Virginia Woolf, one of the great innovative novelists of the 20^th century, was born in London in 1882. Her father, Leslie Stephen, was a philosopher, biographer and he encouraged his daughters to better their minds but at the same time he reserved higher education for Virginia's two brothers. The first great pain of her life was her mother's death. When she was only six years old her half-brother raped her and this event caused her first nervous breakdown.

After her father's death in 1904 she moved with her sister and her two brothers in Bloomsbury, a place where born a group of artists: the “Bloomsbury Group”. For the first time she had around herself people who didn't seem to care that she was a woman and who expected her to contribute to the group both in conversations and in her novels.

With this encouragement, she began writing. She wrote many novels and short stories, but also biographies and hundreds of book reviews and long essays. World War I demoralized Virginia Woolf and she used stream of consciousness in order to pose the interior monologue and to capture the irregularities and meanderings of thought. The technique of the internal monologue presents the character's thoughts in a direct way, imitating as much as possible the character's mind style.

Virginia Woolf was bisexual and thirteen years after her marriage with Leonard Woolf she fell passionately in love with Vita Sackville-West. Her husband however was a real moral support for her especially during her periods of nervous depression.

In the mean time her depression became more violent and pressing, so after two suicide attempts she let herself drown in a river close to home in 1941.