Hermione Lee Virginia Woolf Biography — page 1

A C

L B

Virginia

Woolf

Hermione

Lee

1 8 8 2 – 1 9 4 1

W I T H A C H R O N O L O GY, H O N O U R S & A C H I E V E M E N T S ,

A N D S E L E C T B I B L I O G R A P H Y

1 / 22

V I R G

I N I A W

L F

Biography

Hermione

Lee

“

woman

must

have

money

and

room

her

own

she

write

fiction

.”

— Virginia Woolf,

A Room of One’s Own

, 1929

2 / 22

Hermione Lee Virginia Woolf Biography — page 3

P R E F A C E

Note

the

Text

This is an original biography, written for readers who wish to follow Virginia Woolf’s life

from her childhood in Victorian Kensington to her last days in wartime Sussex. It rests on

well-documented public facts: Woolf’s own published novels, essays, diaries, letters, and

autobiographical sketches; the record of her family and her circle; and the standard

scholarly chronology of her life. It quotes from her published writings only in brief

passages now in the public domain, and it reproduces no copyrighted criticism or

scholarship. Dates follow the conventions of the standard editions; titles follow the forms

in which the books were first published.

3 / 22

Hermione Lee Virginia Woolf Biography — page 4

C O

N T

E N T

This

Book

—

A Note on the Text

A Victorian Childhood, 1882–1904

The Making of Bloomsbury, 1904–1912

III

Marriage and the First Novels, 1912–1922

The Modernist Years, 1922–1929

The Experimental Peak, 1929–1937

The Long Shadow of War, 1937–1941

VII

The Legacy

—

Chronology

—

Honours and Achievements

—

Select Bibliography

—

A Note on Sources

—

About the Author

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Hermione Lee Virginia Woolf Biography — page 5

C H A P

T E

R O

Victorian

Childhood

1882

–

1904

t number 22 Hyde Park Gate, in the narrow Victorian quarter behind Kensington High

Street, a girl was born in an upstairs bedroom in the first weeks of 1882. Adeline Virginia

Stephen arrived into a crowded and intense household, a family of eight children built from

two marriages, presided over by two extraordinary parents. Her father, Leslie Stephen, was a

critic, essayist, and former Cambridge don who had given up holy orders and made himself,

in the estimation of his contemporaries, the leading man of letters of late-Victorian England.

Her mother, Julia, was a celebrated beauty of Anglo-Indian descent, a gifted nurse and philan-

thropist, and the niece of the photographer Julia Margaret Cameron.

Leslie Stephen’s great enterprise was the Dictionary of National Biography, the monumen-

tal reference work he edited through the 1880s and 1890s. The Stephen children grew up sur-

rounded by the apparatus of scholarship: proof sheets on the dining table, volumes of the dic-

tionary accumulating on the shelves, and a father who retired to his study every morning

with the regularity of a clock. For Virginia, the lesson was lifelong: writing was a profession,

prose was a craft, and the mind, left untended, was a garden that would choke with weeds.

Yet the same household was governed by grief. Julia Stephen was already struggling with

illness and exhaustion; in May 1895, when Virginia was thirteen, she died of influenza at the

age of forty-nine. The loss cracked the girl’s mind. She suffered what was then called a ner-

vous breakdown — weeks of agitation, sleeplessness, and terror, including a hallucination that

the sparrows in the garden were speaking Greek. It was the first of the great mental crises

that would return at intervals for the rest of her life.

The years that followed were among the darkest she would ever describe. Her half-sister

Stella, who had taken over the household, died two years later, in 1897, and the father, de-

manding and grieving, leaned more heavily on his daughters. In the memoir she wrote at the

end of her life, A Sketch of the Past, Virginia recalled the shadow cast over her early adoles-

cence by the sexual advances of her Duckworth half-brothers — an experience she described

with muted horror and which she came to understand as a lasting injury to her sense of self.

In June 1902 her father was knighted, a recognition of a lifetime’s literary eminence; but his

health was failing. When Sir Leslie Stephen died in February 1904, Virginia collapsed again.

She spent months under doctors’ care, and at times her recovery seemed doubtful. Out of that

5 / 22

Hermione Lee Virginia Woolf Biography — page 6

long darkness came an act of family courage: Vanessa, the eldest Stephen daughter, proposed

that the four siblings abandon the gloomy Kensington house and begin again in Bloomsbury.

