Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) was an English novelist and essayist, born Adeline Virginia Stephen in London, the daughter of the critic Leslie Stephen, and educated at home in her father's library while her brothers went to Cambridge. With her sister Vanessa Bell and their friends she formed the circle later called Bloomsbury; with her husband Leonard Woolf she founded the Hogarth Press. Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando and The Waves remade the novel around the movement of consciousness rather than plot, and A Room of One's Own became a founding text of feminist criticism. She suffered recurrent breakdowns and drowned herself in the River Ouse in March 1941.