One of the greatest literary figures of the twentieth century, Virginia Woolf was born in London in 1882. The daughter of the prominent literary critic Sir Leslie Stephen, she was educated in the literary and intellectual atmosphere of her home. Her mother died in 1895, and after the death of her father in 1904, Woolf moved to the Bloomsbury area of London. Living with her sister, Vanessa, and brothers, Thoby and Adrian, her house became the center of a circle of artists and writers who would become known as the Bloomsbury Group. One of the members of this group, Leonard Woolf, became her husband in 1912. In this unconventional and intellectually charged atmosphere, she began publishing reviews and essays.

Woolf s career as a novelist began in 1915, when she published The Voyage Out. Though stylistically conventional, it showed an emphasis on character rather than plot which would characterize Woolf's work...