Editing Virginia Woolf

'''(Adeline) Virginia Woolf''' (née '''Stephen'''; 25 January 1882 – 28 March 1941) was an English novelist and essayist, 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|Bloomsbury Group]].  Her most famous works include the novels ''Mrs Dalloway'' (1925), ''To the Lighthouse'' (1927) and ''[[Orlando: A Biography|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."

== Biography ==
Born '''Adeline Virginia Stephen''' in London to Sir Leslie Stephen, considered the father of the Bloomsbury Group,  and Julia Prinsep Stephen (born Jackson) (1846–1895), she was educated by her parents in their literate and well-connected household at 22 Hyde Park Gate, [[Kensington]]. Virginia's parents had each been married previously, and their spouses had died. Consequently, the household contained the children of three marriages: Julia's children with her first husband Herbert Duckworth: George Duckworth (1868–1934); Stella Duckworth (1869–1897); and Gerald Duckworth (1870–1937). Laura Makepeace Stephen (1870–1945), Leslie's daughter with Minny Thackeray, who was declared mentally disabled and lived with them until she was institutionalised in 1891 to the end of her life; and Leslie and Julia's children: Vanessa Stephen (1879–1961); Thoby Stephen (1880–1906); Virginia; and Adrian Stephen (1883–1948). 

Sir Leslie Stephen's eminence as an editor, critic, and biographer, and his connection to William Thackeray (he was the widower of Thackeray's eldest daughter) meant that Woolf was raised in an environment filled with the influences of Victorian era|Victorian literary society.

Henry James, George Eliot, George Henry Lewes, Julia Margaret Cameron (an aunt of Julia Stephen), and James Russell Lowell, who was made Virginia's godfather, were among the visitors to the house. Julia Stephen was equally well connected. Descended from an attendant of Marie Antoinette, she came from a family of renowned beauties who left their mark on Victorian society as models for Pre-Raphaelite artists and early photographers. Supplementing these influences was the immense library at 22 Hyde Park Gate, from which Virginia (unlike her brothers, who were formally educated) was taught the classics and English literature.

According to her 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 family stayed in their home called the Talland House, which looked out over the Porthminster Bay.  Memories of the family holidays and impressions of the landscape, especially the Godrevy Lighthouse, informed the fiction she wrote in later years, notably ''To the Lighthouse''.  She also based the summer home in Scotland after the Talland House and the Ramsay family after her own family.

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. 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 claimed,<ref>Bell, Quentin: Virginia Woolf; a Biography, 1972</ref> were also induced by the sexual abuse she and Vanessa were subject to by their half-brothers George and Gerald (which Woolf recalls in her autobiographical essays ''A Sketch of the Past'' and ''22 Hyde Park Gate'').

Throughout her life, Woolf was plagued by drastic mood swings.  Though these recurring mental breakdowns greatly affected her social functioning, her literary abilities remained intact. Modern diagnostic techniques have led to a posthumous diagnosis of bipolar disorder, an illness which coloured her work, relationships, and life, and eventually led to her suicide. Following the death of her father in 1904 and her second serious nervous breakdown, Virginia, Vanessa, and Adrian sold 22 Hyde Park Gate, and bought a house at 46 Gordon Square in [[Bloomsbury]]. 

Following studies at King's College London, Woolf came to know Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell, Saxon Sydney-Turner, Duncan Grant, and Leonard Woolf, who together formed the nucleus of the intellectual circle known as the [[Bloomsbury Group]] which came to notorious fame in 1910 with the Dreadnought hoax Virginia Woolf participated in, dressed as a male Abyssinian royal.

