Virginia Woolf is typically portrayed as a feminist author and essayist although the themes of her work also included class, prejudice and the effects of war. With her emphasis on the psychological aspects of her character, she has also been called one of the founders of modernist literature. Afflicted with bi-polar disorder, her personal life was one of turmoil and ultimately ended in suicide.

Between the World Wars, Woolf was regarded as one of the most important writers working in English, was an important member of the literary clique known as the Bloomsbury Group.
Her most famous works include the novels Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927) and Orlando (1928), and the important essay A Room of One's Own (1929).
Virginia Woolf was born Adeline Virginia Stephen in London in 1882 into a well known and wealthy family. Her father was a notable author and adventurer and a well-connected member of London literary society. Her step siblings also included relatives of author William Makepeace Thackeray.
Virginia’s home was a popular meeting place for eminent Victorian writers and her childhood was spent in the company of people like Henry James, George Henry Lewes,  and the photographer Julia Margaret Cameron.
Her mother, Julia was a renowned beauty who often served as a model for Pre-Raphaelite artists and early photographers. In addition to the influence of writers visiting the house, Woolf also spent much time in the immense library in the home.
The young Virginia would also spend the summers in Cornwall, and the memories of those summer vacations would reappear in some of her novels such as To the Lighthouse.
By her teen years, Virginia was exhibiting signs of the depressions that would dog her for the rest of her life. The sudden death of her mother when she was 13, the death of her half sister two years later and finally the death of her father in 1904 saw a succession of increasingly alarming mental collapses. The later trauma saw her briefly institutionalized.
Virginia and her sister Vanessa were, according to her autobiographical essay A Sketch of the Past, sexually abused by their half brothers, assaults that obviously contributed to hers ongoing battles with depression and mood disorders.
Virginia attended King's College London where she met  Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell, Saxon Sydney-Turner, Duncan Grant, and Leonard Woolf, who together the circle known as the Bloomsbury Group.
Virginia married writer Leonard Woolf in 1912. The two founded the Hogarth Press five years later, which subsequently published Virginia's novels along with works by T.S. Eliot.
The Bloomsbury group encouraged sexual expression and affairs amongst its members. Almost inevitably Virginia began an affair, and in 1922, Virginia met the writer Vita Sackville-West, wife of Harold Nicolson, and began a sexual relationship that lasted almost 10 years. In 1928, Woolf wrote for Sackville-West the novel Orlando, a fantasy story in which the hero's life spans three centuries and both genders. After their sexual affair ended, the two women remained friends.
Woolf began writing as a journalist for the Times Literary Supplement in 1905 but it wasn’t until 1915 that she published her first novel, The Voyage Out.
Two novels followed, but fame arrived with the publication of Mrs Dalloway in 1925 and To the Lighthouse two years later.
Woolf was considered an innovator with her experiments with stream-of-consciousness and the psychological and emotional features of her characters. She also had her critics who found her work narrow, elitist and snobbish.
Woolf maintained a prodigious level of writing. Diaries, biographies, essays, criticism and essays were all completed in her healthy moments but increasingly bouts of depression became more commonplace and she often withdrew from society and stopped working. In 1941, the Blitz on London and the poor reception of a biography she had written contributed to a particularly bad bout of depression. In March Woolf committed suicide by filling the pockets of an overcoat with stones and walking into the River Ouse near her home and drowning herself.

 Her reputation declined after the War although was rediscovered by feminists in the 1970, largely because of an essay she had written on women writers that coined the phrase and concept of “a room of one’s own.” Today, Woolf is regarded as one of the most important writers of the 20th Century.

Mrs. Dalloway

Mrs. Dalloway, in 1925 is regarded as one of the most important novels of the 20th Century. It portrays a day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway and examines many of the important issues in Woolf’s writing and life – feminism, repression, homosexuality and mental illness.
Using a stream of consciousness type narrative along with flashbacks, multiple internal dialogues and soliloquies the novel was innovative and daring.
Originally called The Hours (a title that would become a movie about Woolf that used many of the plot elements of Mrs. Dalloway), the story was a blend of two short stories. The story follows Clarissa Dalloway as she prepares to hold a party.

Through the course of the day’s preparations she wanders London and considers her youth, her marriage, and her role. After she returns to her house she is visited by another man she knows and whom she perhaps should have married and who is still obsessed with her. The novel abruptly switches to the plight of a veteran of World War I, who spends his day in the park with his wife and who suffers from wild hallucinations and depression as result of shell shock.
Clarissa muses on the role of women, their economic repression and domestic expectations.
The party turns out to be a success. Most of the characters introduced earlier attend. Clarissa is attracted to one of the women guests, whom she admires for her independence and strength. The attraction is vaguely sexual although it isn’t explicitly stated. She also grows weary at the attentions of her former suitor and dispassionate husband. Finally, she learns the veteran has committed suicide by jumping from a window rather than being committed to an asylum. Mrs Dalloway finally considers her life, muses on the role of women, their economic repression and domestic expectations and finally comes to respect the veteran’s suicide as an act of preserving his soul rather giving himself up to some intolerable life.
Mrs Dalloway is often thought to be a response to James Joyce's Ulysses. Interestingly, her company Hogarth Press turned down Joyce’s novel for publication.