M. Forster and Roger Fry; also Clive Bell, who married Vanessa, Lytton Strachey, who once proposed marriage to her, and Leonard Woolf. Despite much ill health in these years, she travelled a good deal, and had an interesting social life in London. She did a little adult-education teaching, worked for female suffrage, and shared the excitement of Roger Fry’s Post-Impressionist Exhibition in 1910. In 1912, after another bout of nervous illness, she married Leonard Woolf.

She was thirty, and had not yet published a book, though The Voyage Out was in preparation. It was accepted for publication by her half-brother Gerald Duckworth in 1913 (it appeared in 1915). She was often ill with depression and anorexia, and in 1913 attempted suicide. But after a bout of violent madness her health seemed to settle down, and in 1917 a printing press was installed at Hogarth House, Richmond, where she and her husband were living. The Hogarth Press, later an illustrious institution, but at first meant in part as therapy for Virginia, was now inaugurated. She began Night and Day, and finished it in 1918. It was published by Duckworth in 1919, the year in which the Woolfs bought Monk’s House, Rodmell, for £700. There, in 1920, she began Jacob’s Room, finished, and published by the Woolfs’ own Hogarth Press, in 1922. In the following year she began Mrs Dalloway (finished in 1924, published 1925), when she was already working on To the Lighthouse (finished and published, after intervals of illness, in 1927). Orlando, a fantastic ‘biography’ of a man–woman, and a tribute to Virginia’s close friendship with Vita Sackville-West, was written quite rapidly over the winter of 1927–8, and published, with considerable success, in October. The Waves was written and rewritten in 1930 and 1931 (published in October of that year). She had already started on Flush, the story of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s pet dog—another success with the public—and in 1932 began work on what became The Years.

This brief account of her work during the first twenty years of her marriage is of course incomplete; she had also written and published many shorter works, as well as both series of The Common Reader, and A Room of One’s Own. There have been accounts of the marriage very hostile to Leonard Woolf, but he can hardly be accused of cramping her talent or hindering the development of her career.

The Years proved an agonizingly difficult book to finish, and was completely rewritten at least twice. Her friend Roger Fry having died in 1934, she planned to write a biography, but illnesses in 1936 delayed the project; towards the end of that year she began instead the polemical Three Guineas, published in 1938. The Years had meanwhile appeared in 1937, by which time she was again at work on the Fry biography, and already sketching in her head the book that was to be Between the Acts. Roger Fry was published in the terrifying summer of 1940. By the autumn of that year many of the familiar Bloomsbury houses had been destroyed or badly damaged by bombs. Back at Monk’s House, she worked on Between the Acts, and finished it in February 1941. Thereafter her mental condition deteriorated alarmingly, and on 28 March, unable to face another bout of insanity, she drowned herself in the River Ouse.

Her career as a writer of fiction covers the years 1912–41, thirty years distracted by intermittent serious illness as well as by the demands, which she regarded as very important, of family and friends, and by the need or desire to write literary criticism and social comment. Her industry was extraordinary—nine highly-wrought novels, two or three of them among the great masterpieces of the form, along with all the other writings, including the copious journals and letters that have been edited and published in recent years. Firmly set though her life was in the ‘Bloomsbury’ context— the agnostic ethic transformed from that of her forebears, the influence of G. E. Moore and the Cambridge Apostles, the individual brilliance of J. M. Keynes, Strachey, Forster, and the others— we have come more and more to value the distinctiveness of her talent, so that she seems more and more to stand free of any context that might be thought to limit her. None of that company—except, perhaps, T.