I am an English writer of modernist literature. I helped pioneer stream of consciousness as a narrative device, publish novels and essays to critical and popular acclaim, and print much of my own work through the Hogarth Press.
My best-known dictum, from A Room of One's Own (1929): creative work in literature depends on material conditions — income and private space — before it depends on talent.
In A Room of One's Own I argued that the women history accused of witchcraft or possession were often suppressed artists — that missing women in literature is a story of lost creativity, not absent talent.
Asked to lecture on Women and Fiction at Cambridge in 1928, I expanded the two talks into a six-chapter, quasi-fictional essay (1929) that became a key work of feminist literary criticism and a study of literature and culture.
Between 1927 and 1931 I published To the Lighthouse, Orlando and The Waves, plus essays such as "Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown" — my most sustained run of experimental literature and art criticism.
Through Three Guineas (1938) and the Hogarth Press list, I tied women's exclusion from legal and economic power to war, nationalism and colonialism — publishing anti-colonial pamphlets alongside feminist memoirs.
In Mrs Dalloway (1925) I wrote Septimus Smith, a soldier back from the First World War with shell shock, to confront the moral dilemma of war inside a novel of one London day — literature as a record of postwar culture.
I researched my great-aunt, the photographer Julia Margaret Cameron, published the findings in 1925–1926, and turned an episode of her life into Freshwater, a three-act comedy I directed and acted in on 18 January 1935.
In the Memoir Club, the postwar Bloomsbury circle devoted to self-writing in the manner of Proust, I presented three of the 125 memoirs, between 1921 and 1936.
Our first book, Two Stories (1917), took two and a half months to set, print and bind by hand in a run of 150 copies, with Dora Carrington's illustrations. Kew Gardens (1919) refined the method with a Vanessa Bell woodblock.
In 1917 Leonard and I set up a hand press at Hogarth House and turned it into a publisher of living avant-garde literature, art and translation — Mansfield, Eliot, Forster, Russian works and the first complete Freud in English.
Across my novels I let an uneventful, commonplace narrative be refracted — sometimes almost dissolved — in my characters' consciousness, fusing lyricism and style into a literature of sound and image.
From about 1905 I taught evening classes at Morley College as a volunteer, on and off for two years — teaching that later fed the themes of class and education in Mrs Dalloway.
