Virginia Woolf - A Short Story Collection - Volume 2: Legendary English writer of classic and beguiling stories

Written by Virginia Woolf

Narrated by David Shaw-Parker

Adeline Virginia Woolf was born on the 25th January 1882 in South Kensington in London.

Although lauded as a founder of modernist writing with such classics as ‘Orlando’, ‘Mrs Dalloway’ and ‘To the Lighthouse’ and, of course, many classic short stories, her background is filled with elements of tragedy that she somehow overcame to become such a revered writer. Her mother died when she was 13, her half-sister Stella two years later and with it her first of several nervous breakdowns. Appallingly it was later found that three of her half-brothers had sexually abused her so darkness must have seemed ever present.

She began writing professionally at age 20 but her father’s death two years later brought a complete mental collapse, and she was briefly institutionalised. Somehow, she found within herself a literary career and with it great innovations in writing; she was a pioneer of “stream of consciousness”.

Her tight circle of friends were the founders of the Bloomsbury Group, a movement whose legacy still influences across the arts and society in many ways to this day.

Whilst the dark periods continued to interrupt her emotional state her rate of work never ceased. Until on 28th March 1941, Woolf put on her overcoat, filled up its pockets with stones, and walked into the River Ouse, in Lewes, East Sussex and drowned herself. Her body was not recovered until the 18th April. She was 59.

She left behind a note which read in part:―“Dearest, I feel certain that I am going mad again. I feel we can't go through another of those terrible times. And I shan't recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can't concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do”.

1 - Virginia Woolf - A Short Story Collection Volume 2 - An Introduction

2 - The Legacy by Virginia Woolf

3 - Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

4 - The Mark on the Wall by Virginia Woolf

5 - An Unwritten Novel by Virginia Woolf

6 - The Lady in the Looking Glass by Virginia Woolf

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Copyright Group
• Release date: Jan 1, 2023
• ISBN: 9781803548449

Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) was an English novelist. Born in London, she was raised in a family of eight children by Julia Prinsep Jackson, a model and philanthropist, and Leslie Stephen, a writer and critic. Homeschooled alongside her sisters, including famed painter Vanessa Bell, Woolf was introduced to classic literature at an early age. Following the death of her mother in 1895, Woolf suffered her first mental breakdown. Two years later, she enrolled at King’s College London, where she studied history and classics and encountered leaders of the burgeoning women’s rights movement. Another mental breakdown accompanied her father’s death in 1904, after which she moved with her Cambridge-educated brothers to Bloomsbury, a bohemian district on London’s West End. There, she became a member of the influential Bloomsbury Group, a gathering of leading artists and intellectuals including Lytton Strachey, John Maynard Keynes, Vanessa Bell, E.M. Forster, and Leonard Woolf, whom she would marry in 1912. Together they founded the Hogarth Press, which would publish most of Woolf’s work. Recognized as a central figure of literary modernism, Woolf was a gifted practitioner of experimental fiction, employing the stream of consciousness technique and mastering the use of free indirect discourse, a form of third person narration which allows the reader to enter the minds of her characters. Woolf, who produced such masterpieces as Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), Orlando (1928), and A Room of One’s Own (1929), continued to suffer from depression throughout her life. Following the German Blitz on her native London, Woolf, a lifelong pacifist, died by suicide in 1941. Her career cut cruelly short, she left a legacy and a body of work unmatched by any English novelist of her day.