Virginia WoolfVirginia Woolf was born in London, daughter of Julia Jackson Duckworth, member of the Duckworth publishing family, and Sir Leslie Stephen, literary critic, friend of Meredith, Henry James, Tennyson, Matthew Arnold and George Eliot, and founder of the Dictionary of National Biography. Leslie Stephen's first wife was the daughter of the novelist William Makepeace Thackeray. His daughter Laura, from his first marriage, was placed in an institution due to mental retardation. In a memoir dated 1907, she wrote of her parents: “Often beautiful, even to our eyes, were their gestures, their looks of pure and indescribable pleasure for each other. » Woolf, who was educated at home by her father, grew up at the family home in Hyde Park Gate. In middle age, she described this period in a letter to Vita Sackville-West: “Think of the way I was raised! No school; I dreamed alone among my father's books; I never had the opportunity to understand everything that goes on in schools: throwing balls. ; complainers; slang; vulgarity scenes; Woolf's youth was marked by a series of emotional shocks. Her half-brother Gerald Duckworth sexually assaulted her. In "Sketch of the Past" (1939), she writes: "I remember the feeling of his hands passing under my clothes; moving firmly and steadily lower and lower, I remember how I hoped he would 'would stop; how I tensed and squirmed as his hand approached my private parts. But he didn't stop when Virginia was in her early teens. , her half-sister, took her mother's place, but died just two years later Leslie Stephen died slowly of cancer When her brother Toby died in 1906, she suffered a prolonged mental breakdown. Virginia's sister Vanessa influenced many of her characters as they bathed and slept together. Later in FLUSH (1933), Woolf parodies her own devotion to Vanessa after her father's death in 1904. , Woolf moved with her sister and two brothers to the house in Bloomsbury. Vanessa, a painter, has agreed to marry the art and literature critic Clive Bell. Virginia's economic situation improved when she inherited £2,500 from an aunt. Their house becomes central to the activities of the Bloomsbury group. “And part of the charm of those Thursday nights was that they were surprisingly abstract. It was not just that Moore's book [Principia Ethica, 1903] had led us all to discuss philosophy, art, religion; by Hawtrey, I can use that word - was abstract in the extreme.