It was in this spirit of modern rebellion that Virginia moved with her adult siblings out of the family home and into the (then rather seedy) London district of Bloomsbury to forge a new kind of living arrangement. The creation of a welfare state in 1945 represented to many in Britain a clean break from a world organized by the wealthy, for the wealthy.Īs the radical ideas of thinkers such as Marx, Freud, and Einstein began to take hold, and the influence of religion weakened, people began to challenge orthodoxy and tradition, and agitate for fairer treatment of the poor and of women. The expansion of the voting franchise and increases in leisure time for workers meant that class divisions were weakened, and more of the population than ever before had a voice in politics and a share of cultural life. Less deadly, but no less revolutionary, the radio, the telephone and the automobile altered the rhythms and expectations of everyday life. When Virginia Woolf was born in 1882, horses and carriages rattled past her home in Kensington by the time she died in 1941, formations of jet aircraft roared overhead and threatened oblivion from the air. The impact of two world wars, prolonged economic depression in the 1930s, and the rise of the USA and the Soviet Union as rival world powers meant that by the latter half of the twentieth century, Britain had lost its global pre-eminence, and witnessed radical social, cultural, and political changes. Yet between the death of Queen Victoria in 1901, when Woolf was 19, and the end of the Second World War, almost every aspect of British life changed.

In people’s daily lives the church occupied a central place, and class positions and gender roles seemed fixed. The British Empire was at the height of its power and influence. In the nineteenth century, the industrial revolution had made Britain the ‘factory to the world’ and solidified its economic power. The period of Virginia Woolf’s life spanned the transition from the Victorian to the modern world. Photograph of Queen Victoria taken by Alexander Bassano in 1882, the year of Virginia Woolf’s birth.

Virginia woolf novel to the lighthouse