ABSTRACT

Virginia Stephen, born in London, January 26, 1882, was one of the younger children of a distinguished literary family. Her father, Leslie Stephen, editor of the Dictionary of National Biography and of the Cornhill Magazine, was the author of critical, biographical, and philosophical essays and the friend of scholars and men of letters during a brilliant period of English literature. The death of her mother when Virginia was thirteen was the first of the losses that affected her deeply. Her half sister, Stella Duckworth, took charge of the household for several years, till Vanessa Stephen was old enough, and then Stella married-dying soon after the birth of her first baby. Two years after Virginia Woolf's marriage, the First World War broke out, ending that period of relative security and stability which all those, at least in the Western world, who grew up before 1914 look back upon with nostalgia.