Did You Know?
The Hogarth Press,
a respected publisher that still operates today, was begun in 1917 by Virginia
and her husband Leonard Woolf after they bought a printing press and installed
it in Hogarth House, where they lived. The Woolfs published everything Virginia wrote after 1917, including Mrs.
Dalloway, as well as many important modern works by their contemporaries.
Though she was a
leading literary modernist, Virginia Woolf hated James Joyce’s Ulysses,
which many critics consider to be The Great Modernist Text. Woolf found
Joyce’s novel irritating and crude.
By the age of 32,
Virginia Woolf had suffered through and survived three mental breakdowns. In
March of 1941, at the age of 59, she felt a fourth breakdown coming on. She
committed suicide by drowning herself in the River Ouse.
