Virginia Woolf

Adeline Virginia Stephen was born in 1882 in Kensington, London, the daughter of Leslie Stephen — the Victorian critic and first editor of the Dictionary of National Biography — and Julia Prinsep Duckworth. Virginia was educated at home in her father's enormous library while her brothers went to Cambridge, an asymmetry she never forgot. Her mother died when she was thirteen and her half-sister Stella two years later; these losses, compounded by sexual abuse from her older half-brothers George and Gerald Duckworth, triggered the first of the breakdowns that would recur throughout her life. After her father's death in 1904, she moved with her siblings to 46 Gordon Square in Bloomsbury, and the household became the nucleus of what would later be called the Bloomsbury Group — Lytton Strachey, Keynes, Forster, Roger Fry, Clive Bell, and her sister Vanessa.

She married Leonard Woolf, a former colonial administrator in Ceylon, in 1912. Together they founded the Hogarth Press in 1917, hand-printing books in their dining room; the press would eventually publish T. S. Eliot, Katherine Mansfield, Freud in English translation, and Woolf's own novels. Her early fiction — The Voyage Out (1915), Night and Day (1919) — was conventional in form. With Jacob's Room (1922) she began the experiments that would define her: a novel built from fragments and the gaps left by a young man killed in the First World War.

Mrs. Dalloway (1925) takes place over a single June day in post-war London, following Clarissa Dalloway as she prepares for a party and Septimus Warren Smith, a shell-shocked veteran, as he moves toward suicide — two strangers whose lives touch only obliquely through the chime of Big Ben. To the Lighthouse (1927), her most autobiographical book, is structured in three parts around the Ramsay family's Hebridean holidays; the middle section, "Time Passes," compresses ten years and several deaths into a few pages of unattended rooms. Orlando (1928), a love letter to Vita Sackville-West, follows a single character across four centuries and two genders. The Waves (1931) abandons plot almost entirely for the interwoven inner monologues of six friends. A Room of One's Own (1929), expanded from lectures at Newnham and Girton, made the argument that a woman needs five hundred a year and a room of her own to write fiction — the most cited sentence in twentieth-century feminist criticism.

On 28 March 1941, with the Second World War grinding on and another breakdown closing in, she filled the pockets of her overcoat with stones and walked into the River Ouse near her house in Sussex. She was fifty-nine. Her body was not found for three weeks.

Her diaries, edited by Leonard and published in five volumes between 1977 and 1984, are essential reading alongside the novels. Start with Mrs. Dalloway if you want the famous one, To the Lighthouse if you want the best one, A Room of One's Own if you want the polemic that still bites.