Modern Fiction

Virginia Woolf was an English writer who published a wide variety of novels and essays in the first half of the 20th century. Born in 1882 to a large, wealthy family in London, Woolf was homeschooled from a young age in classical literature before attending King’s College London. After her father’s death in 1904, the family moved to the bohemian Bloomsbury area, where Woolf married Leonard Woolf and immersed herself in the avant-garde meetings of the Bloomsbury Group.

From 1908 onward, Woolf began to consider how she might reshape the modern novel. Her first experiment, The Voyage Out, was published in 1915. In the wake of “Modern Fiction,” Woolf published several other essays developing her thoughts on the novel and The Proper Stuff of Fiction, as well as a number of novels that put those thoughts to the test. Her experiments in style and form coincided with often radical political motivations, including criticisms of class and war in Mrs Dalloway (1925) and a rejection of gender and genre in the time-traveling mock-biography Orlando (1928).

Woolf was part of a wider Modernist movement that revolutionized