Portraits of Virginia Woolf (at left) and Virginia Woolf with her father, Leslie Stephen (at right), compiled in an album by Violet Dickinson (1865–1948)

In 1902, the year that Charles Beresford took these photographs, Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) was a burgeoning writer, having yet to publish her first essay. Her father, Sir Leslie Stephen (1832–1904), the first editor of the Dictionary of National Biography, had supported her literary ambitions from a young age. Woolf published her first signed essay (about the Brontë family) in 1904, her first short story (a meditation on gender and perspective) in 1917, and her first novel (which laid the groundwork for future experimentation) in 1915. In 1922 she began work on the short stories that would lead to Mrs. Dalloway (1925), her masterpiece that follows two characters—the eponymous society hostess and a suicidal war veteran—through a single summer’s day.