Late in 1904 the Stephen children took a house at 46 Gordon Square, and Virginia, still con-

valescent, began to place her first anonymous reviews in the weekly press. The Victorian

chapter was closed; the modern one had begun.

6 / 22

Hermione Lee Virginia Woolf Biography — page 7

C H A P

T E

R T W O

The

Making

Bloomsbury

1904

–

1912

t Gordon Square the four Stephens created a world of their own. Vanessa hung the

rooms with painted panels and bare walls, scandalizing relatives by allowing the young

to entertain without chaperones. Thoby Stephen, the handsome Cambridge brother, began to

invite his university friends to the house on Thursday evenings — young men who talked

about books, art, and philosophy with an intensity the sisters had never encountered. Out of

those Thursday evenings grew the circle that came to be known, with some irony, as

Bloomsbury.

The names arrived gradually: Lytton Strachey, the wit who would write Eminent

Victorians; Saxon Sydney-Turner, the silent classicist; Clive Bell, the aspiring art critic;

Desmond MacCarthy, the talker who never finished his great book; and later John Maynard

Keynes, Duncan Grant, Roger Fry, and E. M. Forster. Leonard Woolf, another of Thoby’s Trinity

friends, belonged to the outer circle in those early years, though he was far away in Ceylon,

serving as a colonial administrator.

The Bloomsbury conversation had a distinctive note: frankness about personal feeling, se-

riousness about art, mockery of convention. For Virginia, the liberation was chiefly intellec-

tual. She later dated the arrival of the modern world to that exact period — the years of Roger

Fry’s great Post-Impressionist exhibition in 1910 and the famous Dreadnought hoax of the

same winter, in which she and her friends, disguised as a party of Abyssinian royals, talked

their way onto a battleship of the Royal Navy.

The decade was broken by a cruel loss. In 1906 the family traveled to Greece; Thoby re-

turned with typhoid fever and died in November, at the age of twenty-six. The group closed

around the loss. Vanessa married Clive Bell in 1907, and Virginia and her younger brother

Adrian moved to Fitzroy Square, where she continued the double life of a literary journalist.

By day she reviewed the great Victorians for the Times Literary Supplement and other pa-

pers, reading her way through English prose from Chaucer to the moderns with a scholar’s

appetite. She wrote steadily, anonymously, in the mornings; she walked London in the after-

noons, filling her mind with streets, faces, and the sound of the city that would become the

great subject of her fiction.

7 / 22

Hermione Lee Virginia Woolf Biography — page 8

In 1912 she married Leonard Woolf, who had returned from Ceylon the previous year and

had courted her with unusual frankness. It was, by all evidence, a marriage of equals — of

talkers, readers, and workers who placed candor above sentiment. Leonard understood the

fragility of her health; he also believed, more than anyone, in her genius. The marriage, it

would become clear, was the great sustaining fact of her life.

8 / 22

Hermione Lee Virginia Woolf Biography — page 9

C H A P

T E

R T H R E

Marriage

and

the

First

Novels

1912

–

1922

he first years of the marriage were shadowed by illness. Virginia had been writing The

Voyage Out for years, through revisions and doubts; the strain of completing it coin-

cided with a devastating return of her illness. In the summer of 1913 she attempted suicide by

an overdose of sleeping medicine, and the following eighteen months were spent in the care of

doctors and nurses — in silence, in rest cures, in the small rituals by which the mad were, in

that era, returned to sanity. Leonard, indefatigable, watched over her; the marriage, tested to

its limit, held.

The Voyage Out appeared in March 1915, published by Duckworth with a jacket designed

by Vanessa. Its story — a young woman’s voyage to South America, her engagement, her sud-

den death — was conventional in form and quietly rebellious in spirit. Reviewers were respect-

ful; the book sold modestly. But in the weeks around its publication Virginia’s illness returned

with a violence that frightened everyone around her, and she spent the spring of 1915 in a

world of delusion.

The recovery, when it came, was remarkable. By 1916 she was again writing reviews; by

1917 she and Leonard had found an unusual cure for the strain of London life: a small hand

printing press, bought partly as a means of quieting the mind. The Hogarth Press — named af-

ter the house in Richmond where they then lived — began as a hobby and became the most

important independent publishing venture of the modernist movement. Its first publication,

Two Stories, printed by the Woolfs themselves, contained “The Mark on the Wall” by Virginia

and a story by Leonard; the experiment proved that she could publish exactly what she

wished, without the interventions of conventional editors.

