Much has been made by contemporary scholars (most prominently Louise DeSalvo) of Woolf’s sexual abuse, but in reality we do not know the facts of the abuse, its extent, or how it contributed to her illness or to her work. What we do know is that she had a fear of male desire and a feeling of asexuality that lasted throughout her life.

In 1904, while Virginia was still recovering from her breakdown, Vanessa leased a new house for her and her siblings in the Bloomsbury section of London, far from the reach of their extended relatives. There Vanessa, Thoby, Virginia, and Adrian would be free of the ghosts of Hyde Park Gate and liberated from Edwardian social conventions.

At that time English society was very constrained. Entertainment was largely a matter of social intercourse, but conversation was circumscribed, and certain topics — anything remotely inflammatory or sexual — were not mentioned. Daily life was highly segregated, not just by class but by gender — women could not attend Cambridge, could not run for office, and could not vote. Women were also barred from the majority of professions, with writing a notable exception. The defining factor for a woman, though, was not work but her marital status. When married she was a defined figure in the social fabric, a known and valued quantity; when single she was a failure, a spinster, a leftover, someone to be pitied, dependent on others for support and protection. But change was on the way both for women and for society. The suffragettes were beginning to gain momentum in Britain, and there was an avant-garde movement developing in the arts.

After several months of convalescence Virginia moved into her new home with her siblings. It was there that Bloomsbury — which later became shorthand for a set of values and a movement in England during the first four decades of the twentieth century — was born. The group started in a rather impromptu fashion when Thoby invited his Cambridge friends Lytton Strachey, Saxon Sydney-Turner, Clive Bell, and Desmond MacCarthy to drop by on Thursday nights. Virginia was anxious to meet these promising young men; Thoby had been regaling her for years with tales of their brilliance and wit, and she wanted to see how she stacked up against them. At first Virginia was unimpressed. These morose young men seemed to have overinflated egos and to write very bad poetry, as witnessed by a joint collection they had published called Euphrosyne (naming the ship Euphrosyne in The Voyage Out was an inside joke of sorts). But then the men started to talk, and the talk startled Virginia. This was talk without boundaries, talk without constraints, and Virginia reveled in it. Finally, after all of those years shut up in a room studying by herself, she had a chance to discuss, to debate, to participate in a liberated intellectual community. Her belief in talk’s ameliorative powers is reflected in The Voyage Out in Helen’s plan to educate Rachel: “Talk was the medicine she trusted to, talk about everything, talk that was free, unguarded” (p. 118). Perhaps the one Bloomsbury person Virginia most delighted in talking with was Lytton Strachey. Dazzlingly clever and widely read, Lytton proved to be an ideal competitor and confidante for Virginia. The two developed such an affection for each other over the years that Lytton, although homosexual, was once moved to propose marriage — he retracted the offer the same day — and Woolf was inspired to base several characters on Lytton, including the neurasthenic but brilliant St. John Hirst in The Voyage Out.

Bloomsbury was not the only significant change in Virginia’s life. She was now, after years of apprenticeship, a published writer at the age of twenty-two. While convalescing she had written a piece about Haworth Parsonage that was published in the Guardian and a note for a biography on her father. These pieces led to review work for the Guardian and later the Times Literary Supplement. Virginia was soon writing between twenty-five and forty pieces a year, complaining about her workload but rejoicing in her newfound earning power.

The Bloomsbury group was dealt a sharp blow in 1906 with the death of its center, Thoby Stephen. Thoby, Adrian, Vanessa, and Virginia had traveled on an extended journey to Greece, where Vanessa got appendicitis and then Thoby fell ill. Vanessa recovered, but Thoby, whose typhoid fever was originally misdiagnosed as malaria, died. He was only twenty-six.