Introduction

Virginia Woolf has become so much of a Modernist icon that

The ‘indelible footprint of truth’ – at least, the solid facts of biography – are relatively straightforward to synthesise. She was born into a richly intellectual but complex family. Her father was Leslie Stephen (1832–1904), the eminent essayist, intellectual, literary critic and founding editor of the Dictionary of National Biography; her mother, Julia Prinsep, was a highly sensitive trained nurse and publicly engaged philanthropist, but also the incarnation of Victorian principles of caring, devoted femininity. Both parents brought desperate grief into the marriage, having both been widowed early and left with children to fend for. Woolf thus grew up in a recomposed family, the sister of seven siblings who included, of course, the future British post-Impressionist artist Vanessa Bell.

Woolf’s childhood was spent between Cornwall and Kensington, which she later evoked with rich detail and personal insight. The great creative and imaginative freedom of the children’s world was, however, blighted by a harsh series of tragedies, which included the death of their beloved mother in 1895; the elder sister, Stella Duckworth, who had taken the bereft family in hand; Leslie Stephen in 1904; and Woolf’s beloved brother Thoby in 1906. These devastating upheavals, along with the sadness and bereavements of World War One and later the dread of an impending and soon ruthless World War Two, took an immeasurable toll on Woolf’s mental health, sometimes totally undermining her impressively rich, prolific and often pioneering life as a writer and public intellectual until the end of her days.

As a typical representative of her class, era and gender in certain respects, Virginia Woolf’s education was lightweight compared to that of her Cambridge-educated brothers. She was mostly taught at home, took private classes with a number of respected tutors, and enrolled on a number of college courses available for women.