In Search of a Room of One's Own
...If woman had no existence save in the fiction written by men, one would imagine her a person of the utmost importance; very various; heroic and mean; splendid and sordid; infinitely beautiful and hideous in the extreme; as great as a man, some think even greater. But this is woman in fiction…Imaginatively she is of the highest importance; practically she is completely insignificant....
English novelist, critic, and essayist. The London-born daughter of the eminent philosopher Sir Leslie Stephen, Woolf was mainly self-educated through her unrestricted reading in her father's substantial library. For decades she was at the center of the Bloomsbury Group, a celebrated collection of artists, scholars, and writers that included both Woolf and her husband, socialist writer Leonard Woolf. Together, the Woolfs founded and operated the Hogarth Press, whose publications included many of her works. A foremost modernist, Woolf employed penetrating psychological insight, lyrical intensity, and experimental literary techniques in her fiction; her nine novels include the now-classic Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), and The Waves (1931). Her numerous essays are collected in four volumes; they include A Room of One's Own (1929), a historical investigation of women and creativity; and Three Guineas (1938), philosophical dialogues that explore issues of war and feminism. See also www.virginiawoolfsociety.co.uk. 