About the work
Freshwater is a comedy in three acts that Virginia Woolf began writing in 1923 and revised in 1935 for a single performance. On 18 January 1935 she staged it with members of the Bloomsbury Group before an invited audience in a studio on Fitzroy Street in London; it was her only work for the stage.
Plot
At the Isle of Wight home of photographer Julia Margaret Cameron, the young actress Ellen Terry tries to escape her marriage to the much older painter George Frederic Watts. A young naval officer appears to her as a way toward a freer life in Bloomsbury.
Cultural significance
The play is an affectionately mocking reckoning with the Victorian age, linking Woolf's own family history — Cameron was her great-aunt — with themes of artistic freedom and female self-determination that also mark her major novels.