Happy Birthday, Virginia Woolf

Born 1882, London, England | Died March 28, 1941, River Ouse, East Sussex, England

Today, the Best American Essays newsletter celebrates essayist, critic, and novelist Virginia Woolf on the 143rd anniversary of her birth. Considered one of the pillars of modernist literature, Woolf was an ardent essayist. Her most famous long-form essays—A Room of One’s Own (1929) and Three Guineas (1938)—argued that women’s freedom of expression depends on economics, educational opportunities, and independence.

Subscribe to our newsletter for news about upcoming online conversations with Best American Essays contributors about essayists.

Virginia Woolf, 1902, George Charles Bereford.

“[…] words do not live in dictionaries; they live in the mind. If you want proof of this, consider how often in moments of emotion when we most need words we find none. Yet there is the dictionary; there at our disposal are some half-a-million words all in alphabetical order.

But can we use them? No, because words do not live in dictionaries, they live in the mind.”

Virginia Woolf, circa 1927, unknown photographer.

“To be able to read books without reading them, to skip and saunter, to suspend judgment, to lounge and loaf down the alleys and bye-streets of letters is the best way of rejuvenating one’s own creative power.”

On Being Ill was written in 1925 and published in T.S. Eliot’s The Criterion in 1926; it was reprinted, with revisions, in Forum in April 1926, under the title Illness: An Unexploited Mine. It was then published as a standalone volume by Woolf's Hogarth Press in 1930. A Room of One’s Own is based on two lectures Woolf delivered in October 1928 at two women's colleges at the University of Cambridge; it was published as a standalone volume by the Hogarth Press in 1929. Three Guineas was published by Hogarth Press in 1938, elaborating on the ideas in A Room of One’s Own. A collection of autobiographical essays (written between 1907 and 1939-40), was first found in Leonard Woolf’s papers by Quentin Bell, who used them in his biography of Virginia Woolf, published in 1972. In 1976, the essays were published under the title Moments of Being

First published essay:

• “Haworth, November 1904,” The Guardian, 1904.

Select nonfiction bibliography:

• Essays by Woolf appearing in The Yale Review, 1926-1939: “How Should One Read a Book?” (1926), “Street Haunting: A London Adventure” (1927), “Augustine Birrell” (1930), “Memories of a Working Women’s Guild” (1930), “Aurora Leigh” (1931), “Letter to a Young Poet” (1932), “The Novels of Turgenev” (1933), “A Conversation About Art” (1934), “Two Antiquaries: Walpole and Cole” (1939), and “Byron and Mr. Briggs” (1979).

• The Common Reader (Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1925).

• The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Volume 1: 1904-1912 (Harcourt Brace Janovich, 1989).

• The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Volume 2: 1912-1918 (Houghton Mifflin, 1990).

• The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Volume 3: 1919-1924 (Mariner Books Classics, 1991).

• The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Volume 4: 1925-1928 (Mariner Books Classics, 2008).

• The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Volume 5: 1929-1932 (Mariner Books Classics, 2010).

• The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Volume 6: 1933-1941 (Chatto & Windus, 2011).

See also, works by authors whose essays have been reprinted in (R) or listed as Notable in (N) The Best American Essays (BAE) series:

• Victor Brombert, “Virginia Woolf—Death Is the Enemy,” The Hudson Review (2010), (BAE 2011, N).

Visit The Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain

Visit The International Virginia Woolf Society, which houses an archive of the past Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf (1991-present).

Listen to (and read the transcript of) Virginia Woolf reading from her essay “Craftsmanship,” BBC, 2016; originally broadcast in 1937.

Read “Virginia Woolf’s Incomparable Female Gaze,” Raritan, 2024.

Read “Virginia Woolf in The Yale Review,” Claire Messud, The Yale Review, 2024.

Read “Rash Reading: Rethinking Virginia Woolf’s On Being Ill,” Sarah Pett, Literature and Medicine, 2019.

Read “Virginia Woolf: There Are Way Too Many Personal Essays Out There,” Literary Hub, 2017.

Read The Short Season Between Two Silences: The Mystical and the Political in the Novels of Virginia Woolf, Madeline Moore (Allen & Unwin, 1984).

Watch Virginia Woolf: A Night’s Darkness, A Day’s Sail, BBC, 1970.