Her father, Sir Leslie Stephen, was an historian and author, and also one of the most prominent figures in the golden age of mountaineering. Woolf’s mother, Julia Prinsep Stephen, had been born in India and later served as a model for several Pre-Raphaelite painters. She was also a nurse and wrote a book on the profession. Woolf had three full siblings and four half-siblings. (Karjagdiu. L, 2010 )
From the time of her birth, on January 25, 1882, until 1895, Woolf spent her summers in St. Ives, a beach town at the very southwestern tip of England. The Stephens’ summer home, Talland House, which is still standing today, looks out at the dramatic Porthminster Bay and is a short walking distance to the Godrevy lighthouse. In her later memoirs, Woolf recalled St. Ives with a great fondness. In fact, she incorporated scenes from those early summers into her modernist novel, To the …show more content…
Her four years of study introduced her to a handful of radical feminists at the helm of educational reforms. In 1904, her father died. His passing was climatic; during this time she was institutionalized.
Work
Woolf began writing professionally in 1900, initially for the Times Literatury Supplement with a journalistic piece about Haworth, home of the Bronte family. Her first novel (The Voyage Out) was published in 1915 by her half-brother's imprint, Gerald Duckworth and Company Ltd. This novel was originally entitled Melymbrosia, but Woolf repeatedly changed the draft. (Karjagdiu. L, 2010 ) Woolf went on to publish novels and essays as a public intellectual to both critical and popular success. Much of her work was self-published through the Hogarth Press. She has been hailed as one of the greatest novelists of the twentieth century and one of the foremost modernists. Woolf is considered one of the greatest innovators in the English language. In her works she experimented with stream-of-consciousness and the underlying psychological as well as emotional motives of