Virginia Woolf's career as a published writer (she had been keeping journals and diaries since childhood) began in the first years of the century with reviews and articles, primarily for the Guardian, the Times Literary Supplement, and the Cornhill Magazine. After her father's death in 1904, Woolf, then Virginia Stephen, went to stay with her father's sister, Caroline Stephen, who, on her death in 1909, left her, in John Mepham's words, ‘sufficient capital to give her an income something approaching the famous £500 pounds a year, enough for her financial independence, a vital condition for the autonomy of the woman writer’. Woolf also travelled Europe with her brothers and sister during these years (it was soon after a trip to Greece that Thoby Stephen died from typhoid fever), and for two years taught history and writing at Morley College, an adult education institute in south London.

Her early writings also included short stories, some of them unpublished in her lifetime. Her first pieces are nearly all explorations of women's lives at various historical periods, and of the difficulties of representing them adequately. In ‘Memoirs of a Novelist’ (1909) she invents a two-volume ‘life and letters’ of a fictional Victorian woman writer, Miss Willatt, written by her friend, a Miss Linsett. Woolf satirizes the typical eulogistic Victorian biography and shows up the extent to which conventional biography (and, by extension, literary naturalism) kills ‘life’ rather than creating and expressing it: this theme pervades her writing. ‘The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn’ (1906) is an exploration of women's history, cast in the form of a ‘found’ manuscript, as Woolf's present-day historian, Rosalind Merridew, researching the land-tenure system of medieval England, uncovers a journal, written in 1480, by Joan Martyn, a young woman keeping house during the civil wars. Again, Woolf explores the ways in which one woman writes the life of another. ‘Joan Martyn’ anticipates Woolf's many explorations of hidden histories and obscure lives – in her essay ‘Lives of the Obscure’ she describes herself as ‘a deliverer advancing <…> to the rescue of some stranded ghost’ (E. iv. 119) – and her inventions of lives and stories that must be created because they would otherwise have no representation.