Virginia Woolf

The crossings

Virginia Stephen — she did not become Virginia Woolf until she married in 1912 — grew up at 22 Hyde Park Gate in Kensington, west London, in a large, formal, unhappy Victorian household. Her father, Leslie Stephen, was a critic and mountaineer who edited the Dictionary of National Biography, the vast reference work of British lives; her mother, Julia, died when Virginia was thirteen. When Leslie Stephen died in 1904 the four Stephen children sold the Kensington house and moved to 46 Gordon Square in Bloomsbury, the district of garden squares behind the British Museum, and it was there that the friendships now called the Bloomsbury Group began — the writers, painters and thinkers who met in one another's houses over the next thirty years, among them her sister the painter Vanessa Bell, the critic Clive Bell, the painter Duncan Grant, the critic Roger Fry, the biographer Lytton Strachey, the economist John Maynard Keynes, and Leonard Woolf, whom she married in 1912.

France entered her life shortly afterwards and stayed at the edge of it. Her first substantial Paris journey was in 1907, when she was twenty-five, the year her sister Vanessa married the art critic Clive Bell; she went with her brother Adrian, and the letters she sent home from it are the first of a long run of French letters. She crossed again and again over the next thirty years — on the way to Spain in 1923, on a long motoring holiday through Europe in 1935, on the last continental journey she and Leonard made in the summer of 1939, weeks before the Second World War closed the route. Not one of these visits made her a Paris writer. They made her a very good English traveller, which is a different and honest thing to be.

'On or about December 1910': Paris on the walls of a London gallery

The Paris that mattered to Woolf was brought to her. Roger Fry, an English painter and art critic who had run the paintings department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, spent the autumn of 1910 gathering pictures in France and hung them at the Grafton Galleries in London that November under a title he had invented for the occasion: Manet and the Post-Impressionists. Post-Impressionism is his word, coined for that show, and it is still the standard label for the generation of French painters who came after the Impressionists — Cézanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh and Georges Seurat — and who cared less about catching daylight than about structure, flat colour and feeling. Alongside them Fry hung younger men still working in Paris, Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso among them.

London was appalled. Newspaper critics called the pictures the work of madmen and of children; the show was a scandal in the way that only an exhibition of unfamiliar painting can be. It was also, for the writers and painters around Woolf, a permission slip. If a painter could break the surface of a picture and still tell the truth, a novelist could break the surface of a sentence. Fry followed it in 1912 with a Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition at the same gallery, this time with an English room, and by then Woolf's sister Vanessa Bell and the painter Duncan Grant were painting in ways nobody in England had been painting in 1909.

Woolf turned that winter into a joke and a manifesto at the same time. In her 1924 essay Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown — an attack on the older novelist Arnold Bennett and his generation, who she said described a character from the outside — her house, her income, her furniture — and never got inside her head; Mrs Brown is Woolf's imagined ordinary woman in a railway carriage, the person she thought fiction had failed to render — she wrote that on or about December 1910 human character changed. The sentence is usually read as a private nod to Fry's exhibition, which had opened the month before, and it has been quoted ever since as the moment English modernism dates itself from. Her circle's French appetite was not confined to paint: Clive Bell published Art in 1914 arguing that what matters in a picture is its shapes and relations rather than its subject; Fry opened the Omega Workshops in 1913 to put modern design into furniture and fabric; and Woolf herself said her writing owed debts to Marcel Proust, the French novelist of memory, and to the composer Igor Stravinsky. When Fry died in 1934 Woolf wrote his biography, published by the Hogarth Press in 1940 — the last book to appear in her lifetime; only the novel Between the Acts, finished just before her death, came out after it.

A week in France with Vita Sackville-West

Vita Sackville-West was a novelist, poet and garden-maker, born into the Sackville family at Knole, an enormous house in Kent that she loved and could not inherit, because the estate passed only to male heirs. She and Woolf met in 1922 and became lovers; the affair cooled into a friendship that lasted until Woolf's death. Out of it came Orlando (1928), a novel whose hero lives four centuries and changes sex halfway through, drawn openly from Vita's life and from her family's house — Vita's son Nigel Nicolson called it the longest love letter in literature.

In late September 1928 the two women went abroad together, alone, for the only time: about a week in France, travelling south into Burgundy, the wine country south-east of Paris, and stopping at the small towns of Saulieu and Vezelay. Orlando was days from publication, and Woolf wrote home to Leonard almost daily. The journey has become one of the fixed points of her biography, partly because so little else in her French travelling has a shape you can tell as a story, and partly because the letters are funny — two famous writers in provincial hotels, worrying about the food.

Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse

Mrs Dalloway, published in 1925, takes place on a single day in June 1923 in London. Clarissa Dalloway, the wife of a Member of Parliament, walks out in the morning to buy flowers for a party she is giving that evening; the novel follows her through the day and ends at the party. Running beside her, never meeting her, is Septimus Warren Smith, a young veteran of the First World War whose mind has not survived it — he is suffering what the period called shell shock — and who is being handled badly by his doctors. He kills himself; the news reaches Clarissa's party. The book's method is to move in and out of people's thoughts and backwards and forwards in time as they walk the same streets, so that a whole life keeps surfacing inside an ordinary morning.

To the Lighthouse (1927) is built in three unequal parts. In the first, a large family and their guests spend a day at a holiday house by the sea, and a small boy is promised a sailing trip to a lighthouse that the weather cancels. In the short middle section the house stands empty for ten years while the war passes and, in a few lines set off in brackets, the mother dies, a son is killed and a daughter dies in childbirth. In the third part the survivors return and the boy, now grown, finally makes the crossing, while the painter Lily Briscoe finishes the picture she has been failing to finish since part one. The family is a version of Woolf's own — the mother is Julia Stephen, the summers are the summers of her childhood in Cornwall — and the middle section is one of the strangest pieces of writing of the century: a book that hands ten years and three deaths to an empty house.

A Room of One's Own followed in 1929, worked up from two lectures given to women students at Cambridge. Its argument is material rather than mystical: a woman needs money and a private room in order to write, and Woolf puts the figure at five hundred pounds a year — a private income, enough at the time to live on without taking work. The essay asks why the historical record holds so few women writers and answers with an invention: Judith Shakespeare, a sister given the same gifts as her brother, who is kept from school, married off, and dead by her own hand before she can write a line. The reason, Woolf argues, was never talent. It was the absence of an income and of a door that shuts.

The Hogarth Press

In 1917 the Woolfs bought a small hand printing press and a case of type, meaning to take up printing as a hobby and as an occupation that might steady Virginia's health, which had already broken down several times. They installed it at Hogarth House in Richmond, the suburb on the Thames west of London that gave the press its name, and set and printed the first books themselves. By about 1922 the hobby had become a business, and it was the business that made Woolf unusual among novelists of her generation: she was her own publisher, answerable to no editor and no house style, and she said herself that it was the only way she could write exactly what she wanted.

The list was better than a hobby press has any right to be. The Hogarth Press published T. S. Eliot, the American-born poet then working in a London bank, and the novelist E. M. Forster; it was the English publisher of Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis; and it published everything Woolf wrote from 1917 onwards. The press also turned down one of the great books of the century: the typescript of Ulysses — the novel by the Irish writer James Joyce that follows one Dublin day through the minds of its characters, and that no established publisher would touch on grounds of obscenity — reached the Woolfs in 1918, and they declined it — the machine they had was too small to set a book that size, and Virginia disliked what she read.

Rodmell, and 28 March 1941

In 1919 the Woolfs bought Monk's House, a small weather-boarded cottage in the village of Rodmell, in the chalk hills of the Sussex downs about fifty miles south of London, for what Leonard described as the shape and fertility and wildness of its garden. Virginia wrote in a lodge at the bottom of it, and most of her major books were finished there. After their London house was bombed in 1940 it became their permanent home. It belongs to the National Trust today and can be visited.

Woolf had suffered severe mental illness since her teens, in episodes that today would be described as bipolar disorder, and she had attempted suicide before. In the spring of 1941, with the war going badly, the London house destroyed and another breakdown beginning, she wrote a letter to Leonard saying she was certain she was going mad again and could not go through it a second time. On the morning of 28 March 1941 she put a stone in her coat pocket and walked into the River Ouse near Rodmell. She was fifty-nine. Her body was found three weeks later, and Leonard buried her ashes under an elm in the garden at Monk's House.

The papers survived, in quantity, and they are the reason so much of her daily life can be dated: the diaries and letters she kept from girlhood, the manuscript drafts, the Monk's House papers. They are divided today between the University of Sussex, which holds Virginia and Leonard Woolf's archives at The Keep, the archive centre in Brighton where they can be consulted; the British Library; and the Mortimer Rare Book Collection at Smith College in Massachusetts, which holds original papers and drafts. Her published Diary, in five volumes, and her Letters, in six, remain the fullest record any twentieth-century English novelist left of an ordinary working week.