Who is Virginia Woolf as noted in the book, After Sappho?

The English writer Virginia Woolf is another of the central characters in Schwartz’s After Sappho. Virginia is born in 1882 in England; her father, Leslie Stephen, is a historian who writes “hundreds of lives of notable British men” (46). As a student at Kings College, Virginia is deeply intelligent and highly articulate. Some of her early essays argue that “if there were faults with women writers… these merely demonstrated the dire need to educate girls as rigorously as the boys of Cambridge” (53). As the narrative progresses, Virginia begins to argue for an entirely new, feminist conception of the novelistic form. She believes that the “task of the novelist” (194) is to convey the “constant variance” (193) of life itself. Virginia soon begins a romantic relationship with Vita Sackville-West; they create Hogarth Press in order to publish their work, as well as the work of other progressive writers. In the final chapters of the novel, Virginia begins to suggest new possibilities for biographies. She argues that biographies could contain “that queer amalgamation of dream and reality we knew so intimately: it was the alchemy of our own existence” (233). At Virginia’s urging, many of the other lesbians in the novel begin to write autobiographies, thereby asserting their own independence. Virginia herself publishes Orlando, a fictionalized biography based on Vita and her family.