Night and Day

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Virginia Woolf, who would become one of the twentieth century’s most celebrated novelists, was born in London on January 25,1882, to Leslie and Julia Duckworth Stephen. Virginia had access to the works in her erudite father’s extensive library, and she read them voraciously. Unlike her brothers, however, the brilliant, self-taught young woman was denied access to a university education, a fact that would inform her influential feminist works A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas.

When Virginia was thirteen, her mother died, a traumatic event that triggered a mental breakdown, the first in a life intermittently plagued by severe depression. Virginia suffered another breakdown following the death of her father in 1904. While convalescing at the home of a family friend, she began to publish essays and reviews in the Guardian and the Times Literary Supplement.

Later that year, Virginia moved with her siblings Vanessa, Thoby, and Adrian to a house in the Bloomsbury section of London. There Thoby began holding informal gatherings of his Cambridge friends. Known as the Bloomsbury group, this legendary artistic circle included artist Clive Bell, economist John Maynard Keynes, and writers Lytton Strachey and E. M. Forster. It was within this group that Virginia met novelist Leonard Woolf, whom she married in 1912.

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