Who is Afraid of Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf is a world-famous novelist, also distinguished feminist essayist, critic, and a central figure in the English literature. She served as the voice during the time when women played very little part in the society at the same time establishing herself as one of the leading writers of modernism.

Virginia Woolf was born on January 25, 1882 in London, England as the daughter of Julia Jackson Duckworth, a member of the Duckworth publishing family, and literary critic Leslie Stephen, a literary critic and who founded the Dictionary of National Biography. Woolf grew up at the family home at Hyde Park Gate and was educated at home by her father. She began writing for the Times Literary Supplement in 1905. She published her first book upon marrying political theorist Leonard Woolf in 1912. Her feminist views were very much expressed in her works like To The Lighthouse (1927), The Waves (1931) and Mrs Dalloway (1925).

Throughout her life, Woolf suffered severe mental breakdown brought upon by the series of death in her family. Her mother died when she was in her early teens, her half sister died two years later, her father suffered a slow death from cancer, and her brother Toby died in 1906. Her mental illness took its final toll on her on March 28, 1941 when she filled her pockets with stones and drowned herself in the River Ouse near her Sussex home.