the novels of virginia woolf hermione lee

Thackeray) and the institutionalization of their schizophrenic daughter, Stephen married Woolf’s mother, Julia Prinsep Jackson, who brought along three children from her previous marriage. After the death of his first wife (the daughter of the famous novelist W. Woolf’s father, Leslie Stephen, was the well-known editor of the first Dictionary of National Biography, a pronounced atheist and overbearing patriarch. Though Woolf’s adult writing often railed against her parents’ stern, pompous Victorian generation, her future career was certainly aided by her birth, in 1882, into a prominent, upper-middle-class London literary family. Her non-fiction, including A Room of One’s Own (1925) and the anti-fascist tract Three Guineas (1938), is central to the “first wave” feminist canon.

In her own time, Woolf was also well-known for her writings promoting liberal politics, particularly the nascent feminist movement. Woolf is best known for her novels, which represent the peak of British modernist “stream-of-consciousness” style, characterized by the representation of characters’ inner thoughts, a focus on everyday action, and the pervasive instability or unreliability of narration. Virginia Woolf by George Charles Beresford, 1902 (Wikimedia Commons)īritish author Virginia Woolf was a prominent member of the avant-garde, intellectual Bloomsbury Circle in northern London from the years directly preceding World War I until her suicide in 1941.

The novels of virginia woolf hermione lee