Name-dropping:
Virginia Woolf (pronunciation: like the state, like the animal) (1882–1941).
One of Britain’s most important novelists, critics, and major modernist authors. She was also played in the film The Hours by Nicole Kidman, who won an Oscar primarily for wearing a fake nose. Where’s Groucho Marx’s Oscar?! But we digress.

When to Drop Your Knowledge:
Ms. Woolf’s tragic life story will be helpful if you ever have to talk a cocktail party companion down off the edge of a roof deck, for sure. But she’ll also be extremely helpful to you when you’re chatting up a gender studies major and get called upon to prove your feminist chops. (That goes for you, too, boys; feminism isn’t just for the ladies anymore.)

The Basics
Woolf grew up in an intellectual family, but didn’t begin writing books until she was in her 30s, after she’d married Leonard Woolf and founded the Hogarth Press. Virginia’s first two novels, while excellent, were stylistically traditional. But after World War I, she began to experiment, especially with the idea of time and conceptions of gender—themes that would become central to the modernist movement that she helped spearhead.

To the Lighthouse and Mrs. Dalloway are perhaps Woolf’s most famous novels. Massively introspective, discursive, and stylistically challenging, To the Lighthouse might not be the book to take with you to the beach. As in many great literary novels, what happens (the Ramsey family, over the course of several years, finally arrives at a lighthouse) takes a backseat to the brilliance of the story’s telling and the entrancing complexities of Woolf’s language. For instance: Time passes in inverse proportion to the number of words in each section, a kind of novelistic interpretation of Einsteinian relativity.

Woolf was also a vitally important force in 20th-century feminism. Her nonfiction book A Room of One’s Own remains the greatest description of the difficulties a female writer faces. She famously argued that to make one’s way in the literary world, one needed only 50 pounds a month and a room of her own.

Woolf’s literary importance can hardly be overstated. Along with writers like James Joyce, she argued that literature could no longer ignore the inner workings of characters’ lives but instead had to confront the complexity of being human head-on.

The complexity of Woolf’s humanity, sadly, met an unfortunate end. She was plagued throughout her life with periods of insufferable depression. In 1941, Woolf wrote a heartbreaking suicide note to her husband, filled her pockets with stones, and drowned herself in the River Ouse. Although the marriages of major writers have often been marked by neglect, infidelity, and general misery, Virginia and Leonard had a remarkably loving relationship. In her suicide note, she wrote, “I feel certain that I am going mad again. I feel we can’t go through another of those terrible times. And I shan’t recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and can’t concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do.” For her, perhaps. But for the rest of us, losing whatever writing Woolf had before her was definitely not the best thing.

Drowning Poetic
While it’s more or less par for the course for poets to die tragically, a surprisingly large percentage of them end up literally drowning their sorrows.
Besides Woolf:

Percy Bysshe Shelley.
The Romantic poet drowned in a mysterious boating accident on July 8, 1822. Rumors have swirled ever since that it was suicide.

Hart Crane.
Perhaps tired of being known as the third-best American poet of his time (behind e.e. cummings and T. S. Eliot), in 1932, he said, “Good-bye, everybody!” and then leapt from the deck of a cruise ship. His body was never found.

Li Po.
The best poet in eighth-century China, Li Po purportedly drowned while drunkenly trying to embrace the reflection of the moon in the Yangtze River.

Conversation Starters
◆ While there’s no question that the work of James Joyce influenced Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf held a generally low opinion of Joyce and thought him a misogynist.

◆ As a child, Woolf and her sister, Vanessa (who became a prominent interior designer), were sexually abused by their half-brothers. Courageously, Woolf wrote of the abuse openly and without shame in her short memoir Moments of Being.

◆ Sister Vanessa, incidentally, was engaged in a very odd love quadrangle. Vanessa had an open marriage with British critic Clive Bell. She ended up having an affair with the bisexual painter Duncan Grant. Together, they had a daughter, Angelica, who ended up marrying Grant’s one-time male lover, the British writer David Garnett.

◆ Grant, Garnett, Vanessa Bell, and Virginia Woolf were all members of the loose association known as the Bloomsbury Group, so called because they would hang out together in fancy houses in the Bloomsbury section of London. The Bloomsburies also included novelist E. M. Forster and economist John Maynard Keynes.

◆ Although we liked The Hours and enjoy a good cry as much as anyone, Woolf scholars were notably displeased with her portrayal in both the book and the movie. Many felt that novelist Michael Cunningham completely misrepresented Woolf, with
one Woolf biographer going so far as to say that the film version “evacuates her life of political intelligence or social acumen” and reduces her to a “doomed, fey, mad victim.” Burn. (The Hours, incidentally, was Woolf’s working title for the novel that became Mrs. Dalloway.)