==== Personal life ====

Virginia Stephen married writer Leonard Woolf in 1912, referring to him during their engagement as a "penniless Jew." The couple shared a close bond, and in 1937 Woolf wrote in her diary "Love-making — after 25 years can’t be attained by my unattractive countenance ... you see it is enormous pleasure being wanted, a pleasure that I have never felt."  They also collaborated professionally, in 1917 founding the Hogarth Press, which subsequently published most of Woolf's work.[http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/10/books/review/Messud.t.html?_r=1&n=Top%2fFeatures%2fBooks%2fBook%20Reviews&oref=slogin]
The ethos of [[Bloomsbury group|Bloomsbury]] discouraged sexual exclusivity, and in 1922, Woolf met [[Vita Sackville-West]], wife of [[Harold Nicolson]] . After a tentative start, they began a  relationship that lasted through most of the 1920s.[http://andrejkoymasky.com/liv/fam/biow3/wool2.html]
In 1928, Woolf presented Sackville-West with ''[[Orlando: A Biography|Orlando]]'', a fantastical biography in which the eponymous hero's life spans three centuries and both genders. It has been called by [[Nigel Nicolson]], Vita Sackville-West's son, "the longest and most charming love letter in literature." After their affair ended, the two women remained friends until Woolf's death in 1941. Virginia Woolf was also very close to her family, including her sister, Vanessa Bell and Vanessa's husband Clive Bell.

==== Death ====
After completing the manuscript of her last (posthumously published) novel ''Between the Acts'', Woolf fell victim to a depression similar to that which she had earlier experienced. The war, the Luftwaffe's destruction of her London homes, as well as the cool reception given to her biography of her late friend Roger Fry, worsened her condition until she was unable to work.<ref name="autogenerated1">Lee, Hermione: "Virginia Woolf." Knopf, 1997.</ref>

On 28 March 1941, after having a nervous breakdown, Woolf drowned herself by weighing her pockets with stones and walking into the River Ous near her home.
Her body was not found until April 18. Her husband buried her cremated remains under a tree in the garden of their house in Rodmell, Sussex. 

In her last note to her husband she wrote: 
''
I feel certain that I am going mad again. I feel we can't go through another of those terrible times. And I shan't recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can't concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do. You have given me the greatest possible happiness. You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I don't think two people could have been happier 'til this terrible disease came. I can't fight any longer. I know that I am spoiling your life, that without me you could work. And you will I know. You see I can't even write this properly. I can't read. What I want to say is I owe all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good. I want to say that — everybody knows it. If anybody could have saved me it would have been you. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can't go on spoiling your life any longer. I don't think two people could have been happier than we have been.''

==Work==


Woolf began writing professionally in 1905, initially for the ''Times Literary Supplement'' with a journalistic piece aboutHaworth, home of the Brontë family.[http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/vwoolf.htm] Her first novel, ''The Voyage Out'', was published in 1915 by her half-brother's imprint, Gerald Duckworth and Company Ltd.

This novel was originally entitled ''Melymbrosia'', but Woolf repeatedly changed the draft. An earlier version of ''The Voyage Out'' has been reconstructed by Woolf scholar Louise DeSalvo and is now available to the public under the intended title.  DeSalvo argues that many of the changes Woolf made in the text were in response to changes in her own life.[http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0010-7484%28198224%2923%3A1%3C100%3AVW%3E2.0.CO%3B2-3 ]

Woolf went on to publish novels and essays as a public intellectual to both critical and popular success.  Much of her work was self-published through the Hogarth Press. She has been hailed as one of the greatest novelists of the twentieth century and one of the foremost [[modernists]], though she disdained some artists in this category.

Woolf is considered one of the greatest innovators in the English language. In her works she experimented with stream-of-consciousness and the underlying psychological as well as emotional motives of characters.  Woolf's reputation declined sharply after World War II, but her eminence was re-established with the surge of Feminist criticism in the 1970s. After a few more ideologically based altercations, not least caused by claims that Woolf was anti-Semitic and a snob, it seems that a critical consensus has been reached regarding her stature as a novelist.

