Virginia Woolf's Influential Forebears reveals under-acknowledged nineteenth-century legacies which shaped Woolf as a writing woman. Marion Dell identifies significant lines of descent from the lives and works of Woolf's great-aunt Julia Margaret Cameron, the writer she called aunt, Anny Thackeray Ritchie, and her mother, Julia Prinsep Stephen.

Marion Dell is an independent writer and lecturer based in the UK, and has previously taught at the Open University. She is the co-author (with Marion Whybrow) of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell: Remembering St Ives (2003), and she is currently writing a biography of Julia Stephen.