Virginia Woolf was born in London. She grew up educating herself in her father’s library ( he was a Victorian critic, philosopher biographer and scholar). In 1904 her father died, and she settled with her sisters and brothers in Bloomsbury, later associated with the group founded by Virginia Woolf herself: the “Bloomsbury group”  that included the biographer L. Strachey, the economist J.M. Keynes, the art critic R. Fry and E.M. Forster. The sexual topics and the sexual life of Bloomsbury provided ample material for discussion. Not only her family members were bisexual, but Virginia Woolf was herself bisexual too. In fact, after thirteen years after her marriage to the journalist and essayist Leonard Woolf, who with his wife founded the Hogarth Press, she fell in love with the poet Victoria Sackville-West. The relationship with this woman was to produce the most lighthearted of her books: Orlando. Her suicide in March 1941, resulting from her dread of World War II and her fear that she was about to lose her mind and become a burden on her husband; previously she dad been subject to periods of nervous depression, particularly after finishing a book.                                                                                                                                           Woolf came into profession of writing criticizing the materialism of novelist of that period and sought a more delicate rendering of those aspects of consciousness in which she felt that the truth of human experience really lay. After two novels cast in traditional form, she developed her own style (she handled the consciousness with a modulated poetic flow and brought into prose fiction something of the rhythms and imaginary of lyric poetry). She explored the possibilities of moving between action and contemplation, between external reality and internal reality. These were technical experiments and they made possible those  later novels in which her method is fully developed, for example Mrs Dalloway. Woolf was increasingly concerned with the position of women, especially professional women, and the constrictions they suffered under, subjects wrote for example in Three Guineas. She also wrote many reviews and critical essays, collected in The Common Reader.