Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf (1882–1941), novelist, essayist and critic; author of Jacob’s Room (1922); Mrs Dalloway (1925), and To the Lighthouse (1927), among other experimental and influential novels, as well as of A Room of One’s Own (1928), a classic of modern feminist criticism, and The Common Reader (1925) and other collections of essays. Daughter of the editor and biographer Leslie Stephen (1832–1904), she married Leonard Woolf in 1912, published her first novel The Voyage Out in 1915, and founded the Hogarth Press with her husband in 1917. The Hogarth Press published TSE’s Poems (1919), The Waste Land (1923), and Homage to John Dryden (1923). For his part, TSE published in the Criterion Woolf’s essays and talks including ‘Kew Gardens’, ‘Character in Fiction’, and ‘On Being Ill’. In addition to being his publisher, Woolf became a friend and correspondent; and her diaries and letters give a detailed first-hand account of him. See Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf (1996).