Night and Day (1919), her second novel, was a spacious social comedy of Edwardian

London, a deliberate farewell to the tradition of the nineteenth-century novel. In the same

year she published Kew Gardens, a short prose experiment in which flowers, light, and drift-

ing conversation dissolve the ordinary boundaries of the story. Between them, the two works

marked the poles between which her art would oscillate for the rest of her life.

In July 1919 the Woolfs bought Monk’s House, a weatherboard cottage in the Sussex village

of Rodmell, with a long garden, an orchard, and a view across the Ouse valley to the downs.

London in the week, Rodmell at weekends: the arrangement gave Virginia the two lives she

needed — the stimulus of the city and the silence of the country.

9 / 22

Hermione Lee Virginia Woolf Biography — page 10

Jacob’s Room (1922) was the breakthrough. Written as an elegy for her brother and for a

lost generation of young men, the novel tells the life of Jacob Flanders through letters, rooms,

conversations, and absences — the whole portrait constructed, astonishingly, from what is not

said. Critics were puzzled; Virginia felt she had at last found her own form. Her friendship

with Katherine Mansfield, begun a few years earlier, sharpened her sense of what the short

story could do; the two writers watched each other’s experiments with a mixture of rivalry

and admiration. When Mansfield died in 1923, Virginia recorded the loss at length in her diary.

The modern novel, she was convinced, was being made now, in London, in her own lifetime.

10 / 22

Hermione Lee Virginia Woolf Biography — page 11

C H A P

T E

R F

The

Modernist

Years

1922

–

1929

n March 1924 the Woolfs moved to 52 Tavistock Square, a large Georgian house in the mid-

dle of Bloomsbury, and the Hogarth Press came with them. The small press that had be-

gun by printing a handful of copies on a hand machine had grown into a genuine publisher. It

issued the first English edition of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, printed Katherine Mansfield’s

Prelude, and, from 1924, brought out translations of Freud which the English public met with

astonishment. The press made the Woolfs independent; it also made them, in effect, the pub-

lishers of their own generation.

Mrs Dalloway, published in May 1925, is set on a single June day in post-war London.

Clarissa Dalloway walks through Westminster buying flowers for her party; a young man,

Septimus Smith, shell-shocked by the war, walks through the same city toward his death; the

two lines of the novel cross and separate. In its use of interior monologue and its compression

of time, the book was seen immediately as a landmark. Together with James Joyce and Marcel

Proust, Virginia Woolf had made the old novel obsolete.

The Common Reader was published in the same year: a collection of essays, from Chaucer

to Conrad, in which she invented an ideal reader — unprofessional, curious, alive — and made

criticism itself a form of literature. For the rest of her career she would return to this project,

the education of the common reader, as she conceived it.

To the Lighthouse appeared in May 1927. In it, the Ramsay family spends a summer at

their house on the Isle of Skye; Mrs Ramsay, a beautiful and elusive maternal presence, pre-

sides over dinners and children’s anxieties, while her philosopher husband demands impossi-

ble sympathy; the middle section, “Time Passes,” watches the empty house decay through a

decade of darkness; the final movement sends the surviving family, at last, to the lighthouse.

The novel was, unmistakably, a portrait of her own parents, and the act of writing it, Woolf

felt, had exorcised their ghosts. Critics and readers recognized a masterpiece; it remains, for

many, her greatest book.

In October 1928 she published Orlando, a mock-biography that begins in the court of

Elizabeth I and carries its hero — who changes sex and lives for three hundred years — into an

England of motorcars and newspapers. A love letter, in form, to her friend Vita Sackville-West,

Orlando was also a philosophical joke about identity, biography, and time. It became her most

commercially successful book.

11 / 22

Hermione Lee Virginia Woolf Biography — page 12

A Room of One’s Own followed in October 1929. Expanded from lectures given at the

women’s colleges of Cambridge, Newnham and Girton, in 1928, the book is a dramatized essay:

a woman walks across the lawns of a college where she is not allowed; she is denied access to

the library; she invents the story of Judith Shakespeare, a sister as gifted as Will, who dies ob-

scure and unremembered. The essay’s argument — that a woman writer needs, literally and

symbolically, money and a private room — has become the most famous formulation of mod-

ern feminism.

