Virginia Woolf was born on this date in 1882. 10 facts about her:
Her birth name was Adeline Virginia Stephen. She was named after her aunt Adeline, who had recently died so the family tended to use her middle name instead. Both her parents had children from previous relationships, and there were eight children in the household.
While fairly slow at learning to talk, Virginia started writing at a young age. From the age of 10, she and her sister Vanessa wrote an illustrated family newspaper called the Hyde Park Gate News, chronicling life and events within the Stephen family, based on the popular magazine Titbits.
The family had a holiday home in St Ives, Cornwall, and until the age of 13, Virginia spent much of the summers there. Its best feature was the view overlooking Porthminster Bay towards the Godrevy Lighthouse. It’s thought that these childhood summers provided the inspiration for her novels Jacob's Room, To the Lighthouse and The Waves. The death of her mother and the fact that a hotel was built in front of the house, blocking the view, meant the end of those holidays.
Virginia didn’t go to university herself, but her brother Thoby went to Cambridge and it was through him that she met the men who would play a significant role in her life: Clive Bell, Lytton Strachey, Leonard Woolf and Saxon Sydney-Turner. They first met at the Trinity May Ball in 1900. The men formed a reading group called the Midnight Society, which the Stephen sisters were invited to.
Virginia once took part in a prank in which she and five of her male friends pretended to be the ‘Prince of Abyssinia’ and his entourage and were granted a tour of the HMS Dreadnought by Virginia's cousin Commander Fisher, who was not aware of the joke.
Virginia had an unusual writing method. She used a standing desk, not unlike an artist’s easel. She liked to take a step back and look at her work, rather like an artist working on a painting might. She experimented with different types of pen, but her favourite was her mother’s pen, filled with Purple ink. She believed that using the perfect pen helped the process of words flowing onto the page.
She battled with her mental health for much of her life. Modern scholars have suggested she was bipolar. The deaths of her mother and father triggered serious breakdowns. On one occasion she was prescribed a “rest cure” at "a private nursing home for women with nervous disorder" called Burley House. The cure involved isolation, force feeding, and no reading. Needless to say, she hated the place. After her father’s death, she attempted suicide by throwing herself out of a window. She spent one summer believing that the birds were chirping in Greek and King Edward VII was uttering curses from behind nearby shrubbery. This tendency could have run in the family; her half sister, Laura, was in an asylum for four years and then spent the rest of her life in a care home.
Virginia’s hobbies included bookbinding, which came in handy when she and her husband Leonard set up a their own printing house. She liked Opera and classical music, listening to Beethoven’s late quartets while writing The Waves. She would walk for up to eight miles a day, jumping over ditches, climbing up hills, or through Barbed Wire fences in order to get where she wanted to go. It’s also said that she used to go skinny dipping with the poet Rupert Brooke. Her forays into driving and cookery were less successful. She bought a Singer, a luxurious car, and took driving lessons, but gave up after driving it into a hedge. After getting married, she thought she’d better learn some domestic skills, and enrolled in cookery classes. She accidentally baked her Wedding ring in a suet pudding.
Her first published work was an essay called “Haworth, November 1904,” which was about the Bronte Sisters and published in the Guardian in 1904. Her first novel was The Voyage Out, originally called Melymbrosia, published in 1915. One of her lesser known novels is Flush, a story told from the perspective of poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Dog.
On 28 March 1941, Woolf drowned herself by walking into the River Ouse near her home, after placing a large stone in her pocket. She was 59 years old and had fallen into a depression, perhaps a combination of a low brought on by finishing a book, Between the Acts, the onset of the second world war and the cool reception given to her biography of her late friend Roger Fry. Her body was not found until 18 April. She was cremated and her ashes buried under an elm tree in the garden of Monk's House, their home in Rodmell, Sussex.
Beta
(Combat Team Series #2)
Steff was abducted by an evil alien race, the Orbs, at fourteen. Used as a weapon for years, he eventually escapes, but his problems are just beginning. How does a man support himself when his only work experience is a paper round and using an Orb bio-integrated gun?
Warlord is an alien soldier who knows little but war. When the centuries-old conflict which ravaged his planet ends, he seeks out another world where his skills are still relevant. There are always wars on Earth, it seems. However, none of Earth's powerful armies want him.
Natalie has always wanted to visit England and sees a chance to do so while using her martial arts skills, but there are sacrifices she must make in order to fulfil her dream.
Maggie resorted to crime to fund her sister's medical care. She uses her genetic variant abilities to gain access to the rooms of wealthy hotel guests. The Ballards look like rich pickings, but they are not what they seem. When Maggie targets them, little does she know that she is walking into a trap.
Hotel owner Hamilton Lonsdale puts together a combat team to pit against those of other multi-millionaires. He recruits Warlord, Natalie, Maggie and Steff along with a trained gorilla, a probability-altering alien, a stockbroker whose work of art proved to be much more than he'd bargained for, a marketing officer who can create psionic forcefields, a teleporting member of the landed gentry, and a socially awkward fixer. This is Combat Team Beta.
Steff never talks about his time with the Orbs, until he finds a woman who lived through it, too. Steff believes he has finally found happiness, but it is destined to be short-lived. He is left with an unusual legacy which he and Team Beta struggle to comprehend; including why something out there seems determined to destroy it.
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