Virginia Woolf

Woolf's father, Leslie Stephen, was born in 1832 in South Kensington to Sir James and Lady Jane Catherine Stephen (née Venn), daughter of John Venn, rector of Clapham.

The Venns were the centre of the evangelical Clapham Sect.

Sir James Stephen was the under secretary at the Colonial Office, and with another Clapham member, William Wilberforce, was responsible for the passage of the Slavery Abolition Bill in 1833.

As a family of educators, lawyers, and writers, the Stephens represented the elite intellectual aristocracy.

A graduate and fellow of Cambridge University, Leslie renounced his faith and position to move to London where he became a notable man of letters.

He was described as a "gaunt figure with a ragged red brown beard...a formidable man."

In 1867 Julia had married her first husband Herbert Duckworth, a barrister, but within three years she was left a widow with three infant children: George, Stella, and Gerald.

In 1867 he wed Harriet Marian ("Minny") Thackeray, youngest daughter of William Makepeace Thackeray.

They had a daughter, Laura, but Harriet subsequently died in childbirth in 1875.

Laura was born prematurely at 30 weeks, and was developmentally disabled, eventually being institutionalised.

The widowed Julia Duckworth knew Leslie Stephen through her friendship with Minny's elder sister Anne (Anny) Isabella Ritchie and had taken interest in his agnostic writings.

Both were preoccupied with mourning, and they formed a close friendship and intense correspondence.

Leslie proposed to Julia in 1877, and they were married on 26 March, 1878.

Adeline Virginia Woolf (25 January 1882 – 28 March 1941) was an English writer.

She is considered one of the most important modernist 20th-century authors.

She pioneered the use of stream of consciousness as a narrative device.

Woolf was born into an affluent household in South Kensington, London.

She was the seventh child of Julia Prinsep Jackson and Leslie Stephen in a blended family of eight that included the modernist painter Vanessa Bell.

She was home-schooled in English classics and Victorian literature from a young age.

Virginia Woolf was born Adeline Virginia Stephen on 25 January 1882 at 22 Hyde Park Gate in South Kensington, London, to Julia (née Jackson) and Sir Leslie Stephen.

Her father was a writer, historian, essayist, biographer, and mountaineer.

She was named after her mother's eldest sister Adeline Maria Jackson and her mother's aunt Virginia Pattle.

Because of her aunt Adeline's death the year before Adeline Virginia's birth, the family never used her first name.

The Jacksons were a well-educated, literary and artistic proconsular middle-class family.

Their side of the family contained Julia Margaret Cameron, a celebrated photographer, and Lady Henry Somerset, a campaigner for women's rights.

From 1897 to 1901, she attended the Ladies' Department of King's College London.

There, she studied classics and history, coming into contact with early reformers of women's higher education and the women's rights movement.

Woolf began writing professionally in 1900.

During the inter-war period, Woolf was an important part of London's literary and artistic society.

After her father's death in 1904, the Stephen family moved from Kensington to the more bohemian Bloomsbury, where, in conjunction with the brothers' intellectual friends, they formed the artistic and literary Bloomsbury Group.

In 1912, she married Leonard Woolf, and in 1917, the couple founded the Hogarth Press, which published much of her work.

In 1915, she published her first novel, The Voyage Out, through her half-brother's publishing house, Gerald Duckworth and Company.

Her best-known works include the novels Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927) and Orlando (1928).

She is also known for her essays, such as A Room of One's Own (1929).

They rented a home in Sussex and permanently settled there in 1940.

Woolf became one of the central subjects of the 1970s movement of feminist criticism.

Her works, translated into more than 50 languages, have attracted attention and widespread commentary for inspiring feminism.

A large body of writing is dedicated to her life and work.

She has been the subject of plays, novels, and films.

Woolf is commemorated by statues, societies dedicated to her work, and a building at the University of London.