In the same year, 1928, the University of Manchester conferred an honorary doctorate

upon her — one of the few formal honours she accepted. Her reputation, as both novelist and

critic, was now international.

12 / 22

Hermione Lee Virginia Woolf Biography — page 13

C H A P

T E

R F

I V E

The

Experimental

Peak

1929

–

1937

he Waves, published in 1931, was the farthest point of her experiment. The book has no

plot in the ordinary sense, and almost no connective tissue of narrative. Six voices —

Bernard, Susan, Rhoda, Neville, Jinny, Louis — speak in a series of soliloquies from the nursery

to old age, interleaved with interludes describing the sun crossing a seaside day. It is prose

written at the very edge of poetry, and it divided its first readers. Woolf herself thought of it as

a kind of play written in prose, and she believed that no one had ever attempted anything

quite like it.

The Common Reader: Second Series appeared in 1932, and in 1933 she published Flush, a

“biography” of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s spaniel — a graceful and witty jeu d’esprit that

also served as a study of the constraints of a woman’s life in the nineteenth century.

The Years, begun in 1932 and published in March 1937, was the novel that cost her most.

An ambitious family chronicle reaching from 1880 to the present day, it underwent endless

drafts and revisions; the struggle with it brought her, in the spring of 1936, to a collapse from

which she spent months recovering. When the book finally appeared it was a great popular

success, and in 1938 it was awarded the Fémina-Vie Heureuse prize — the principal literary

honour of her lifetime.

By the mid-1930s she was a public figure. In 1937 she gave an early literary broadcast for

the BBC — a talk on the craft of writing. Her name was known not only in England but in

France, America, and across Europe. The Hogarth Press, meanwhile, had become a substan-

tial concern, publishing the poets and critics of the day while remaining small enough to serve

as a vehicle for her own work.

But the decade was darkening. The rise of fascism, the Spanish Civil War, the approach of

war — these entered her work as they entered everyone’s. Her next book was to be an argu-

ment, not a novel.

13 / 22

Hermione Lee Virginia Woolf Biography — page 14

C H A P

T E

R S

I X

The

Long

Shadow

War

1937

–

1941

hree Guineas, published in June 1938, was the most controversial book she ever wrote.

Framed as a reply to a correspondent who had asked how war might be prevented, the

book refuses every comfortable formula. Its argument — developed with sardonic fury — is

that the tyranny of the fascist state is continuous with the tyranny of the patriarchal house-

hold; that the professional world which excludes women has helped make the world which

makes war; that women, as outsiders, have a peculiar power to refuse the ceremonies of patri-

otism. “As a woman, I have no country,” she wrote. Several of her closest friends were discon-

certed; reviewers attacked it; and it became, as she had foreseen, a lightning rod. It remains,

together with A Room of One’s Own, one of the founding texts of twentieth-century feminism.

The war came, as she had foreseen, in September 1939. The Woolfs spent much of the next

year between London and Rodmell; in the autumn of 1940 a bomb destroyed their London

house, and they made Monk’s House their only home, in a Sussex increasingly loud with the

traffic of war. In 1940 she also published Roger Fry: A Biography, a long and affectionate por-

trait of the painter and critic who had changed the course of British art — the most traditional

of her books, and the last major work she saw through the press.

Between the Acts, her final novel, was written during the war. It imagines a single June day

in 1939 in an English village, where the villagers perform an annual pageant of English his-

tory, and the pageant — interrupted, ragged, full of gaps — gives way to darkness and the

coming catastrophe. The novel is quiet, comic, and terrifying by turns; she was still revising it

in March 1941.

That spring the old illness returned. Woolf had long feared madness more than death; she

had said, in the darkest months of earlier breakdowns, that she could not endure another

such winter. On the morning of March 28, 1941, she wrote two notes — to Leonard and to

Vanessa — walked out across the Sussex fields to the River Ouse, and put stones in her coat

pockets. Her body was recovered three weeks later, on April 18. She was cremated, and her

ashes were buried beneath the great elm tree at the end of the garden at Monk’s House.

14 / 22

Hermione Lee Virginia Woolf Biography — page 15

C H A P

T E

R S

V E

The

Legacy

etween the Acts was published later that year, in the summer of 1941, still smelling of

war. If her death made her a legend, her work made her a presence. But for a long time

the legend obscured the writer: she was remembered as a fragile, vanishing genius, a victim of

her own nerves.

