When Minny died in 1875, she left Stephen with a daughter, Laura, who was insane. His first marriage was to Minny Thackeray, the daughter of the famous novelist, William Makepeace Thackeray. Her father was an eminent Victorian critic, writer, and essayist who founded the Dictionary of National Biography. Virginia Woolf was born Adeline Virginia Stephen on January 25, 1882, in London, to Sir Leslie Stephen and Julia Jackson Duckworth Stephen.

A 2006 edition of The Waves, edited by Mark Hussey and introduced and annotated by Molly Hite, is available from Harcourt. In its exploration of selfhood, identity, and death, The Waves remains Woolf's modernist masterpiece. For Woolf scholars and the general reader, The Waves is an endlessly fascinating book, one that leads to many interpretations.

When this strange, mystical novel was published in 1931, it was titled The Waves. Woolf envisioned a novel without a plot, but a novel that would reveal the rich interior lives of its six characters. This new novel was to be a sort of autobiography, highly experimental, and abstract in form. Thus, as she worked on a book she tentatively called The Moths, Woolf was at the height of her form. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), and Orlando (1928) all received positive critical reviews and were also commercial successes. She was also one of the founders of the Bloomsbury group, an intellectual gathering of some of the top minds of the day.Īfter the publication of several novels, essays, and short stories, she began writing the books for which she is most famous. Although her early life was marked by tragedy and she struggled with bouts of debilitating depression, Woolf persevered and wrote prolifically. Virginia Woolf established herself as one of the most important writers of the twentieth century before her 1941 death by suicide.

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