Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf, one of the great innovative novelists of the 20^th century, was born in London in 1882; she is the daughter of Leslie Stephen who was a Victorian critic, philosopher, biographer. He educated his daughter in his great library, but at the same time he reserved more time for Virginia's two brother's education. When she was only six her mother's death caused her the first difficulty of her life; moreover in the same period her half-brother raped her and this caused her a first nervous breakdown.

After her father death in 1904, she moved with her sister and the two brothers in Bloomsbury: here she noticed she was in the middle of a company who does not seem to care she was a woman, and for this reason she began to write. She wrote novels and short stories, biographies, hundreds of book reviews and long letters, and finally her autobiographical sketch published in 1976 as "Moments of Being".

Virginia Woolf was bisexual and thirteen years after her marriage with Leonard Woolf she fell in love with Victoria Sackville-West. Woolf's relationship with this aristocratic lesbian was to produce the most light hearted and scintillating of her books, Orlando (1928).

In her way of writing she rebelled against "materialism"; she developed her own style against traditional literature and novels, which dealt with the stream of consciousness to explore the impressions a person is able to keep from the exterior world.

She committed suicide in 1941 because of the World War II which caused her a violent depression.