’s College, London, and in 1904, she helped form the Bloomsbury Group, which was a group of English intellectuals, artists, and writers who met to discuss philosophy and art. Woolf also became involved in the women’s rights movement while at college.

In 1912, she married her husband Leonard Woolf, who was a writer and publisher. Together, they founded the Hogarth Press in 1917, which provided a publication platform for modernist writers including T.S. Eliot and Katherine Mansfield in addition to Woolf herself. Her most famous works include the novels Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), and The Waves (1931), along with the feminist nonfiction essay collection A Room of One’s Own (1929). Woolf’s novels focused on the interiority of her characters, and Mrs.