The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf (2nd edition)

Born to the ex‐son‐in‐law of Thackeray and a model for Pre‐Raphaelite artist Burne‐Jones, Adeline Virginia Stephen was destined to lead a creative, if troubled, life. Inspired by her literary father, himself an author and editor of The Cornhill Magazine, Virginia and her brother and sister were already budding journalists as children (writing for the “family newspaper”), but the death of her mother in early adolescence began a downward spiral of mental illness that ended tragically in 1941. Virginia Woolf's most famous titles, Mrs Dalloway (1925), To The Lighthouse (1927) and A Room of One's Own (1929), are important in...