The publication of Leonard Woolf’s A Writer’s Diary in 1953 changed the portrait. Here was

the professional — the woman who rose each morning to write, who read her way through

English literature, who managed a press, who swam, walked, gardened, and fought her illness

with ferocity. The full edition of her Letters (1975–1980) and her Diary (1977–1984), along with

the autobiographical writings collected as Moments of Being (1976), completed the revolution.

The “madwoman” was replaced by what the documents revealed: a disciplined, ambitious,

immensely social artist.

The feminist criticism of the 1970s and afterward placed A Room of One’s Own and Three

Guineas among the essential texts of women’s liberation, and returned her novels to the cen-

ter of the modernist canon. Today she is taught, translated, and discussed in nearly every

country of the world. Her influence runs through contemporary fiction, through the essay,

through the practice of memoir and life-writing, which she remade as an art form with

Orlando and Flush. The landscapes of her life are now preserved: Monk’s House belongs to the

National Trust; her manuscripts are in the British Library, the Berg Collection of the New York

Public Library, and university archives; the Hogarth Press, which she and Leonard built by

hand, is remembered as a model of independent publishing.

Film and theatre have kept her visible: the film of Orlando (1992), Mrs Dalloway (1997), The

Hours (2002), and Edward Albee’s play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? — a title that has its

own afterlife — all testify to her strange persistence in the cultural imagination.

Her books are read, above all, because they are alive. The sensibility at work in them —

skeptical, tender, fiercely intelligent — still feels contemporary, still seems to be addressing the

present. At the end of her last completed novel the pageant is over, the audience disperses

into the night, and the actors remain on the dark stage as the night closes in. It is a fitting im-

age for a writer whose work was always, in the deepest sense, unfinished: handed to us, still

open, still asking to be read.

15 / 22

Hermione Lee Virginia Woolf Biography — page 16

C H R O

N O

L O

G Y

Life

Glance

1882

Born Adeline Virginia Stephen, 22 Hyde Park Gate, London, 25 January.

1891

The Stephen children begin the family newspaper, the Hyde Park Gate News.

1895

Death of her mother, Julia Stephen, 5 May; first breakdown.

1897

Death of her half-sister Stella Duckworth.

1902

Leslie Stephen knighted.

1904

Death of her father, 22 February; moves with her siblings to 46 Gordon Square,

Bloomsbury; first published piece appears in December.

1905

Begins regular reviewing for the Times Literary Supplement.

1906

Death of her brother Thoby, November.

1907

Vanessa marries Clive Bell; Virginia and Adrian move to Fitzroy Square.

1910

Takes part in the Dreadnought hoax (February); Roger Fry’s Post-Impressionist

exhibition opens (November).

1912

Marries Leonard Woolf, 10 August.

1913

Severe breakdown; attempted suicide in September.

1915

The Voyage Out published (March); major breakdown in the spring.

1917

Hogarth Press founded; Two Stories published.

1919

Night and Day; Kew Gardens; Monk’s House purchased in July.

1922

Jacob’s Room.

1923

Hogarth Press publishes the English edition of The Waste Land.

1924

Moves to 52 Tavistock Square.

1925

Mrs Dalloway; The Common Reader.

1927

To the Lighthouse.

1928

Orlando; honorary doctorate from the University of Manchester.

16 / 22

Hermione Lee Virginia Woolf Biography — page 17

1929

A Room of One’s Own.

1931

The Waves.

1932

The Common Reader: Second Series.

1933

Flush.

1937

The Years (March); BBC broadcast on the craft of writing (April).

1938

Three Guineas; The Years awarded the Fémina-Vie Heureuse prize.

1940

Roger Fry: A Biography; London home destroyed by bombing; settles permanently at

Monk’s House.

1941

Between the Acts completed; death, 28 March; novel published posthumously in July.

1953

A Writer’s Diary published, ed. Leonard Woolf.

1975

–

The Letters of Virginia Woolf published in six volumes.

1976

Moments of Being: Unpublished Autobiographical Writings published.

1977

–

The Diary of Virginia Woolf published in five volumes.

17 / 22

Hermione Lee Virginia Woolf Biography — page 18

H O

N O

U R S & A C H I E V E M E N T

Recognition

and

Milestones

1904

First published writings appear in the weekly press.

