Who was Virginia Woolf?

Virginia Woolf was an innovative modern novelist, essayist, literary critic, and central member of the Bloomsbury group.
A literary inheritance
Woolf was born in 1882 into what historian Noel Annan famously termed the ‘Intellectual Aristocracy', a world of upper-middle class educated elites who intermarried.
Her father, Leslie Stephen, was the founding editor of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Stephen’s first wife was daughter of the novelist William Makepeace Thackeray.
Woolf’s mother, Julia Prinsep Stephen (née Jackson, formerly Mrs Duckworth), was part of the Little Holland House literary circle and a model for Edward Burne-Jones’s painting, Annunciation. Gerald Duckworth, Julia’s son by her first marriage, founded Duckworth & Co. who published Woolf’s first two novels.
The Bloomsbury group
Virginia and her siblings Vanessa, Thoby and Adrian moved to Bloomsbury in London in 1904. Here they surrounded themselves with Thoby's friends from Cambridge University, the artists, writers and philosophers who would collectively become known as the Bloomsbury group. Notable figures included John Maynard Keynes, Lytton Strachey, Roger Fry, Duncan Grant, E.M. Forster and Leonard Woolf.
Virginia married Leonard in 1912, and together they founded the Hogarth Press, which published T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and Woolf’s later novels.
A new way of writing
Woolf’s novels tested the boundaries of traditional narrative. Rather than following Victorian and Edwardian conventions for plotting and character development, she focussed on the inner worlds of her characters. She traced our participation in the natural and urban worlds we inhabit, and how we become part of the experiences, places, and people we encounter.
Although for most of her life Woolf suffered from bouts of mental illness, a condition which would lead her to commit suicide in 1941, her novels remained exuberant in their embrace of human experience. This is perhaps most aptly summed up in Mrs Dalloway’s exclamation, ‘What a lark! What a plunge!’
Sussex and Monk’s House
Though Woolf is often seen as a London writer, which she certainly was, both she and Leonard Woolf had an abiding love for the South Downs. They purchased Monk’s House near Rodmell in 1919, and from then on, used it as their writer’s retreat.
Monk's House was not the only Bloomsbury outpost in the South Downs. In 1916 Woolf's sister, the artist Vanessa Bell, moved to Charleston Farmhouse with the painter Duncan Grant. Bell and Grant lived and worked at Charleston on and off for the rest of their lives, regularly hosting Bloomsbury friends and acquaintances including Virginia and Leonard.
Imagining the landscape
The Sussex landscape was integral to Woolf’s writing, and she attempted to capture what she saw as its unsurpassable beauty in her novels and essays.
She was also engaged in its conservation, writing against unsympathetic developments in the countryside with a passion matching that of the National Trust and the Council for the Preservation of Rural England.
Our places with Virginia Woolf connections

Monk's House
Virginia and Leonard Woolf's country retreat, Monk's House, is a seventeenth century cottage in the village of Rodmell. The Woolfs purchased the house in 1919, and Woolf worked on all of her subsequent novels there. Her writing lodge, in the garden, overlooks Mount Caburn and the medieval parish church, and gave her a room of her own.

South Downs
Woolf first visited the South Downs in 1910 with her brother Adrian and found the landscape so entrancing that she decided to lease a villa in Firle. In 1912 she leased Asheham House, near Beddingham, with her sister Vanessa Bell, and later, she and Leonard Woolf purchased Monk’s House in Rodmell. Virginia's long daily walks along the Downs were immensely important to her writing, and details of the landscape abound in her novels, essays, letters, and diaries.

Knole
Knole was the much-loved ancestral home of Woolf's close friend and lover, Vita Sackville-West. Woolf first visited in July 1924 and felt rather overwhelmed by its expanse, but was moved and inspired by Vita’s attachment to it and to its history. It is the main setting for Woolf’s 'Orlando', a novel which Vita's son, Nigel Nicolson, famously described as a ‘love letter’ to his mother.

Sissinghurst Castle Garden
Woolf was a frequent visitor to Sissinghurst Castle, the country home of Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson near Cranbrook in Kent. Sissinghurst became the object of Vita’s intense focus as she lovingly restored its buildings and created its spectacular gardens. It is home to the first hand-press that Leonard and Virginia Woolf bought for the Hogarth Press. Virginia gave it to Vita as a present when she and Harold moved to the castle in 1930.

Smallhythe Place
The character Miss LaTrobe in Woolf’s 1941 novel ‘Between the Acts’ was inspired by Edith Craig, the innovative theatre director, women’s suffrage activist and daughter of the celebrated actress Ellen Terry. After her mother’s death in 1928, Craig organised an annual memorial performance at the Barn Theatre in the grounds of Terry’s house, The Farm at Smallhythe in Kent. Craig turned the house into a memorial museum to her mother, and gave it to the National Trust in 1939.

Our collections
Explore our collections with Woolf connections, from paintings and furniture to books and personal possessions.