Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf was born in London in 1882; her father, Leslie Stephen, was an eminent critic and editor of the Dictionary of National Biography. She never went to school and educated herself in her father's library. Her mother died when she was thirteen, and she suffered several breakdowns thereafter. After her father's death she moved with her sister and brothers to Bloomsbury in London, and their house became a meeting place for writers, artists and scholars later known as the Bloomsbury Group, among them the economist Keynes and the novelist E. M. Forster. She married the writer Leonard Woolf, and with a hand press the couple founded the Hogarth Press, which published T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land and the English translations of Freud. One of the pioneers of the stream-of-consciousness novel, she drowned herself in a river at fifty-nine, under the shadow of the Second World War.