The literary critic Queenie Leavis, who had been born into the British lower middle class

and reared three children while writing and editing and teaching, thought Virginia Woolf

a preposterous representative of real women's lives: "There is no reason to suppose Mrs.

Woolf would know which end of the cradle to stir." Yet no one was more aware of the

price of unworldliness than Virginia Woolf. Her imaginative voyages into the waveringly

lighted depths of "Mrs. Dalloway" and "To the Lighthouse" were partly owed to a

freedom from the literal daily need of voyaging out - to the shop or the office or even the

nursery. Her husband, Leonard Woolf, believed that without the aid of her inheritance his

wife would probably not have written a novel at all.

For money guaranteed not just time but intellectual liberty. "I'm the only woman in

England free to write what I like," she exulted in her diary in 1925, after the publication of "Mrs.

Dalloway" by the Hogarth Press, which she and Leonard had set up to free her from the demands

and often indulging in malicious flights of fantasy at the expense of her friends. She was loved

especially the lengthy illnesses of 1913/14 and 1915, is well documented; in particular, typical

asylum (13-14). For generations her family history is filled with gloomy men and eccentric

its natural course; such severe and lengthy attacks would be rare today. Her medical history

first breakdown at the age of thirteen, and others when she was twenty-two, twenty-eight, and

illness. Her brother Thoby died young but was an emotionally disturbed child. Her sister

Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1777
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page double spaced)