

Virginia Woolf, long appreciated in high literary circles and hailed as a feminist activist, is becoming appreciated by a younger audience with recent adaptations of her work, including a movie of her novel Night and Day. It is released this week starring Haley Bennett, Timothy Spall, Jennifer Saunders, Jack Whitehall and Lily Allen, and focuses on a female astronomer trying to gain admission to the University of Cambridge to read maths and battling academia’s anti-women attitudes (women students were being refused degrees in those days even if they were admitted). As she confronts the patriarchal expectations of Edwardian society, she realises her intellectual ambitions are only possible as a married woman.
Born 25 January 1882 12.15pm London, she grew up in a literary and artistic household with a free run of her father’s library, so was better educated than most girls of the time. As an adult she became part of the upmarket bohemian, intellectual Bloomsbury Group and married Leonard Woolf, a writer, publisher, civil servant and Labour supporter. All of her life she suffered mood swings and depression; and ultimately took her life during World War 11, drowning herself in a river. Although she married Woolf, she had many affairs with women to whom she was more attracted than men.
She had an ambitious, career-oriented Sun Aquarius on her Midheaven in a downbeat square to Saturn in determined Taurus and trine Pluto in late Taurus – so quite a driven, battened down temperament with problems of self-worth. Her Aries Moon was square Venus in Capricorn and sextile an upfront and wordy Mars in Gemini in her 1st. She had a stellium in Taurus including a Jupiter Neptune conjunction trine Uranus as well as Pluto. Her Pluto was also in an intensely emotionally trine to Venus.
What a complicated personality. On the masculine side Sun Saturn Pluto – unyielding, dominating, not supportive. On the feminine side the Moon Venus, referred to by astrologer Richard Idemon as the ‘poisoned apple’, a mother’s love mixed in with sexuality, heightened by Pluto Venus. And an eye-catching idealistic, visionary, impressionable Jupiter Neptune conjunction in an innovative trine to Uranus. Her Jupiter conjunct Chiron marked her out as one who would inspire and teach others.
When she died on 28 March 1941, having become increasingly obsessed with death since the start of the war in 1939, she was hearing voices and felt she was sliding towards another breakdown. She was on her exact Jupiter Return, with tr Jupiter also exactly conjunct her Chiron, no doubt longing for peace, as a build up of darker influences wore her down – tr Pluto was close to challenging opposition to her Sun and in an unrelentingly gloomy square to her Saturn; tr Saturn was conjunct her Neptune increasing her uncertainty; and her Solar Arc Mars was bearing down on her Pluto in a square which must have made her feel her life had come to a halt and she couldn’t see a way through.
Her creative 5th and 7th harmonics were heavily aspected, though troubled especially her 7H. Her writer’s 21st harmonic was notable, influential and tortured. Her leaving-a-legacy-for-history also marked her out as a fighter for women’s freedom against oppression.





































