As the daughter of two prototypically Eminent Victorians—Sir Leslie Stephen, the editor of The Dictionary of National Biography and Julia Stephen, a member of the prestigious Pre-Raphaelite circle—Virginia Woolf was raised in what Sandra Gilbert calls a "mausoleum of (a) late Victorian household" (No Man's Land, Vol. III, Letters from the Front, 1994), but the death of her father in 1904 when she was twenty-two dislodged her from the restrictions and expectations of some deeply entrenched social conventions.

When she moved into the emerging world of artistic innovation and bohemian inclinations of "loomsbury" she began to fashion her own life as a journalist, essayist, novelist, and teacher, eventually marrying Leonard Woolf (who she described candidly but not critically as a "penniless Jew" in an irrevocable separation from the Hyde Park Gate home where she was raised. The impression of her upbringing, however, remained a...