Cast in Stone

Media metadata | Métadonnées multimédias

Virginia Woolf

has biography | a une biographie

English writer and renowned modernist author in the twentieth century.

Woolf's life was entangled with the British Empire in a number of ways. Her paternal grandfather, James Stephen (1789-1859), had been the British Undersecretary of State for the Colonies from 1836 to 1847, and her mother, Julia Jackson (1846-1895) was born to two Anglo-Indian families in Kolkata, India in 1846. Virginia was also involved in the Dreadnought Hoax of 1910, in which she and a group of pranksters dressed up as "Abyssinian royals" and wore blackface to board a Royal Navy ship as a trick.

In 1912, Woolf married Leonard Sidney Woolf (1880-1969), who had returned to England after serving as a officer in the Ceylon Civil Service in Sri Lanka for seven years. In 1917, Virginia and Leonard founded the Hogarth Press publishing house.

Virginia and Leonard wrote about empire throughout their lives, often working together collaboratively. One example on Virginia's side is her essay 'Thunder at Wembley' (1924), in which she recorded her reflections on the 1924 British Empire Exhibition in Wembley. References to empire can also be found throughout her classic works such as Mrs Dalloway (1925) and The Waves (1931). Leonard drew on his experiences in Sri Lanka for his fictional novel The Village in the Jungle (1913), as well as publishing the work Empire and Commerce in Africa (1920) which Virginia helped to research.

was born | est né

25 January 1882

died in | est mort par

28 March 1941

has nationality | a la nationalité

United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland

has type | est de type

depicted

is referred to by | est référencé par

Wikipedia - Virginia Woolf

Wikipedia - Leonard Woolf

Wikipedia - Dreadnought hoax

National Portrait Gallery

Virginia Woolf, 'Thunder at Wembley', in The Captain's Death Bed and Other Essays (London: The Hogarth Press, 1950) 203-207 - Internet Archive

Leonard Woolf, The Village in the Jungle (London: Edward Arnold, 1913) - Project Gutenberg

Michèle Barrett, 'Virginia Woolf's Research for "Empire and Commerce in Africa" (Leonard Woolf, 1920)', Woolf Studies Annual, 19 (2013) 83-122

S. Cohen, 'The Empire from the Street: Virginia Woolf, Wembley, and Imperial Monuments', Modern Fiction Studies, 50, 1 (2004) 85–109

Anna Snaith, 'Leonard and Virginia Woolf: Writing Against Empire', The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 50, 1 (2014) 19-32 (free access)