Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf was the daughter of Leslie Stephen, educated in his library, and the centre of the Bloomsbury group with her sister Vanessa Bell and her husband Leonard, with whom she founded the Hogarth Press. Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse and The Waves remade the novel around consciousness, memory and the passage of time; A Room of One’s Own, from lectures at Cambridge, is the argument that a woman needs money and a room to write, and the founding text of feminist criticism. She suffered recurrent breakdowns and drowned herself in the Ouse in 1941.