Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf was an English writer born in London in 1882 and one of the central figures of literary modernism. She grew up in a large, book-filled household and was largely educated at home. As an adult she became part of the Bloomsbury Group, a circle of writers and artists in London, and with her husband Leonard she founded the Hogarth Press, which published her own work and that of others. Her novels moved away from tidy plots and instead followed the flow of thought, memory and perception, often within a single day or a single household. She also wrote essays, biographies and criticism, and argued thoughtfully for women's independence and for their place in intellectual life. She suffered from recurring periods of serious mental illness. She died in 1941. Her books are still widely read for their poetic prose and for their close attention to how people actually experience time and one another.