Five Fascinating Facts about Virginia Woolf

By Viola van de Sandt

More than seventy years after her death, Virginia Woolf continues to be a source of inspiration, analysis, interest, and admiration. Emphasis on a small number of famous events in her lifetime has turned her into a mythological figure that, at times, may have little resemblance to the flesh-and-blood woman behind the brand. Yet besides the stories of her breakdowns, her ‘madness,’ her snobbishness, her suicide, and the sexual abuse she suffered, there’s much more to tell about the writer who was at the forefront of twentieth-century Modernism.

1. When Virginia and Leonard Woolf, who together ran the Hogarth Press, received the manuscript of the first chapters of James Joyce’s Ulysses, they turned it down for publication because it was impossible to print the entire book on their handpress. Although she later came to appreciate some aspects of the book, having read it through the…