![]() ![]() When Virginia Woolf was born in 1882, horses and carriages rattled past her home in Kensington by the time she died in 1941, formations of jet aircraft roared overhead and threatened oblivion from the air. The impact of two world wars, prolonged economic depression in the 1930s, and the rise of the USA and the Soviet Union as rival world powers meant that by the latter half of the twentieth century, Britain had lost its global pre-eminence, and witnessed radical social, cultural, and political changes. Yet between the death of Queen Victoria in 1901, when Woolf was 19, and the end of the Second World War, almost every aspect of British life changed. In people’s daily lives the church occupied a central place, and class positions and gender roles seemed fixed. The British Empire was at the height of its power and influence. ![]() ![]() In the nineteenth century, the industrial revolution had made Britain the ‘factory to the world’ and solidified its economic power. The period of Virginia Woolf’s life spanned the transition from the Victorian to the modern world. Photograph of Queen Victoria taken by Alexander Bassano in 1882, the year of Virginia Woolf’s birth. ![]()
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