Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf, born Virginia Stephen, grew up in a literary family in London. She was not allowed to attend university, but educated herself in her father’s library. After her parents’ deaths she and her siblings moved to Bloomsbury, where they formed the centre of the Bloomsbury Group of writers and artists. All her life she suffered from periods of severe depression.

In 1912 she married the writer Leonard Woolf, with whom she founded the Hogarth Press. Her novels “Mrs Dalloway” (1925), “To the Lighthouse” (1927) and “The Waves” (1931) revolutionised the novel with their stream-of-consciousness technique. In “A Room of One’s Own” (1929) she argued that a woman needs money and a room of her own to write.

In the mid-1920s she fell in love with the writer Vita Sackville-West, and the two had a love affair. Inspired by Vita, Woolf wrote “Orlando” (1928), the story of a nobleman who lives for centuries and one morning wakes up as a woman. Vita’s son later called it “the longest and most charming love letter in literature”.

In March 1941, fearing another breakdown, Virginia Woolf took her own life near her house in Sussex. She was 59 years old.