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| VIRGINIA WOOLF (1882-1941) |
"Imaginative work... is like a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners." | | Birthplace
London, England
Education
She was educated at home.
Other jobs
Journalist, critic, publisher
Did you know?
Woolf wrote a biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's spaniel entitled Flush.
Critical verdict
Now the most renowned member of the Bloomsbury Group, which included Vanessa Bell, Lytton Strachey, John Maynard Keynes, Clive Bell and Vita Sackville-West, Woolf produced some of the highest points of high modernism with her extraordinary ultra-realistic yet experimentally stream-of-consciousness novels. She was also an accomplished literary critic and feminist polemicist.
Recommended works
The Waves is a lush, evocative piece of stream-of-consciousness, The Years her most 'conventional' novel; A Room of One's Own is a classic feminist text.
Influences
Walter Pater; the Bloomsbury Group
Now read on
Katherine Mansfield, Doris Lessing, Elizabeth Bowen, Dorothy Richardson
Adaptations
Sally Potter's Orlando (1992), with the luminously hermaphrodite Tilda Swinton, is a visual feast and catches the novel's playful spirit - with the added bonus of Quentin Crisp as Queen Elizabeth, a role he was born to play. 1997's Mrs Dalloway is less visually inventive, but a faithful and rich adaptation nonetheless.
Recommended biography
Her letters are prodigiously fascinating. Hermione Lee's biography rests on considerable new research and is a wonderful read; Quentin Bell's life has obvious interest.
Criticism
See her essay 'Modern Fiction' for a statement of her experimental project.
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