Over the next quarter century Woolf’s sensibilities all but dominated the world of English letters. Fearing another onset of mental illness, Virginia Woolf drowned herself in the River Ouse, near her country home in Sussex, on March 28, 1941. “With the death of Virginia Woolf, a whole pattern of culture is broken,” reflected T. S. Eliot at the time. “She was the centre, not merely of an esoteric group, but of the literary life of London. Her position was due to a concurrence of qualities and circumstances which never happened before, and which I do not think will ever happen again.”

Woolf devoted much of her creative energy to forging new forms in fiction. She made a remarkable debut as a novelist with The Voyage Out (1915). Her second novel, Night and Day (1919), was a conventional love story that disappointed critics, but Jacob’s Room (1922), an impressionistic elegy to the lost heroes of World War I, marked a turning point in her career. (“A new type of fiction has swum into view,” noted E. M. Forster.) Woolf scored another triumph with Mrs. Dalloway (1925), a stream-of-consciousness novel often compared with James Joyce’s Ulysses, and secured her reputation as a major writer with To the Lighthouse (1927), which Eudora Welty deemed “a vision of reality … an instantaneous burst of coherence over chaos and the dark.” Her subsequent fiction includes Orlando (1928), the historical fantasy written for Vita Sackville-West; The Waves (1931), an extended prose poem generally considered to be her masterpiece; The Years (1937), a brilliant fantasia on the Proustian theme of Time; and Between the Acts (1941), a powerful evocation of English life in the months leading up to World War II. “The novel, of course, was never to be the same after the day she started work on it,” reflected Welty. “ ‘Breaking the mold’ she called the task she set herself. As novel succeeded novel she proceeded to break, in turn, each mold of her own.”

Though best remembered for her novels, Woolf also wrote nearly fifty short stories, many of which served as a testing ground for her longer fiction. The new kind of narrative forms she created in experimental sketches such as “Kew Gardens” (1919) and “The Mark on the Wall” (1919) paved the way for Jacob’s Room and other innovative novels. Woolf’s first collection of short fiction, Monday or Tuesday, was published by the Hogarth Press in 1921. Her other compilations include A Haunted House and Other Short Stories (1944) and Mrs. Dalloway’s Party (1975). “[Her stories] seem as perfect, and as functional for all their beauty, as spider webs,” observed Welty. “The extreme beauty of her writing is due greatly to one fact, that the imprisonment of life in the word was as much a matter of the senses with Virginia Woolf as it was a concern of the intellect.”

A discerning and influential literary critic as well as a novelist, Woolf began contributing book reviews to the Times Literary Supplement in 1905. “Whether you are writing a review or a love letter, the great thing is to be confronted with a very vivid idea of your subject,” she once remarked. Woolf published but three volumes of criticism during her lifetime: Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown (1924), The Common Reader (1925), and The Second Common Reader (1932). Following his wife’s death Leonard Woolf brought out several compilations of her essays and reviews, including The Death of the Moth and Other Essays (1942), The Moment and Other Essays (1947), The Captain’s Death Bed and Other Essays (1950), Granite and Rainbow (1958), and Collected Essays (four volumes, 1967). In assessing Woolf’s critical acumen, Welty wrote: “That beautiful mind! That was the thing. Lucid, passionate, independent, acute, proudly and incessantly nourished, eccentric for honorable reasons, sensitive for every reason, it has marked us forever.”

The Woolf canon comprises several other notable works of non-fiction. Perhaps the most famous are her two feminist polemics, A Room of One’s Own (1930) and Three Guineas (1938).