Virginia Woolf - What You Didn't Know About the Famous Writer

Virginia Woolf is famous for her writing and suicide; few people know more than those two things about this amazing woman. Despite struggling with manic depressive disorder and losing her parents at a young age, she educated herself, learned several languages, and wrote endlessly in the form of essays, letters, and articles, and books, and plays. Woolf was also an activist for women - not the kind that protested in the streets. She wrote about women's issues and gender roles in society in her fictional and non-fictional pieces.

Woolf was the seventh child of eight and had a total of four brothers, (two half-brothers), and three sisters, (two half-sisters), being senior only to her brother, Adrian. The oldest sibling, George, was fourteen years her elder! Woolf was closest to her sister, Vanessa, and her two brothers, Thoby and Adrian. Their mother died when Woolf was only 13 years old. The four of them attended school together, but as they grew, only the boys were permitted to attend college, leaving Vanessa and Virginia at home where Virginia taught herself by reading from her father's profuse library. They stayed close, and the two sisters followed their brothers to what would be a legendary social circle in London called Bloomsbury. Their father died when Woolf was 23 years old.

Woolf wrote newspaper columns and married a friend of her brothers from the Bloomsbury clan, Leonard Woolf. Leonard took good care of Virginia over the next thirty-nine years, especially when she suffered with mania or depression. In this time, they opened a printing press together; she became a famous novelist, and taught herself Italian to "refresh" her brain when she was writing. They took trips together and were a happy couple. Sadly, Virginia's illness killed her in 1951 when she drowned in the Ouse River.

*References: Virginia Woolf, by Nigel Nicolson, published by The Penguin Group, 2000