Born in London in 1882, Virginia Woolf was a renowned critic, feminist and writer whose work experimented with the form of the novel. Daughter of prominent Victorian critic, philosopher, biographer and scholar Sir Leslie Stephen, Virginia was educated at home, surrounded by some of the most eminent people of the age. When her father died in 1904, she moved with her sister and two brothers to the London district of Bloomsbury which lent its name to “The Bloomsbury Group” of writers and thinkers which gathered at their home, frequently famous for their liberated and entangled sex lives as much as for their work. In 1912, she married Leonard Woolf and they founded the Hogarth Press, which published her novels. During a recurrence of nervous depression in 1941, Woolf committed suicide by drowning, near to her home in Sussex.
After her first two, quite traditional novels, Woolf began to experiment with the style of her writing and developed a “stream of consciousness” techniques, bringing a poetic flow of rhythm and imagery to prose fiction. Monday or Tuesday (1921) was a collection of her early exploratory sketches. These experiments paved the way for her later novels: Jacob’s Room (1922), Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), The Waves (1931), The Years (1937) and Between the Acts (1941). Orlando (1928) is a lighter historical fantasy about a young man of Elizabeth I’s reign who lives until the present, transforming into a woman along the way. The work was inspired by Woolf’s extra-marital love affair with Vita Sackville-West. She also wrote biographies, one as the memories of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s dog (Flush in 1933) and critical essays. Her most famous is A Room of One's Own (1929), which discusses the challenges for female writers in a patriarchal society.
The “stream of consciousness” style that Woolf frequently used in her novels is a focus on the continuous flow of experience upon the human consciousness as the events in the outer world impinge upon it. Her writing experiments with the experience of time as a sequence of moments. Mrs Dalloway and Between the Acts occur in the space of only one day. Restricting time and utilising recurring imagery further enhanced the poetic effect. The Waves is written from the perspective of all six characters from childhood to their old age; the novel is concerned with the human experience of different ages rather than story or character.