Brain Snacks: Tasty Tidbits of Knowledge
When she's talking about female friendship in life's adventure, Woolf pretends to be worried that a certain Sir Chartres Biron is hiding behind a curtain. She's talking about the magistrate in charge of the obscenity trial for The Well of Loneliness, a book about lesbianism. (source)
Woolf was a part of an intellectual circle called the Bloomsbury Group. It wasn't all tea and conversation, though. The members of the group were also more sexually entangled than the characters on Gossip Girl. (source)
Woolf talks a lot in A Room of One's Own about women getting the right to vote, known as suffrage. The Suffragettes were women who went to extremes to win that right. Some of them went on hunger strikes, one woman killed herself by throwing herself under a horse, and a group of them even blew up part of a politician's house. We're not saying we approve, but we do appreciate that everyone can vote now. (source)
On her 33rd birthday Woolf and her husband decided to buy a printing press and a bulldog. The bulldog business apparently never went anywhere, but they did purchase a manual printing press. When they finally learned how to use it, they were able to publish Woolf's and others' works independently. (source)
In 1910 Woolf and a few other people from the Bloomsbury group dressed up as Abyssinian princes and tricked the British Navy into giving them the red carpet treatment. Woolf is on the left, wearing the beard. (source)