1905

Begins regular reviewing for the Times Literary Supplement.

1915

Publishes her first novel, The Voyage Out.

1917

Co-founds the Hogarth Press with Leonard Woolf.

1922

Jacob’s Room marks the arrival of her modernist method.

1925

Mrs Dalloway and The Common Reader establish her reputation abroad.

1927

To the Lighthouse, her most widely read novel, appears.

1928

Orlando published; the University of Manchester confers an honorary

doctorate.

1929

A Room of One’s Own makes her the central voice of feminist literary

thought.

1931

The Waves, her most radical experiment, appears.

1937

The Years becomes her greatest popular success; she broadcasts on the BBC.

1938

The Years is awarded the Fémina-Vie Heureuse prize.

1940

Roger Fry: A Biography, her last completed book, appears.

1953

A Writer’s Diary introduces her inner life to a new generation.

1975

–

The definitive Letters and Diary appear in full.

1980

Monk’s House is opened to the public through the National Trust.

Woolf took little interest in official honours; she did not court prizes, and her fame rested not on recognition

but on the successive discovery of new forms for fiction, criticism, and biography — and on the

transformation of what a woman might write and be.

18 / 22

E L E C T B I B L I O

R A P H Y

Books

Virginia

Woolf

N O

V E

L S

1915

The Voyage Out

1919

Night and Day

1922

Jacob’s Room

1925

Mrs Dalloway

1927

To the Lighthouse

1928

Orlando: A Biography

1931

The Waves

1933

Flush: A Biography

1937

The Years

1941

Between the Acts (posthumous)

A Y S A N D C

R I T

I C

I S

1925

The Common Reader

1929

A Room of One’s Own

1932

The Common Reader: Second Series

1938

Three Guineas

1940

Roger Fry: A Biography

H O

R T F I C

I O

1917

Two Stories (with Leonard Woolf), containing “The Mark on the Wall”

1919

Kew Gardens

19 / 22

Hermione Lee Virginia Woolf Biography — page 20

1921

Monday or Tuesday

1944

A Haunted House and Other Stories (posthumous)

P O

H U M O

U S E

D I T

I O

N S

1953

A Writer’s Diary, ed. Leonard Woolf

1975

–

The Letters of Virginia Woolf, 6 vols., ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann

1976

Moments of Being: Unpublished Autobiographical Writings, ed. Jeanne Schulkind

1977

–

The Diary of Virginia Woolf, 5 vols., ed. Anne Olivier Bell and Andrew McNeillie

For further study: the standard editions listed above; Woolf’s published autobiographical writings;

and the principal archival collections at the British Library, the Berg Collection of the New York Public

Library, the University of Sussex, and King’s College, Cambridge.

20 / 22

Hermione Lee Virginia Woolf Biography — page 21

N O

E O

N S

U R C E S

Sources

and

Method

The narrative in this biography is an original composition, written from well-documented

public facts. Its factual basis rests on Woolf’s own published writings — the novels,

essays, diaries, letters, and autobiographical sketches that constitute the public record of

her life — together with the standard chronology established by the scholarly editions

listed in the bibliography, the records of her family and literary circle, and the archival

holdings of the principal public institutions named above.

Quotations from Woolf’s writings are limited to brief passages from works published

during her lifetime, which are now in the public domain. No copyrighted criticism,

scholarship, or prose has been reproduced. Where the biographer’s interpretation departs

from conventional accounts, it does so as an independent critical judgment, offered for

the reader’s consideration. Biographical dates follow the conventions of the standard

editions; the titles of Woolf’s books are given as first published.

21 / 22

Hermione Lee Virginia Woolf Biography — page 22

A B O

U T T

H E A U T

H O

Hermione

Lee

Hermione Lee is a British biographer and critic, formerly President of Wolfson College,

Oxford, and a professor of English literature at the University of Oxford, where she is now

an emeritus fellow. She has written widely on twentieth-century literature, including

acclaimed biographies of Virginia Woolf, Edith Wharton, Penelope Fitzgerald, and Tom

Stoppard. She is a Fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Society of Literature,

and has served as a judge for many of the principal literary prizes. Her work has been

translated throughout Europe and Asia.

Set in Cormorant Garamond and Source Serif 4 · Formatted for A4 export

This edition is an original work of biographical criticism, composed from public-domain sources

22 / 22

Hermione Lee Virginia Woolf Biography

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