Content Warning – mentions of depression and suicide

Adeline Virginia Stephen, better known as Virginia Woolf, remains one of the most influential and acclaimed writers within English literature. One of the major authors of the Modernist period and a pioneer of the ‘stream-of-consciousness’ form, in recent decades Woolf has also come to attract attention as a queer icon. From the queer allusions that featured in her works to her own personal relationships, Woolf has over the years garnered a reputation as one of the most beloved and studied LGBTQ+ writers in the English language.

Born into a wealthy family in London in 1882, Woolf began writing at a young age. Though prolific in her output, from early on Woolf experienced several traumatic events which would lead to a life marked by prolonged periods of depression. The death of her mother when she was just thirteen years old, accompanied with her father’s death just several years later, resulted in an extended period of melancholy and several suicide attempts.

This did not stop her from writing extensively, having published her first novel, The Voyage Out, in 1915. This was followed over the next decade or so by some of her most well-known texts, including Mrs Dalloway (1925) and To The Lighthouse (1927). Both novels, which have since come to be regarded as some of the finest prose in twentieth-century literature, made significant challenges to literary form and structure. Woolf abandoned the rigid narrative conventions of her Victorian predecessors, privileging emotion and introspection over linear narrative. During this time, Woolf was also a prolific diarist. Her diaries, available for all to read, covered a great range of personal experiences, from her relationship with the Bloomsbury Group (to which she, along with other queer intellectuals such as the writer E.M. Forster and economist John Maynard Keynes, belonged), to simple observations of everyday minutiae and, at times, her darker moments. It was also during this time that Woolf, along with her husband Leonard (whom she married in 1912), established the Hogarth Press. The press would go on to publish and oversee the success of some of the most important texts produced within early twentieth-century modernism, including, most famously, T.S. Eliot’s 1922 poem The Waste Land. 

Much queer criticism and exploration of Woolf’s life focuses on her relationship with Vita Sackville-West. Like Woolf, Sackville-West was born into considerable wealth and was a successful novelist. Though the exact details of their relationship are not entirely known, the two first met at a dinner party in 1922, and it has been speculated that there was a romantic (and possibly even sexual) dimension to it. Allusions to Woolf’s sexual orientation featured in both her diaries and the many letters she exchanged with Sackville-West. The two women’s relationship reached its peak in the mid-to-late 1920s, during a period of heightened productivity and literary output on both their parts. It was during this period that Woolf published her ground-breaking novel Orlando (1928), heavily inspired by her relationship with Sackville-West and her family history. In some ways controversial, Orlando follows a fictional poet who can change gender and lives across the centuries of English literature, encountering major writers including Alexander Pope. The novel has since become a cornerstone of queer literary criticism and transgender studies. It cemented Woolf’s posthumous reputation as a major queer author.  

In the years following this creative apogee, Woolf’s mental health took a turn for the worse. Her relationship with Sackville-West trailed off into a platonic one, and by the start of the Second World War, Woolf had succumbed to a major depressive episode. Tragically, she would never recover from it. On the 28th of March, 1941, at the age of 59, Woolf committed suicide by drowning herself in the River Ouse at Lewes, Sussex. She left behind a heartrending note to her husband, acknowledging in the last words she ever wrote that no two people could have been happier than they had been.

Virginia Woolf’s reputation as a queer writer continues to grow, and study of her sexuality and the queerness of her texts, along with her feminist views, continues to arouse endless discussion. Her sexuality has become the subject of several books, both fiction and non-fiction, including Michael Cunningham’s 1998 novel The Hours. Few, if any, queer figures have left such an indelible impression on literature as Woolf has.

Read more Queer Biographies:

Queer Biographies: Robert Mapplethorpe

Queer Biographies: Gertrude Stein

Queer Biographies: Keith Haring