This is the sixteenth in a series
highlighting the best gay and lesbian authors from the 20th century
(with a few before and after that period) who have recorded in fiction,
and nonfiction, the history of gay people telling what life is, and was,
during an important time of history

I
had heard of Virginia Woolf, that she was a writer and was held in high
esteem by literary people but I didn't read any of her works, I don't
think, until after I had been to a preview of one of the most moving
plays that I had/have ever seen, "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" I had
to find out why Edward Albee named the play after her and why Martha
and George were afraid of Virginia Woolf and within a few months I had
read the majority of her works. Most were a little too 'smart' for me
until I reread a few a decade later.

I did see the movie versions of "Orlando" and "The Hours", the latter  was based on 3 women affected by Woolf's novel, "Mrs. Dalloway",
and much preferred the books. Just this week our local movie 'art'
house brought back  "Orlando", mainly because of its star Tilda Swinton, and I plan to see it again.

Adeline Virginia Woolf (pronounced /ˈwÊŠlf/; 25 January 1882 – 28
March 1941) was an English author, essayist, publisher, and writer of short
stories, regarded as one of the foremost modernist literary figures of the
twentieth century.
During the interwar
period, Woolf was a significant figure in London literary society and a
member of the Bloomsbury Group. Her most famous works
include the novels Mrs
Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927) and Orlando (1928), and the book-length essay A Room of One's Own (1929), with its
famous dictum, "A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write
fiction"
According to Woolf's memoirs, her most vivid childhood memories, however,
were not of London but of St. Ives in Cornwall, where the family spent every summer until
1895. The Stephens' summer home, Talland House, looked out over Porthminster Bay, and is still standing today, though somewhat altered. Memories of these
family holidays and impressions of the landscape, especially the Godrevy Lighthouse, informed the fiction
Woolf wrote in later years, most notably To the Lighthouse.
The sudden death of her mother in 1895, when Virginia was 13, and that of her
half-sister Stella two years later, led to the first of Virginia's several nervous breakdowns. She was, however, able to
take courses of study (some at degree level) in Greek, Latin, German and history
at the Ladies’ Department of King’s College London between 1897 and 1901, and
this brought her into contact with some of the early reformers of women’s higher
education such as Clara Pater, George Warr and Lilian Faithfull (Principal of
the King’s Ladies’ Department) Her sister Vanessa
also studied Latin, Italian, art and architecture at King’s Ladies’ Department.
The death of her father in 1904 provoked her most alarming collapse and she
was briefly institutionalized. Her breakdowns
and subsequent recurring depressive periods, modern scholars
(including her nephew and biographer, Quentin Bell) have suggested, were also influenced by the sexual abuse she and Vanessa
were subjected to by their half-brothers George and Gerald Duckworth (which
Woolf recalls in her autobiographical essays A Sketch of the Past and 22 Hyde
Park Gate).
Throughout her life, Woolf was plagued by periodic mood swings and associated illnesses. Though this
instability often affected her social life, her literary productivity continued
with few breaks until her suicide.

Bloomsbury

The Dreadnought Hoaxers in Abyssinian regalia; Virginia Woolf is the bearded figure on the
far left

FOR MORE VIRGINIA WOOLF'S UNORTHODOX LIFE GO TO:

Bibliography

Novels

• The Voyage
  Out (1915)


• Night and Day (1919)


• Jacob's Room (1922)


• Mrs Dalloway (1925)


• To the
  Lighthouse (1927)


• Orlando (1928)


• The Waves (1931)


• The Years (1937)


• Between the
  Acts (1941)

[ Short story
collections

• Monday or Tuesday (1921)


• A Haunted House and Other
  Short Stories (1944)


• Mrs Dalloway's Party (1973)


• The Complete Shorter Fiction (1985)

"Biographies"

• Orlando: A Biography (1928, usually
  characterised Novel, inspired by the life of Vita
  Sackville-West)


• Flush: A
  Biography (1933, more explicitly cross-genre: fiction as "stream
  of consciousness" tale by Flush, a dog; non-fiction in the sense of
  telling the story of the owner of the dog, Elizabeth Barrett Browning),
  reprinted in 2005 by Persephone Books


• Roger Fry: A Biography (1940,
  usually characterised non-fiction, however: "[Woolf's] novelistic skills
  worked against her talent as a biographer, for her impressionistic observations
  jostled uncomfortably with the simultaneous need to marshall a multitude of
  facts."^[27])

Non-fiction books

• Modern Fiction (1919)


• The Common Reader (1925)


• A Room
  of One's Own (1929)


• On Being Ill (1930)


• The London Scene (1931)


• The Common Reader: Second Series (1932)


• Three Guineas (1938)


• The Death of the Moth and Other Essays (1942)


• The Moment and Other Essays (1947)


• The Captain's Death Bed And Other Essays (1950)


• Granite and Rainbow (1958)


• Books and Portraits (1978)


• Women And Writing (1979)


• Collected Essays (four volumes)

Drama

• Freshwater:
  A Comedy (performed in 1923, revised in 1935, and published in
  1976)

[ Autobiographical writings and diaries

• A Writer’s Diary (1953) – Extracts from the complete diary


• Moments of
  Being (1976)


• A Moment's Liberty: the shorter diary (1990)


• The Diary of Virginia Woolf (five volumes) – Diary of Virginia Woolf
  from 1915 to 1941


• Passionate Apprentice: The Early Journals, 1897–1909 (1990)


• Travels With Virginia Woolf (1993) – Greek travel diary of Virginia
  Woolf, edited by Jan Morris


• The Platform of Time: Memoirs of Family and Friends, Expanded
  Edition, edited by S. P. Rosenbaum (London, Hesperus, 2008)

Letters

• Congenial Spirits: The Selected Letters (1993)


• The Letters of Virginia Woolf 1888–1941 (six volumes, 1975–1980)


• Paper Darts: The Illustrated Letters of Virginia Woolf (1991)

Prefaces,
contributions

• Selections Autobiographical and Imaginative from the Works of George Gissing ed. Alfred C. Gissing, with
  an introduction by Virginia Woolf (London & New York, 1929)