Virginia Woolf
1882–1941 · English (London) · Literary Modernism, Bloomsbury Group
Known for: Modernist master—Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando, A Room of One's Own
Virginia Woolf was brilliant, fragile, and tormented by mental illness throughout her life. She was sexually abused by her half-brothers as a child. She was at the center of the Bloomsbury Group—the intellectual elite of interwar London—and co-founded the Hogarth Press with her husband Leonard.
Her novels pioneered stream of consciousness and explored the inner lives of women with unprecedented depth. A Room of One's Own is a foundational feminist text. She drowned herself in the River Ouse in 1941, filling her pockets with stones, leaving a note to Leonard: 'I owe all the happiness of my life to you.'
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