Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) - in full Adeline Virginia Woolf, original surname Stephen. Virginia Woolf is british author who made an original contribution to the form of the novel also distinguished feminist essayist, critic in The Times Literary Supplement, and a central figure of Bloomsbury group. Virginia Woolf's books were published by Hogarth Press, which she founded with her husband, the critic and writer Leonard Woolf. Originally their printing machine was small enough to fit on a kitchen table, but their publications later included T.S. Eliot's Waste Land (1922), fiction by Maxim Gorky, E.M. Forster, and Katherine Mansfield, and the complete twenty-four-volume translation of the works of Sigmund Freud. Virginia Woolf was born in London, the daughter of Julia Jackson Duckworth, a member of the Duckworth publishing family, and Sir Leslie Stephen, a literary critic, a friend of Meredith, Henry James, Tennyson, Matthew Arnold, and George Eliot, and the founder of the Dictionary of National Biography. Leslie Stephen's first wife had been the daughter of the novelist William Makepeace Thackeray. His daughter Laura from the first marriage was institutionalized because of mental retardation. In a memoir dated 1907 she wrote of her parents, "Beautiful often, even to our eyes, were their gestures, their glances of pure and unutterable delight in each other." Woolf, who was educated at home, grew up at the family home at Hyde Park Gate. From her early age, she was extremely attached to her father. In middle age she described this period in a letter to Vita "Think how I was brought up! No school mooning about alone among my father's books never any chance to pick up all that goes on in schoolsthrowing balls ragging slang vulgarities scenes jealousies!" Woolf's youth was shadowed by series of emotional shocks. Gerald Duckworth, her half-brother, sexually abused her. In 'Sketch of the Past' (1939) she "I can remember the feel of his hands going under my clothes going firmly and steadily lower and lower, I remember how I hoped that he would stop how I stiffened and wriggled as his hand approached my private parts. But he did not stop."