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WHO IS VIRGINIA WOOLF?
ОглавлениеVirginia Woolf was born Adeline Virginia Stephen in London in 1882. It was the second marriage for both her father, Sir Leslie Stephen, and her mother, Julia Stephen (née Duckworth). Virginia was one of eight siblings and half‐siblings, including Vanessa (later Vanessa Bell, the artist).
Leslie Stephen was a prominent essayist and critic, and editor of the Dictionary of National Biography. So although Virginia was educated at home rather than at school and university (as were her brothers), she was exposed to a wealth of knowledge and intellectual ideas throughout her childhood and teen years. There was a parade of learned or artistic visitors to their London Hyde Park home, among them the writer Henry James, poet Alfred Lord Tennyson, and the photographer Julia Margaret Cameron (Julia Stephen's aunt).
When Virginia was just 13, her mother died. She was devastated, as was her father, who turned his grief onto his children. This extra psychological pressure plunged Virginia into the first of a series of breakdowns she suffered throughout her life. They occurred on the death of her elder sister, Stella, that of her father, and after the completion of her first novel, The Voyage Out (1915).
Virginia married Leonard Woolf in 1912 and together they established the Hogarth Press, partly in order to give Virginia repetitive manual work in order to rest her fevered brain and aid in her recovery. The Hogarth Press published a range of important works, including T.S. Eliot's modernist epic poem, ‘The Waste Land’ (1924), a number of Woolf's own novels and essays and, later, English translations (by James Strachey) of the complete works of Sigmund Freud (1952–74).
Although Virginia worked and wrote prolifically, publishing nine novels and hundreds of short stories and essays, her mental health was never stable. In 1941, terrified of the threat of a German victory in the Second World War and what that would mean for herself and her Jewish husband, she committed suicide by drowning near her home in Sussex.