Virginia Woolf is a major novelist and one of the pioneers amongst modernist writers using stream of consciousness as a narrative device, alongside her contemporaries Marcel Proust and James Joyce. Her reputation declined sharply after WWII, but her importance was re-established with the growth of feminist criticism in the 1970’s.

She began writing professionally in 1900. The first of her writings to be accepted for publication, ‘Haworth, November 1904’, was a journalistic account of a visit to the Bronte family home at Haworth. From 1905 she wrote for The Times Literary Supplement.

http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/woolf/VW-Bronte.html

‘Virginia Woolf’s peculiarities as a fiction writer have tended to obscure her central strength: she is arguably the major lyrical novelist in the English language. Her novels are highly experimental: a narrative, frequently uneventful and commonplace, is refracted – and sometimes almost dissolved – in the characters’ receptive consciousness. Intense lyricism and stylistic virtuosity fuse to create a world overabundant with auditory and visual impressions.’

‘Woolf’s narrative is defined by its stream-of-conscious quality; rather than having a fixed narrator with a fixed perspective. Woolf goes in and out of the minds of different characters, making unexpected connections that are not always clear or necessarily rational. This feature of her writing allows her to produce stories that are less driven by the plot than by the beauty of the minute details that make up the experience of life.’

A major influence on Woolf from 1912 onward was Russian literature. The style of Fyodor Dostoyevsky with his depiction of a fluid mind in operation influenced her writings about a ‘discontinuous writing process’. Woolf admired Chekhov for his stories of ordinary people living their lives, doing banal things and plots that had no neat endings.

From Tolstoy, Woolf drew lessons about how a novelist should depict a character’s psychological state and the interior tension within. From Ivan Turgenev, Woolf drew the lessons that there are multiple “I’s” when writing a novel. She was also influenced by Henry David Thoreau, and wrote in an essay that her aim as a writer was to follow Thoreau by capturing ‘the moment, to burn always with this hard, gem-like flame’. 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.

Other notable influences include: William Shakespeare, George Eliot, Marcel Proust, Emily Bronte, Daniel Defoe, James Joyce, E. M. Forster.