Her work was criticised for epitomizing the narrow world of the upper-middle class English intelligentsia. Some critics judged it to be lacking in universality and depth, without the power to communicate anything of emotional or ethical relevance to the disillusioned common reader, weary of the 1920s ''[[aesthetes]]''. She was also criticized by some as an anti-Semite, despite her marriage to a Jewish man. She wrote in her diary, "I do not like the Jewish voice; I do not like the Jewish laugh." However, in a 1930 letter to Ethel Smyth quoted in Nigel Nicolson's biography,''Virginia Woolf,'' she recollects her boasts of Leonard's Jewishness confirming her snobbish tendencies, "How I hated marrying a Jew- What a snob I was, for they have immense vitality."[http://www.commentarymagazine.com/cm/main/viewArticle.aip?id=10801&page=2]

Virginia Woolf's peculiarities as a fiction writer have tended to obscure her central strength: Woolf is arguably the major lyrical novelist in the English language. Her novels are highly experimental: a narrative, frequently uneventful and commonplace, is refracted—and sometimes almost dissolved—in the characters' receptive consciousness. Intense lyricism and stylistic virtuosity fuse to create a world overabundant with auditory and visual impressions.

The intensity of Virginia Woolf's poetic vision elevates the ordinary, sometimes banal settings - often wartime environments - of most of her novels. For example, ''Mrs Dalloway'' (1925) centres on the efforts of Clarissa Dalloway, a middle-aged society woman, to organize a party, even as her life is paralleled with that of Septimus Warren Smith, a working-class veteran who has returned from the First World War bearing deep psychological scars.

''To the Lighthouse'' (1927) is set on two days ten years apart. The plot centers around the Ramsay family's anticipation of and reflection upon a visit to a lighthouse and the connected familial tensions. One of the primary themes of the novel is the struggle in the creative process that beset painter Lily Briscoe while she struggles to paint in the midst of the family drama. The novel is also a meditation upon the lives of a nation's inhabitants in the midst of war, and of the people left behind. 

''The Waves'' (1931) presents a group of six friends whose reflections, which are closer to recitatives than to interior monologues proper, create a wave-like atmosphere that is more akin to a prose poem than to a plot-centered novel.

Her last work, ''Between the Acts'' (1941) sums up and magnifies Woolf's chief preoccupations: the transformation of life through art, sexual ambivalence, and meditation on the themes of flux of time and life, presented simultaneously as corrosion and rejuvenation - all set in a highly imaginative and symbolic narrative encompassing almost all of English history.

While nowhere near a simple recapitulation of the coterie's ideals, Woolf's work can be understood as consistently in dialogue with Bloomsbury, particularly its tendency (informed by G.E. Moore, among others) towards doctrinaire rationalism.

==Modern scholarship and interpretations==

Recently, studies of Virginia Woolf have focused on [[feminist]] and [[lesbian]] themes in her work, such as in the 1997 collection of critical essays, ''Virginia Woolf: Lesbian Readings'', edited by Eileen Barrett and Patricia Cramer. Louise A. DeSalvo offers treatment of the incestuous sexual abuse Woolf experienced as a young woman in her book ''Virginia Woolf: The Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse on her Life and Work''. 

Woolf's fiction is also studied for its insight into [[shell shock]], [[war]], [[social class|class]], and modern British society.  Her best-known nonfiction works, ''[[A Room of One's Own]]'' (1929)  and ''[[Three Guineas]]'' (1938), examine the difficulties female writers and intellectuals faced in an era when men held disproportionate legal and economic power, and the future of women in education and society.  

