Born into a well-off family connected to the world of arts and literature - her father was a prominent biographer - she experienced a childhood marked by the death of her parents and constant abuse from her half-brothers.
This troubled childhood led the young writer to suffer from a series of depressive thoughts that would accompany her throughout her life.
Despite everything, Virginia Woolf never stopped writing and managed to become a unique and indispensable writer when revisiting the literature of the last century. Often compared to the Irish writer James Joyce, Woolf developed a body of work where introspection and the search for identity became central themes.
Her narrative introduces us as witnesses to the modernization that took place in the first post-war years of the last century. At its peak, Mrs. Dalloway places at the center a day in the life of the character Clarissa, a typical housewife of the early century affected by her time.
The ravages of war become visible when Septimus, a veteran of the British Army, decides to end his life after suffering from post-traumatic stress.
The scourge of war and the suffering it causes to the civilian population, especially women, would be captured in Three Guineas, a feminist and pacifist manifesto about the world women could build if they were granted spaces of power.
The budding emancipation that women enjoyed during the war led the intellectuals of the time to reflect on the role of women in society. Virginia Woolf, an icon of literary feminism, addressed in A Room of One's Own the difficulties faced by women writers in a world made for and by men.
For universal literature, Virginia Woolf's death meant an irreparable loss. Her life was brief, but her legacy lives on in each of her works and in every writer inspired by her writings.
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