The Lady in the Looking Glass

Virginia Woolf was born in 1882, in London, England, into a large and wealthy family. Her father, Leslie Stephen, was an celebrated figure in the Victorian literary establishment, the first editor of the Dictionary of National Biography. Her mother, Julia, was renowned for her beauty and skill as a hostess, drawing on her extensive aristocratic and artistic connections. In many ways, Woolf’s parents were the quintessential respectable Victorian couple. Woolf was homeschooled (common for girls at the time); her father led her studies, and she had access to his substantial library. Virginia was encouraged to write and produced with her sister Vanessa—with whom she had a close and competitive relationship—the “Hyde Park News,” a family magazine.

Woolf’s mother died when she was 13, and the deaths of her half sister Stella, her father, and her brother followed afterward. From 15, she studied Greek, Latin, German, and history at the Ladies Department in King’s College London from 1897 to 1901. In 1904, Woolf moved to Bloomsbury with her siblings and their home became the central social point for a community of writers, artists, critics, and philosophers who debated about literature, art, and ideas, now known as the Bloomsbury Group. Virginia Woolf’s participation in these discussions broadened her horizons considerably and introduced her, as a sheltered Victorian girl, to the new ideas and liberal social mores of the 20th century. Her first piece was published in 1904, followed by a considerable quantity of journalism, stories, essays and novels. Virginia married Leonard Woolf, a fellow member of the Bloomsbury Group, in 1912. Together they founded the Hogarth Press, which published their works and those of other leading Modernists. They were happily married but Virginia is also known to have engaged in lesbian affairs, reflecting the unusually liberal sexual attitudes of the Bloomsbury Group for the period. Most famously, she had a relationship with Vita Sackville-West, explored in her 1928 novel Orlando, the protagonist of which is a gender-fluid character.

Woolf published her first novel, The Voyage Out, in 1915. When writing this novel, she was determined to reform the Victorian novel and experimented with a new narrative style. Woolf desired to prove that she could master the traditional novel form and wrote Night and Day in 1919 in a literary realist style, including credible dialogue, realistic descriptions of settings of her time, and investigations of the issues of class, politics, and women’s rights.

After publishing Mrs. Dalloway in 1925, she further explored her new narrative style in her novel To the Lighthouse (1927). Orlando (1928) is her first novel written fully in the stream-of-consciousness style. This expression of the flow of a character’s thoughts and emotions grants the reader the feeling of being situated within the mind of a character, creating a complex portrait of their inner lives. “The Lady in the Looking glass” is an example of Woolf’s practiced style at this time.

Throughout her works, Woolf uses stream of consciousness to explore Modernist themes. Both in style and subject, she captures the fast-changing world she lived in. Shifts in the understanding of gender roles, sexuality, class, and technology are explored in her narratives, which are situated within Modernist themes such as the subconscious, time, perception, female identity, industrialized cities, and the impact of war. Her revolutionary narrative style made her one of the most prominent writers of the 20th century.

Woolf experienced periods of depression and mental illness throughout her life. She described herself as hearing voices, having uncontrollable anxieties and impulses, and being unable to concentrate or write. She died from suicide in 1941.