Virginia Woolf

Adeline Virginia Woolf was an English writer, considered one of the most important modernist 20th-century authors and a pioneer in the use of stream of consciousness as a narrative device. Woolf was born into an affluent household in South Kensington, London, the seventh child in a blended family of eight. Her father, Sir Leslie Stephen, was a notable historian, author, critic and mountaineer. Her mother, Julia Prinsep Stephen, was a renowned beauty and niece of the photographer Julia Margaret Cameron. Woolf was educated by her parents in their literate and well-connected household. Her parents' circle of friends included literary and artistic luminaries like Henry James, George Eliot, and James Russell Lowell. Despite her extensive education, Woolf was prevented from attending university, a source of lifelong resentment. Woolf's most famous works include the novels Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), and Orlando (1928), and the book-length essay A Room of One's Own (1929). The latter contains her famous dictum, "A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction." Woolf suffered from severe bouts of mental illness throughout her life, now believed to have been bipolar disorder, and committed suicide by drowning in 1941 at the age of 59.