The New Dress

Virginia Woolf was born in 1882 in London, England. She was an essayist, novelist, and feminist who wrote with a commitment to Modernist experimentation. She belonged to the Bloomsbury Group, an informal association of novelists, critics, and painters, many of whom had studied at Cambridge. The group rejected its Victorian predecessors and spoke against cultural conservativism. Woolf was committed to finding new ways of writing about womanhood, independence, and the right to disrupt cultural expectations associated with femininity, for example, that a woman’s role should be limited to the private sphere—being a wife and mother.

Woolf’s famous essay “A Room of One’s Own” discusses the importance of women finding spaces to build their own voice. Woolf’s novels that are considered Modernist classics include Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, which explore women’s experiences and roles in early-20th-century England. T. S. Eliot argued that Woolf was the center of Modernism in England and that, without her work, none of the other Bloomsbury Circle members would have found their voices. Woolf owned Hogarth Press with her husband, and they published her works along with such writers as Eliot and Sigmund Freud. Woolf’s novels achieved critical acclaim during her lifetime, though she struggled with personal