Virginia Woolf was born Adeline Virginia Stephen in 1882. Her family belonged to Victorian London’s upper-middle-class intellectual elite; her father, Leslie Stephen, was an important biographer and first editor of the Dictionary of National Biography (1882-91). Woolf’s education was informal but thorough. She read voraciously in her father’s extensive library, and as a young woman eagerly participated in the intellectual and social world of her brother Thoby’s university friends. This circle of friends formed the core of what would come to be known as the Bloomsbury Group, a cluster of artists and thinkers who were an important influence on British cultural and political life in the first decades of the twentieth century. Woolf herself was a critic, biographer, and essayist as well as a novelist. One of Woolf’s several works was To the Lighthouse, her fifth novel and, in the eyes of many critics, her best. The most autobiographical of her novels, it explores Woolf’s relationship with her family and memorializes her parents.
Post-Impressionism: revolution in the visual arts. After centuries devoted to realistic depictions of the world, the visual arts took a striking turn toward the conceptual at the end of the nineteenth century.
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