Born in 1882, the daughter of Julia Jackson Duckworth and Victorian
scholar Sir Leslie Stephen, Virginia Stephen settled in 46 Gordon
Square, Bloomsbury, in 1904. This house would become the first
meeting place of the now-famous Bloomsbury Group-writers, artists,
and intellectuals such as E. M. Forster, John Maynard Keynes, and
Lytton Strachey who, along with Virginia and her sister Vanessa,
shared an intense belief in the importance of the arts and a
skepticism regarding their society''s conventions and restraints.
It was after Virginia''s 1912 marriage to Leonard Woolf-a
remarkable and supportive twenty-nine-year-union-that she began to
publish her major work. Her first novel, The Voyage Out, appeared
in 1915 and was followed by Night and Day (1919), Jacob''s Room
(1922), Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), Orlando
(1928), The Waves (1931), and The Years (1937). Woolf is also
admired for her contributions to literary criticism in general and
to feminist criticism in particular, with A Room of One''s Own
(1929) and Three Guineas (1937) reflecting the full range of her
intellectual vigor, insight, and compassion for the role cast for
female artists in the modern world. Additionally, Woolf s diary and
correspondence, published posthumously, provide an invaluable
window into her world offer-flung relationships and interests,
imaginative depth, and creative method. The victim of a lifetime of
mental illness, Woolf com-mitted suicide in 1941. She left behind
her a literary legacy, including The Hogarth Press, established
with Leonard in 1917, which published not only Woolf s own work but
that of an increasingly influential group of innovative
writers-including T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Katherine
Mansfield.
MARK HUSSEY, general editor of Harcourt''s annotated Woolf
series, is a professor of English and women''s and gender studies,
and editor of the Woolf Studies Annual, at Pace University. He
lives in Upper Nyack, New York.
Bonnie Kime Scott is a contributor for Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
titles including: "Mrs. Dalloway (Annotated)".