Virginia Woolf

Woolf, Virginia (1882–1941), English novelist and essayist. The daughter of Sir Leslie Stephen, she married the critic Leonard Sidney Woolf (1880–1969), and they established the Hogarth Press (1917). Their home was the center of the Bloomsbury group. Her novels Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), and The Waves (1931) display—using the technique of stream of consciousness—her characters' thoughts and feelings about common experiences. Some of her brilliant criticism was published in The Common Reader (1925). She also wrote feminist tracts, including A Room of One's Own (1929). Subject to fits of mental instability, she drowned herself.

See also: Bloomsbury group.