Irene Coates's book ''Who's Afraid of Leonard Woolf: A Case for the Sanity of Virginia Woolf'' takes the position that Leonard Woolf's treatment of his wife encouraged her ill health and ultimately was responsible for her death.  The position, which is not accepted by Leonard's family, is extensively researched and fills in some of the gaps in the traditional account of Virginia Woolf's life. In contrast, Victoria Glendinning's book ''Leonard Woolf: A Biography'', which is even more extensively researched and supported by contemporaneous writings, argues that Leonard Woolf was not only very supportive of his wife, but enabled her to live as long as she did by providing her with the life and atmosphere she needed to live and write. Accounts of Virginia's supposed anti-semitism (Leonard was a secular Jew) are not only taken out of historical context but greatly exaggerated. Virginia's own diaries support this view of the Woolfs' marriage.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.commentarymagazine.com/cm/main/viewArticle.aip?id=10801 |title="Mr. Virginia Woolf"|publisher=Commentarymagazine.com |date= |accessdate=2008-09-08}}</ref>

The first biography of Virginia Woolf was published in 1972 by her nephew, Quentin Bell.

In 1989 Louise Desalvo published the book ''Virginia Woolf: The Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse on Her Life and Work''.

In 1992, Thomas Caramagno published the book ''The Flight of the Mind: Virginia Woolf's Art and Manic-Depressive Illness."

[[Hermione Lee]]'s 1996 biography ''Virginia Woolf'' provides a thorough and authoritative examination of Woolf's life and work.

In 2001 Louise DeSalvo and Mitchell A. Leaska edited ''The Letters of Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf''.	
Julia Briggs's ''Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life'', published in 2005, is the most recent examination of Woolf's life. It focuses on Woolf's writing, including her novels and her commentary on the creative process, to illuminate her life. [[Thomas Szasz]]'s book ''My Madness Saved Me: The Madness and Marriage of Virginia Woolf'' (ISBN 0-7658-0321-6) was published in 2006.

==Cultural references==
{{Trivia|date=August 2008}}
* [[Michael Cunningham]]'s [[1998]] [[Pulitzer Prize]]-winning novel ''[[The Hours (novel)|The Hours]]'' uses some of Woolf's characteristic stylistic tools to intertwine a story of the Virginia who is writing ''Mrs Dalloway'' with stories of two other women decades apart, each of whom is planning a party. The book was adapted into a [[The Hours (film)|2002 film]], which was nominated for the [[Academy Award for Best Picture]]. [[Nicole Kidman]] won an [[Academy Award for Best Actress|Oscar]] for her portrayal of Woolf in the movie.
* [[Susan Sellers]]' novel "Vanessa and Virginia" explores the intense relation between Woolf and her sister Vanessa, the painter.  Two Ravens Press, 2008; Harcourt 2009.

* Playwright [[Edward Albee]] asked Woolf's widower Leonard Woolf for permission to use his wife's name in the title of his play ''[[Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?]]'', which concerns a clash between a university professor and his wife as they host a younger faculty couple for evening cocktails. The [[Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (film)|film adaptation]] of the play is the only film to be nominated in every eligible category at the Academy Awards.

