Virginia Woolf Virginia Stephen was born in London on the 25th of January, 1882.

She was the third son of Leslie Stephen, a famous historian and literary critic of the late Victorian Age. Her father's profession and cultural background were very influential throughough her life - they were both a gift and a weigh; when Virginia and here sister Vanessa were just kids, Vanessa asked her whom of their parents she preferred: Virginia answered that she preferred her father, because he was a writer, and it was what she wanted to be in the future. In fact, her father gave her the best possible culture: she could access his big library whenever she wanted and read all the books she wanted. On the other hand, there was a problem, a big problem to deal about: Virginia was a woman. While in the morning she was completely immersed in her books, in the afternoon Virginia and her sister had to be hostess for people coming from the high Victorian society. While she could have all the books she wanted from her father's library, she couldn't access University because she was a woman. Her ambigous relashionship with her father is well expressed in a passage from her diary, written when she was 46, in 1928: 'Father birthday. He would have been 96; 96, yes, today; & could have been 96, like other people one has known; but mercifully was not. His life would have entirely ended mine. What would have happened? No writing, no books; - inconceivable.' She says mercifully he's not alive anymore: it's like he was her main inspiration and her main obstacle to become a writer. The first of many personal and intimate tragedies of her life happened in 1895: her mother died, and Virginia suffered from a mental illness that would become recurrent in her life; it was the first of many nervous breakdowns, which leaded her to depression and attempts to suicide. Her mother wasn't no more a person of her life, but eventually became a character of her novel. She became quite an ideal person for Virginia, it was what she would never be: the model of a 'perfect' woman, she was angelic, warm, a perfect example of stability and self-consciousness ---> this is undoubtly due to the fact that Virginia never really had the chances to get in touch with her mother, who became a sort of fading image of her past. In 1904 her father -finally?- died and Virginia and Vanessa moved from Hide Park Gate to Gordon Square, in Bloomsbury. Few after Virginia suffered again from a violent attack of mental illness. In Bloomsbury they became members of the Bloomsbury group, which was very important for the current cultural scene of England. Other members were the historical critic Lytton Strachey, the art critic Clive Bell, and Leonard Woolf, who would eventually become Virginia's husband in 1912. The group was famous for its cultural and sexual freedom: there were a lot of relashionship inside of it, both heterosexual and homosexual, there were also relashionships between 3 persons (like the one between Lytton Strachey, his lover Ralph Partridge and his lover's wife Dora Carrington). pg L episodio del 1910 In 1913 she published her first novel, The Voyage Out, which brought her the first critical and commercial recognition, and, of course, another nervous breakdown. This novel marks the first appereance of a character which would become recurrent in her

works: Mrs Dalloway, who appears also in the homonimous novel and in two short stories "Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street" and "The Prime Minister". The Voyage Out was followed in 1919 and 1922 by the novels Night And Day and Jacob's Room. The latter gave her a lot of commercial success, and represented an important turning point for her literal production: it is a departure from Woolf's previous novels, which were more conventional in form. In this novel the main character is presented in a very ambiguous way, only by the impressions that the other characters have of him. The work is seen as a modernist text, and its experimental form is viewed as a progression from of the innovative writing style she presented in her earlier collection of short stories Monday or Tuesday.

'Dearest, I feel certain 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 till 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. hat 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. "verything 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. #.' These are Virginia Woolf's last words, written to her husband Leonard in a letter she left on the 28th of March, 1941. he co!!itted suicide, "utting a large stone in the "oc#et of her coat, and drowning herself under the water of the ri$er %use. Th