Virginia Woolf
(1882–1941)

One can scarcely think of twentieth-century trends in fiction without thinking of "stream of consciousness," the technique whereby a character's innermost thoughts, emotions, and memories are woven together into a complex psychological fabric. And one can scarcely think of stream of consciousness without thinking of Virginia Woolf, the brilliant literary pioneer whose novels and short stories introduced this technique to the world.

Ironically, for a writer who would become one of the leading lights of Modernism, Virginia Woolf was born into a family of prim and proper Victorians. Her father, Leslie Stephan, who served as the first editor of the renowned Dictionary of National Biography, saw to it that his daughter grew up surrounded by books, and at the age of 23 Virginia began contributing reviews to the Literary Supplement of The Times of London. In 1912, she married Leonard Woolf, an author and social reformer, with whom she founded the Hogarth Press. Their house in the Bloomsbury section of London became an informal printing place of some of the more important thinkers of the era, attracting such figures as the writers E. M. Forster and Lytton Strachey, the art critic Roger Fry, and the economist John Maynard Keynes.

Woolf's first two novels, The Voyage Out (1915) and Night and Day (1919) were more or less conventional works. Her third, Jacob's Room (1922), was anything but. It shattered the conventions of modern fiction-writing by telling the story of a young man's life entirely through an examination of his room and its cluttered contents. Although we never actually meet the title character, we come to know a great deal about him through an artful arrangement of photographs.

In the years between the wars, Woolf continued to refine her fluid, inward-looking style with three more stream-of-consciousness novels–Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), and The Waves (1931)–and with four slightly experimental ones. In her more revolutionary works, she virtually abolished the traditional concept of plot, preferring instead to concentrate on what she called "an ordinary mind on an ordinary day." Today, Woolf is recognized, along with James Joyce–whose life span almost exactly paralleled her own–as one of the most influential shapers of contemporary modern fiction.

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