About the author

Born into an affluent household in 1882 in South Kensington, London, Adeline Virginia Stephen was raised by cultured parents and began writing as a young girl.

At the age of 13, she had to cope with the sudden death of her mother, which led to her first mental breakdown. Virginia Woolf’s dance between depression and literary expression carried on for the rest of her life until her suicide in 1941.

After their father’s death in 1904, Virginia and her siblings purchased a house in Bloomsbury, a more bohemian area of London. During this period, they began forming a circle of intellectuals and artists later to be known as the Bloomsbury group.

After marrying essayist Leonard Woolf, she published her first novel The Voyage Out in 1915. Together with her husband, they founded their own publishing house, Hogarth Press, operating out of their basement and publishing many renowned authors such as K. Mansfield, T.S. Eliot and E.M. Forster.

Virginia Woolf is recognised as one of the most innovative writers of the 20th century, largely experimenting with the “stream of consciousness” technique. Portraying the inner lives of her characters, she explored the key motifs of modernism: the subconscious, the perception of time and the fast-changing urban society.

Les 10 mots clés de l’histoire

an age = une époque to epitomise = être le parfait exemple de well-to-do = aisé to be fond of sb = aimer/adorer qq an errand = une commission, une course a proposal = une demande en mariage one’s lot = le sort/le destin de qq a predicament = un embarras the brains = l’intelligence an outburst = un emportement