“I see children running in the garden…The sound of the sea at night…

almost forty years of life, all built on that, permeated by that: so much I could never explain."

These childhood memories inspired the settings and themes of English author Virginia Woolf’s
powerful stream-of-consciousness narratives, a unique literary style that established Woolf as one of
modern feminism’s most influential voices.

Born in London in 1882, Woolf grew up in a home with a large library, and a constant stream of
literary visitors come to call on her author and historian father. Unsurprisingly, Woolf would become
an integral member of the Bloomsbury Group, a collective of prominent contemporary intellectuals
and artists.

Woolf’s lyrical writing thrived on the introspection of her characters, revealing the complex
emotions underlying seemingly mundane events — how the ringing of the Big Ben evokes the
passage of time in Mrs. Dalloway (1925) or a family’s visit to the coast hides deep-seated tensions in
To the Lighthouse (1927).

Nonfiction works like A Room of One’s Own (1929) and Three Guineas (1938) showcase Woolf’s
unflinching feminist perspective by documenting the gendered intellectual stratification and
resulting male-dominated power dynamics of the period.

Created by London-based illustrator Louise Pomeroy, today’s Doodle celebrates Woolf’s minimalist
style — her iconic profile surrounded by the falling autumn leaves (a frequent visual theme in her
work). In Woolf’s words: “The autumn trees gleam in the yellow moonlight, in the light of harvest
moons, the light which mellows the energy of labor, and smooths the stubble, and brings the wave
lapping blue to the shore.”

Happy 136th birthday, Virginia Woolf!