BIRTH. Adeline Virginia Stephen in London to a literary family in 1882.
LOSS. The death of her mother, Julia Stephen, triggering Woolf's first mental breakdown at age 13. In 1904 she lost her father, Leslie Stephen and moved to Bloomsbury.
JOY. Woolf joined the intellectual Bloomsbury group. She participated in the Dreadnought Hoax, a famous practical joke.
LOVE. In 1912 Virginia Stephen married author and publisher Leonard Woolf. They had a complicated, close, and sometimes open relationship. In 1922 Woolf met the aristocratic Vita Sackville-West with whom she maintained letter correspondence, becoming romantically involved.
WORK. In 1915 Woolf published her first novel, The Voyage Out. With her husband Leonard, she founded the Hogarth Press which published their work, and that of others such as T.S. Eliot. The 1925 novel Mrs. Dalloway was a landmark in stream-of-consciousness literature. In 1927 Woolf published To The Lighthouse, a highly personal novel based on her childhood. In 1929 she published her famous essay on woman in literature, A Room of Ones Own.
PAIN. Woolf long struggled with recurrent depressive episodes and illness. In 1940 the Woolf's London home was destroyed in the Blitz; moves to Sussex.
DEATH. On March 28, 1941 Virginia Woolf took her own life in the River Ouse near her Sussex home. She left a note to Leonard, her last act of writing.
IMPACT.
