The Duchess and the Jeweller

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) was an English novelist, essayist, biographer, and feminist. She was a key figure in the avant-garde literary life of London and was central to the bohemian Bloomsbury Group. Her commitment to capturing modern life, particularly the hidden life within individuals, led her to experiment and produce impactful innovations in the novel. Woolf is best known for her novels including Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), and Orlando (1928). In her time, she was also known as an essayist, critic, speaker, and publisher. Today, Virginia Woolf is recognized as one of the most important novelists of the 20th century.

Woolf was born Adeline Virginia Stephen on January 25, 1882, in Kensington, London, England. She was born into a privileged, extended family, the third child of Sir Leslie Stephen and Julia Duckworth, who had four children between them from previous marriages. Her parents were literary and artistic, and encouraged Virginia’s precocious writing talents. While her brothers were sent to Cambridge, Virginia and her sister Vanessa had no formal education. Instead, they had private tutors and read books from the family library. Woolf later criticized such educational inequality, condemning women’s lack of access to education and employment in her writing such as “Professions for Women” (1931).