[citation needed] Leslie Stephen described his circle as "most of the literary people of mark...clever young writers and barristers, chiefly of the radical persuasion...we used to meet on Wednesday and Sunday evenings, to smoke and drink and discuss the universe and the reform movement".

[59] During this period, the group began to increasingly explore progressive ideas, with open discussions of members' homosexual inclinations, and nude dancing from Vanessa, who in 1910 went so far as to propose a libertarian society with sexual freedom for all.

[62][56] In November 1911 Virginia and Adrian moved to a larger house at 38 Brunswick Square, and invited John Maynard Keynes, Duncan Grant and Leonard Woolf to become lodgers there.

[79] In 1904 Leonard Woolf left Britain for a civil service position in Ceylon,[80] but returned for a year's leave in 1911 after letters from Lytton Strachey describing Virginia's beauty enticed him back.

[95] 1920 saw a postwar reconstitution of the Bloomsbury Group, under the title of the Memoir Club, which as the name suggests focussed on self-writing, in the manner of Proust's A La Recherche, and inspired some of the more influential books of the 20th century.

The Group, which had been scattered by the war, was reconvened by Mary ('Molly') MacCarthy who called them "Bloomsberries", and operated under rules derived from the Cambridge Apostles, an elite university debating society that a number of them had been members of.

This period was to prove fruitful for both authors, Woolf producing three novels, To the Lighthouse (1927), Orlando (1928), and The Waves (1931) as well as a number of essays, including "Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown" (1924) and "A Letter to a Young Poet" (1932).

The onset of the Second World War, the destruction of her London home during the Blitz, and the cool reception given to her biography of her late friend Roger Fry all worsened her condition until she was unable to work.

[117] Her mother's death in 1895, "the greatest disaster that could happen",[118][119] precipitated a crisis for which their family doctor, Dr Seton, prescribed rest, stopping lessons and writing, and regular walks supervised by Stella.

On Savage's recommendation, Virginia spent three short periods in 1910, 1912, and 1913 at Burley House at 15 Cambridge Park, Twickenham, described as "a private nursing home for women with nervous disorder" run by Miss Jean Thomas.

[citation needed] She loathed the experience; writing to her sister on 28 July,[127] she described how she found the religious atmosphere stifling and the institution ugly, and informed Vanessa that to escape "I shall soon have to jump out of a window".

She remained unstable over the next two years, with another incident involving veronal that she claimed was an 'accident', and consulted another psychiatrist in April 1914, Maurice Craig, who explained that she was not sufficiently psychotic to be certified or committed to an institution.

[137] Her experiences informed her work, such as the character of Septimus Warren Smith in Mrs Dalloway (1925), who, like Woolf, was haunted by the dead, and ultimately takes his own life rather than be admitted to a sanitorium.

[140] Modern scholars, including her nephew and biographer, Quentin Bell,[141] have suggested her breakdowns and subsequent recurring depressive periods were influenced by the sexual abuse which she and her sister Vanessa were subjected to by their half-brothers George and Gerald Duckworth (which Woolf recalls in her autobiographical essays "A Sketch of the Past" and "22 Hyde Park Gate").

[3] "22 Hyde Park Gate" ends with the sentence "The old ladies of Kensington and Belgravia never knew that George Duckworth was not only father and mother, brother and sister to those poor Stephen girls; he was their lover also.

[151][149] Stephen Trombley describes Woolf as having a confrontational relationship with her doctors, and possibly being a woman who is a "victim of male medicine", referring to the lack of understanding, particularly at the time, about mental illness.

In fact, she dislikes the quality of masculinity ; says that women stimulate her imagination, by their grace & their art of life – Vita Sackville-West's diary, dated 26 September 1928Among her other notable affairs were those with Sibyl Colefax, Lady Ottoline Morrell, and Mary Hutchinson.

Although it was rejected, this shipboard romance by the 8-year-old would presage her first novel 25 years later, as would contributions to the Hyde Park News, such as the model letter "to show young people the right way to express what is in their hearts", a subtle commentary on her mother's legendary matchmaking.

[182] In A Room of One's Own (1929) Woolf equates historical accusations of witchcraft with creativity and genius among women "When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils...then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet, of some mute and inglorious Jane Austen".

"[189] This trope is deeply embedded in her texts' structure and grammar; James Antoniou notes in Sydney Morning Herald how "Woolf made a virtue of the semicolon, the shape and function of which resembles the wave, her most famous motif.

[202][203] The Woolfs had been discussing setting up a publishing house for some time – Leonard intended for it to give Virginia a rest from the strain of writing, and therefore help her fragile mental health.

Pamphlets had fallen out of fashion due to the high production costs and low revenue, but the Hogarth Press produced several series on contemporary issues of international politics, challenging colonialism and critiquing Soviet Russia and Italian fascism.

[212] The Woolfs also published political fiction, including Turbott Wolfe (1926) by William Plomer and In a Province (1934) by Laurens van der Post, which concern South African racial policies and revolutionary movements respectively.

[213] Virginia Woolf saw a link between international politics and feminism, publishing a biography of Indian feminist activist Saroj Nalini Dutt and the memoirs of suffragette Elizabeth Robins.

[214] Scholar Ursula McTaggart argues that the Hogarth Press shaped and represented Woolf's later concept of an "Outsiders' Society", a non-organised group of women who would resist "the patriarchal fascism of war and nationalism" by exerting influence through private actions, as described in Three Guineas.

[218] Both authors believed in a certain transcendental, mystical approach to life and writing, where even banal things could be capable of generating deep emotions if one had enough silence and the presence of mind to appreciate them.

Woolf's best-known nonfiction works, A Room of One's Own (1929) and Three Guineas (1938), examine the difficulties that female writers and intellectuals faced because men held disproportionate legal and economic power, as well as the future of women in education and society.

Woolf's mother, Julia Stephen, wrote the book Agnostic Women (1880), which argued that agnosticism (defined here as something more like atheism) could be a highly moral approach to life.

[240] Woolf's tendentious expressions, including prejudicial feelings against disabled people, have often been the topic of academic criticism:[234] The first quotation is from a diary entry of September 1920 and runs: "The fact is the lower classes are detestable."

The remainder follow the first in reproducing stereotypes standard to upper-class and upper-middle class life in the early 20th century: "imbeciles should certainly be killed"; "Jews" are greasy; a "crowd" is both an ontological "mass" and is, again, "detestable"; "Germans" are akin to vermin; some "baboon faced intellectuals" mix with "sad green dressed negroes and negresses, looking like chimpanzees" at a peace conference; Kensington High St. revolts one's stomach with its innumerable "women of incredible mediocrity, drab as dishwater".