* Indiana band [[Murder by Death (band)|Murder by Death]] have a song entitled "I'm Afraid of 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" on their first album, ''Like the Exorcist, but More Breakdancing''.
* American [[folk rock]] duo [[Indigo Girls]] wrote and recorded a song called "Virginia Woolf" for their 1992 album ''[[Rites of Passage (album)|Rites of Passage]]'', and also included it on their live recording ''1200 Curfews'' in 1995.
* Sharon Carpenter Rose portrays Woolf in the 2009 feature film [[Lives and Deaths of the Poets]], written and directed by Leland Steigs.
* British [[indie rock]] band [[Assembly Now]] reference Woolf by name in their song "It's Magnetic".
* British singer [[Steve Harley]] wrote and recorded a song "Riding the Waves (for Virginia Woolf)" for his album ''Hobo with a grin''.
* American folk singer [[Sara Hickman]] recorded a song "Room Of One's Own" on her album "Necessary Angels."
* [[Laura Veirs]] references Virginia Woolf in her song "Rapture".
* In ''[[The Reptile Room]]'', the second novel in ''[[A Series of Unfortunate Events]]'' by [[Lemony Snicket]], there is mention of a snake called the Virginian Wolfsnake. The only thing said about it is that it should never, ever be allowed near a typewriter.
* In ''[[The Hostile Hospital]]'' the eighth book in by [[Lemony Snicket]]'s ''[[A Series of Unfortunate Events]]'' mentions a woman named Clarissa who is looking sadly out of a window.
* Folk group [[Two Nice Girls]] named their album ''Chloe Liked Olivia'' after a key phrase in Woolf's ''A Room of One's Own''.
* [[Patrick Wolf]]'s song "To the Lighthouse" was inspired by Woolf's novel.
* The character Virginia Wolfe in ''[[Rocko's Modern Life]]'' is named after Woolf.
* [[Regina Spektor]] references Virginia Woolf in her song "[[Paris]]".
* In ''[[Scrubs (TV series)|Scrubs]]'', Elliot cites Virginia Woolf as one of her favourite authors.
* [[Javier Krahe]], Spanish songwriter, references Virginia Woolf in the song "Nembutal" from his album ''Corral de Cuernos''
* [[Profesora]], Swedish performance artist released a song called Virginia Woolf at her album.
* [[The Murder City Devils]], a rock and roll band, reference Virginia Woolf saying, "I think I'll call you Virginia Woolf."
* In ''[[Destroy All Humans!]]'', when at the Santa Monica level, if you scan a housewife's thought she says "I'm afraid of Virginia Woolf."
* [[Ludovico Einaudi]] wrote, probably his most famous solo piano piece, "Le Onde" after reading an Italian translation of Woolf's [[The Waves]].
* The name of the [[United States|American]] band [[Modest Mouse]] is derived from a passage from the story "The Mark on the Wall" which reads "...and very frequent even in the minds of modest, mouse-coloured people..."
* The Celtic rock band GrooveLily mentions Virginia Woolf in a live version of their song, "Screwed-Up People Make Great Art."
* The feature film ''[[Notes on a Scandal]]'' ([[Cate Blanchett]], [[Judi Dench]]) mentions Woolf during a scene where Blanchett screams, "It's a flat in the Archway Road and you think you're Virginia friggin' Woolf!"
* On her debut album ''[[Ballads of Living and Dying]]'', [[Marissa Nadler]] chronicles the death of Virginia Woolf in the song "Virginia".
* The song "[[Shakespeare's Sister (song)|Shakespeare's Sister]]" by [[The Smiths]] is a reference to Virginia Woolf's concept in ''[[A Room of One's Own]]'', where she argues that if Shakespeare had a sister with similar talents she would have been denied his opportunities.
* The season 13 ''[[The Simpsons|Simpsons]]'' episode "[[Homer the Moe]]" has a reference to Virginia Woolf's drowning death when Moe's old teacher at Swigmore University walks into a lake until it's too deep to swim out.
* Composer Dominick Argento received the 1975 Pulitzer Prize in Music for his song cycle, "From the Diary of Virginia Woolf", settings for voice and piano of entries from Woolf's personal diary from 1919 to 1941.
* American [[Metalcore]] band [[Starkweather (band)|Starkweather]] reference Virginia Woolf's death and suicide note in their song "Hushabye: Goodnight" with the lyrics, "Find me the heaviest stones to fill my pockets / I thought it for the best that I should drown..."
* Paul Pennyfeather, protagonist of [[Evelyn Waugh]]'s first novel [[Decline and Fall]], is asked by the prison's librarian whether he would like the 'new Virginia Woolf book'.

==Bibliography==
{{see also|Bibliography of Virginia Woolf}}
===Novels===
*''[[The Voyage Out]]'' (1915)
*''[[Night and Day (novel)|Night and Day]]'' (1919)
*''[[Jacob's Room]]'' (1922)
*''[[Mrs Dalloway]]'' (1925)
*''[[To the Lighthouse]]'' (1927)
*''[[Orlando: A Biography|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]]'' (1943)
*''The Complete Shorter Fiction'' (1985)

