The Stephen children move out of Hyde Park to a house in the Bloomsbury district of London. Thoby Stephen begins holding informal gatherings of writers and artists from Cambridge University; those who attend come to be known collectively as the Bloomsbury group. Virginia relishes these literary gatherings and forms lifetime friendships with, among others, Lytton Strachey, John Maynard Keynes, Roger Fry, and E. M. Forster, as well as her future husband, Leonard Woolf, and her future brother-in-law, Clive Bell.

1906 Virginia, Thoby, Vanessa, and Adrian travel to Greece, where Thoby contracts typhoid fever; he dies shortly after their return to London. Virginia is greatly saddened by the loss of her beloved brother, whom she will recall in her novels The Voyage Out, Jacob’s Room, and The Waves.
1907 Vanessa marries art critic Clive Bell; Virginia and Adrian move to 29 Fitzroy Square. Virginia begins work on her first novel, Melymbrosia, which will later be published under the title The Voyage Out. Letters to her brother-in-law during this time outline her hopes for her first novel.
1908 Julian Bell is born to Vanessa and Clive Bell.
1909 Virginia and writer Lytton Strachey are engaged for a short time. She volunteers her time in support of the women’s suffrage movement.
1910 One of Virginia’s friends, painter and critic Roger Fry, organizes and presents the first exhibition of “post-impressionist” art.
1912 Virginia marries Leonard Woolf.
1913 The Voyage Out is set to be published by the Duckworth Press, owned by Virginia’s half brother Gerald Duckworth. However, Virginia has a severe mental breakdown that delays publication; anxious about the quality of the writing, she continues to revise the text. French novelist Marcel Proust publishes Du côté de chez Swann (Swann’s Way), the first volume of his masterpiece À la recherche du temps perdu (Remembrance of Things Past).
1914 World War I begins. Vanessa leaves Clive Bell for Scottish painter Duncan Grant.
1915 The Voyage Out is published. Virginia, still recovering from her breakdown, attempts unsuccessfully to write her first diary entries since her marriage.
1917 Virginia and Leonard found the Hogarth Press, which they run from their home. They publish Two Stories, with one by Virginia and the other by Leonard. The small press will go on to publish works by Sigmund Freud, T. S. Eliot, Katherine Mansfield, and James Joyce. Virginia takes on much of the arduous process of printing the books. She begins writing in her diary again and will do so until her death.
1918 World War I ends on November 11.
1919 Virginia Woolf’s short story “Kew Gardens” is published by the Hogarth Press, while her novel Night and Day is brought out by the Duckworth Press. Her manifesto on modern writing, “Modern Novels,” appears in the Times Literary Supplement. She and Leonard buy Monks House in Rodmell , a small village on the River Ouse in southern England.
1921 Hogarth publishes a collection of Virginia’s short stories, Monday or Tuesday.
1922 The Hogarth Press publishes Virginia’s novel Jacob’s Room and also begins to release works by Freud. Virginia meets Vita Sackville-West; the two will become lovers in 1925.
1923 British writer Katherine Mansfield dies.
1925 Hogarth publishes Virginia’s novel Mrs. Dalloway, whose characters first appear in less sympathetic form in The Voyage Out. Her volume of essays The Common Reader appears.
1927 To the Lighthouse, arguably Virginia Woolf’s masterpiece, is published; characters in the novel are based on her own family .
1928 Orlando: A Biography, a novel inspired by Sackville-West, is published.
1929 The influential feminist book A Room of One’s Own appears. Two of its most important themes are financial independence for women and the need for a private space in which to work.
1931 Virginia’s novel The Waves is published.
1932 Lytton Strachey dies. Virginia publishes her essay “A Letter to a Young Poet” and The Common Reader: Second Series.
1933 Flush: A Biography, a fictional life of English poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s dog, is published.
1934 Roger Fry dies.
1935 Leonard and Virginia visit Nazi Germany. Her play Freshwater , a comedy based on the life of her great aunt, is performed in Vanessa Bell’s studio.
1937 Virginia Woolf’s novel The Years is published.
1938 Three Guineas, her second feminist work, is published.
1939 On September 3 Britain and France declare war on Germany. Living mostly in Rodmell, Leonard and Virginia make a plan to commit suicide in the event of an invasion.
1940 Virginia publishes Roger Fry’s biography. Amid air raids and the threat of invasion, she finishes her eighth novel, Between the Acts. Her chronic depression and the strain of war propel her on a downward spiral.
1941 On March 28, after writing a note to her husband, Virginia Woolf fills her pockets with stones and drowns herself in the River Ouse. Between the Acts is published posthumously.

INTRODUCTION

At the age of twenty-five Virginia Woolf began work on her first novel, initially titled Melymbrosia. She had just lost her favorite brother, Thoby, to death and her best friend and sister, Vanessa, to marriage, and was feeling lonely and orphaned and angry at the solution people proposed: “I wish everyone didn’t tell me to marry” (The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 1: 1888-1912, p. 274; see “For Further Reading”). At the time Woolf had never had a serious relationship with a man and was apprehensive about sex and disdainful of marriage, which she feared would require her to surrender not just her independence but her sense of self. She was also furious about women’s limited choices and their subjugated position in a male-orchestrated society.