VIRGINIA WOOLF
1882-1941
Virginia Woolf was a novelist and essayist. She grew up in a literary atmosphere and was educated in her father’s extensive library. The famous group of intellectuals which came to be known as the Bloomsbury Group originated in gatherings of Cambridge University graduates and their friends in Virginia’s home. Along with her husband, Virginia started the Hogarth Press which became a successful publishing house. In her novels, Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, she experimented with new techniques, particularly new ways of capturing the flow of time. She believed that much imaginative literature is false to life because it relates episodes in a straight line, whereas our experiences actually flow together like a stream. This essay records fleeting impressions and delicate shades of mental experience.