Study Index

Social/ Cultural Timeline for Woolf/ Modernism

YEAR	Woolf’s Life	Social/Political/Military	Women	Arts/Literatrue
1870			Girton founded at Cambridge 1875: Newnham Hall, Cambridge 1979: Lady Margaret Hall and Somerville, Oxford
1880				Death of Flaubert, George Eliot Pirates of Penzance Dostoyevsky, Brothers Karamazov
1881				Death of Carlyle Birth of Picasso James, Portrait of a Lady
1882	V, Stephens b. Jan 25 at 22 Hyde Park Gate, London		Brits pass Married Women's Property Act	Death of Darwin, Emerson, D.G. Rossestti Birth of James Joyce, Stravinsky
1887		Q. Victoria Golden Jubilee
1890				Death of Van Gogh Wm. Morris, News from Nowhere
1895	May 5: Julia Stephen dies VS first breakdown Lease of Talland House, Cornwall, sold			Trial and conviction of Oscar Wilde
1897	Begins first diary	Q. Victoria Diamond Jubilee
1898	Attends classes at King’s College in Latin and Greek (-1900)
1900				Freud, Interpretation of Dreams. Death of Nietzsche, Wilde, Ruskin
1901	Reading Sophocles	Death of Queen Victoria Edward VII to throne
1902	Private lessons in Greek wi Janet Case	TLS founded		Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
1903	Studying Aeschylus		Emmeline Pankhurst founds Women’s Social and Political Union
1904	Feb. Leslie S dies May: Breakdown Oct: move to Bloomsbury Leonard Woolf goes to Ceylon		,	VS publishes 2nd essay, “Haworth, November 1904”
1905	VS begins teaching classes at Morley College for Women Thursday Evenings begin	Einstein, Special Theory of Relativity 1st motor buses in London		Fauvism
1907	Feb: Vanessa Marries CB March: VS moves to Fitzroy Sq.			VS begins work on Melymbrosia First Cubist Exhibition, Paris
1908				Stein, Three Lives  Forster, Room wi a View
1910	Jan: work for suffrage Feb: Dreadnought Hoax	Edward VII dies; George V succeeds		Opening of first Post- Impressionism exhibit, London Forster, Howard’s End TS Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
1912	Jan:  LW proposes May: agrees marry LW Aug: marries LW	Death of Scott in Antarctic Titanic		VO finished 2nd Post-Impressionist Exhibit
1913	breakdown & suicide attempt		Height of Suffragette demonstrations in London Emily Wilding Davison throws herself in front of King’s horse at Ascot.	DH Lawrence, Sons and Lovers Proust, A la Rescherche… Stravinsky, Rite of Spring
1914		WW I  begins		LW, Education and the co-operative Mvmt.
1915	1915: Jan: Take Hogarth House & buy printing press Mar: nursing home	Zepplin attacks on London Einstein, General Theory of Relativity		Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out
1916		First Battle of Somme Easter Rising, Dublin Gallipoli		Joyce, Portrait of the Artist LW, International Gvmt
1917	1917: begin printing at Hogarth House, Two Stories	Bolshevik Revolution in Russia		1917: "The Mark on the Wall” “Kew Gardens" wr.
1918		Nov. 11: Armistice Influenza pandemic	Brit pass Women's Suffrage (propertied women over 30)	Ulysses begins to be pub in The Little Review. Lytton Strachey, Eminent Victorians
1919	July: purchase Monk's House in Sussex	Treaty of Versailles J.M. Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace	Sex Disqualification Act allows women to become lawyers, vets, engineers and civil servants  First female MP, Nancy Astor	V Woolf, Night and Day TSE "Tradition and the Individual Talent"
1920		Founding of the League of Nations	American women achieve the vote Women awarded degrees at Oxford, but in Cambridge the women were denied again in 1921, having to settle for titles of degrees only (called, inevitably, the ‘BA tit’).	VW: An Unwritten Novel” “A Society” Eliot, Sacred Wood Mansfield, Bliss LW, Empire and Commerce in Africa
1921				VW, Monday or Tuesday
1922		Fascists rise to power in Italy		T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land Joyce, Ulysses Mansfield Garden Party Virginia Woolf, Jacob’s Room
1924	Move back to London, Tavistock Sq,			Forster, Passage to India
1925		Hitler publishes Mein Kampf		Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway The Common Reader LW, Fear and Politics
1926		General Strike throughout Britain, May 3-12		Fritz Lang’s film Metropolis
1927		Lindberg flies Atlantic		Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse First “talkies”
1928			Brit: Women’s suffrage: all women over 21.	Virginia Woolf, Orlando Hall, Well of Loneliness Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s L
1929		New York stock market collapses Ramsey MacDonald forms Labour gvmt		Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own Faulkner, Sound & Fury
1931				VW, The Waves
1933		Hitler appointed Chancellor of Germany First German Concentration Camps		Woolf, Flush Stein, Autobio of Alice B. Toklas
1934		Feb: Nazis take over Austria Oswald Mosley: British Fascists
1935	May: to Germany wi Mitz and Italy.	Nuremberg Laws against Jews begin to be passed Nov. Italian invasion of Abyssinia		Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral  LW, Quack! Quack!
1936		Death of George v; accession of Edward VII; abdication; accession of George VI Beginning of Spanish Civil War (-1939) Hiltler invades Rhineland		Mitchell, Gone with the Wind
1937		Guernica, Spain Chamberlain Prime Minister		VW, The Years
1938		Munich Agreement		VW, Three Guineas
1939	Move to Mecklenburg Sq, London	Italy invades Albania Beginning of WWII (Sept 3)		Death of Freud, Yeats Joyce, Finnegan’s Wake
1940	Bomb destroys London House	Germans invade Holland, Belgium;  enter Paris Battle of Britain in air over Sussex		VW, Roger Fry
1941	Germans dropping incendiary bombs along South Downs March 28, VW drowns herself in River Ouse	Germans invade Russia		Joyce dies VW, Between the Acts

SOURCES

Bishop, Edward. Virginia Woolf: A Chronology.   Boston MS: G.K. Hall & Co., 1989.

Bradshaw, David, ed. A Concise Companion to Modernism. Blackwell Publishers, Ltd, 2003.

Spotts, Frederic, ed.  Letters of Leonard Woolf. Harcourt Brace, Jovanovich, 1989.