==="Biographies"===
Virginia Woolf published three books which she gave the subtitle "A Biography":
*''[[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]])
*''[[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."<ref>Frances Spalding (ed.), ''Viginia Woolf: Paper Darts: the Illustrated Letters'', Collins & Brown, 1991, (ISBN 1-85585-046-X) (hb) & (ISBN 1-85585-103-2) (pb), pp. 139-140</ref>)

===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)
*''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 including Dreadnought Hoax talk, 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 Gissing|Alfred C. Gissing]], with an introduction by Virginia Woolf (London & New York, 1929)

==Biographies==
*''Virginia Woolf'' by [[Nigel Nicolson]]. New York, Penguin Group. 2000
*''Virginia Woolf: A Biography'' by [[Quentin Bell]]. New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972
* "Vanessa and Virginia" by [[Susan Sellers]] (Two Ravens, 2008; Harcourt 2009) [Fictional biography of Woolf and her sister Vanessa Bell]
* ''The Unknown Virginia Woolf'' by Roger Poole. Cambridge UP, 1978. 
* ''The Invisible Presence: Virginia Woolf and the Mother-Daughter Relationship'' by Ellen Bayuk Rosenman. Louisiana State University Press, 1986.
* ''Virginia Woolf: The Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse on Her Life and Work'' by Louise DeSalvo. Boston: Little Brown, 1989
* ''A Virginia Woolf Chronology'' by [[Edward Bishop (writer)|Edward Bishop]]. Boston: G.K. Hall & Co., 1989.
* ''A Very Close Conspiracy:  Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf'' by Jane Dunn.  Boston: Little, Brown, 1990
* ''Virginia Woolf: A Writer's Life'' by [[Lyndall Gordon]]. New York: Norton, 1984; 1991.
* ''The Flight of the Mind: Virginia Woolf's Art and Manic-Depressive Illness'' by Thomas D. Caramago. Berkeley: U of California Press, 1992
* ''Virginia Woolf'' by [[James King (author)|James King]]. NY: W.W. Norton, 1994.
* ''Art and Affection: A Life of Virginia Woolf'' by Panthea Reid. New York: Oxford UP, 1996.
* ''Virginia Woolf'' by [[Hermione Lee]]. New York: Knopf, 1997.
* ''Granite and Rainbow: The Hidden Life of Virginia Woolf'' by Mitchell Leaska.  New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998.
* ''Virginia Woolf: The Will to Create as a Woman'' by [[Ruth Gruber]]. New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2005
* ''My Madness Saved Me: The Madness and Marriage of Virginia Woolf'' by [[Thomas Szasz]], 2006
* ''The Bedside, Bathtub and Armchair Companion to Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury'' by [[Sarah M. Hall]], Continuum Publishing, 2007
* ''A Life of One's Own: A Guide to Better Living through the Work and Wisdom of Virginia Woolf'' by [[Ilana Simons]], New York: Penguin Press, 2007



==External links==


* [http://www.moralquotes.com/index.php/a?blog=2&paged=1&page=1&cat=183 Virginia Woolf Quotes]
* [http://www.bodysoulandspirit.net/mystical_experiences/read/notables/woolf.shtml Mystical Experiences of Virginia Woolf]

* [http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/audiointerviews/profilepages/woolfv1.shtml Listen to Virginia Woolf's BBC Broadcast (29 April 1937)  'Words Fail Me']
* [http://www.portalmundos.com/mundoliteratura/escritoras/virginiawoolf.htm Biography of Virginia Woolf] Spanish
* [http://www.the-ledge.com/flash/ledge.php?book=147&lan=UK Virginia Woolf 'Bookweb' on literary website The Ledge, with suggestions for further reading.]
*[http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/main/w-vh/w-visits/w-findaplace/w-monkshouse/ Monk's House information at the National Trust]
*[http://librivox.org/night-and-day-by-virginia-woolf Public domain recording of Woolf's novel ''Night and Day'']
*[http://www.mrs-dalloway.com Mrs Dalloway e-text]
[[Category:Bisexual writers]]