Virginia Woolf

By Imogen West-Knights

“I enjoyed talking to her, but thought nothing of her writing. I considered her a beautiful little knitter.” So wrote Edith Sitwell of an afternoon she spent with Virginia Woolf. Not much of Woolf’s knitting survives, but nine novels and dozens of short stories, essays and diaries do.

Woolf is now upheld as one of the founding figures of modernism. Born in 1882 into an artistic household in Kensington, she grew up surrounded by writers, which gave her a sense that she had as much right to put pen to paper as any of the literati who passed through her family drawing room.