While Virginia Woolf’s reputation as one of the most prominent modernist and feminist writers is firmly established by her experimental novels, her tremendous contribution to essay writing has been overlooked until recently. It is surprising that Woolf’s essays have received little critical attention considering that she was primarily an essayist and reviewer for the first two decades of her professional life and continued to write reviews in almost forty years as a literary journalist. The most remarkable aspect of her neglected essays is that many reveal her enthusiastic engagement with biographical writing. In these essays, Woolf notes that the biographer’s art has entered a new phase to capture the essence of a personality as modern novels do. This paper examines several essays on biographical writing, “The New Biography,” “The Art of Biography,” “The Lives of the Obscure,” “Shelley and Elizabeth Hitchener,” and “Eliza and Sterne,” to explore the ways in which Woolf advocates a new biography by criticizing her predecessors and evolving her own modern aesthetic position. These essays show that Woolf’s experiments with biographical writing illustrate her attitudes toward life and writing and demonstrate her concerns about women and history, which, in turn, establish her as an uncompromising feminist and great modernist.