Virginia Woolf

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guardian.co.uk, Tuesday July 22 2008 15.39 BST

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.