Virginia Woolf (London 1882, March 1941) grew up as a member of a large and talented family, educating herself at home in her father's library. After her father's death she went to Bloomsbury with her sister and two brothers. There they founded the "Bloomsbury Group". The intelligence of Virginia and her brother was equaled by their frankness, notable in sexual topics and sexual life in Bloomsbury. Virginia was herself bisexual and thirteen years after she got married to Leonard Woolf, she fell in love with the poet Victoria Sackville-West. This relationship was to produce one of her most famous books: ORLANDO. She killed herself in March 1941 because she was feared to lose her mind.

Virginia Woolf rebelled against "materialism" and she looked for a more delicate rendering of the aspects of consciousness. Her style handled the steam of consciousness with a carefully modulated poetic flow. The technical experiments in which she explored the possibilities of moving between action and contemplation were collected in MONDAY OR TUESDAY. They made possible the later novels in which her method is developed.

She was concerned with the position of the women and the constrictions they suffered.

She wrote also critical essays collected in THE COMMON READER and THE SECOND COMMON READER. Her criticism is suggestive and has an air of spontaneity.