A Heroine
Virginia (Stephen) Woolf
1882 - 1941
Virginia Woolf was born to Sir Leslie Stephen and her mother, Julia Jackson Duckworth in London, England. She was one of four siblings, Vanessa, Thoby, Stella, and Adrian. She began her career as a writer at first with critical essays and articles for newspapers. Later she began to publish her own fiction and little by little, gaining the recognition she deserves. Her most notable works are Mrs. Dalloway, The Voyage Out, Orlando, To the Lighthouse, and Jacob's Room. She is known best for the "stream of consciousness" style of writing. She is such a phenomena that people are fascinated by EVERYTHING she wrote. Even her diary has been published, some in very downsized versions, others in volumes. It is known that she wrote in her diaries constantly that she had volume upon volume lining her shelves.
Virginia was born on January 25th and was only fifty-nine years old when she died in 1941. Her life had it's tragedies and triumphs, but her early life is very littered with such personal setbacks in which she never recovered from and would plague her her whole adult life. Though I have not been able to find specifics as of yet, I had once come across a very disturbing fact about our dear Virginia. As a child she was sexually mollested by a family member, presumably an uncle. This affected her ableness to secure a stable mind and confused her the rest of her life as to her true sexual nature. Her mother died when she was only three, and though she had sisters and a couple of further "mother figures," she never fully recovered from her loss.
If you wish to know more, I have found the following detailed sites that will aide in your understanding of
this intricate, talented woman:
Eight of Woolf's Short Stories
Virginia Woolf's Pscychiatric History
Links For Everything Imaginable about Virginia
Links & Reviews Written by Woolf
A Little Inkling about Woolf's Bloomsbury Group
Virginia Woolf Webring
Books I suggest reading that tell her story is one by her nephew, Quentin Bell, Virginia Woolf; a Biography. It
contains great precious every-day life pictures of Woolf as a young girl, family, and even the members of the Bloomsbury Group. Though they are criminally abrigded, her diaries are also a most enlightening read, such as
A Moment's Liberty: The Shorter Diary and A Passionate Apprentice: The Early Jounals, 1897-1909.
