Virginia Woolf was born in London in 1882 to Sir Leslie Stephen and Julia Prinsep Stephen (nèe Jackson). She was educated by her parents in their literate and well-connected household at 22 Hyde Park Gate, Kensington. Her parents had each been married previously and been widowed, adn, consequently, the household containe the cildren of three marriages.

The sudden death of Virginia's mother in 1895 when Virginia was 13, led to the first of Virginia's several nervous breakdowns. She was, however, able to take courses of study in Greek, Ltin, German and history of the Ladies' Departement of Kinf's College in London between 1897 1901, and this brought her into contact with some of the early reformers of women's higher education.

The death of her father in 1904 provoked her most alarming collpse and she was briefly institutionalized. Her breakdowns and depressive periods were influenced also by the sexual abuse to which she and her sister Vanessa were subjected by their half-brothers George and Gerald Duckworth.

Though Virginia's life was plagued by many periods of illness her literary roductivity continued with few breaks throughout her life.

She came to know Leonard Woolf in the intellectual circle of writers and artista known as the Bloomsbury Group and married him in 1912. The two also collaborated profesionally, in 1917 founding the Hogarth Press, which subsequently published Virginia's novels along with works by T.S. Eliot, Laurens van der Post, and others.

The ethos of the Bloomsbury Group encouraged a liberal approach to sexuality, and in 1922 she met the writer and gardener Vita Sackville-West, wife of Harold Nicolson. After a tentative start, they began a sexual relationship and after their affair ended the two women remained friends until Woolf's death in 1941.

Woolf began writing professionally in 1900, initially for the Times Literary Supplement with a journalistic piece.. Her first novel, The Voyage Out, was published in 1915 and was originally entitled Melymbrosia, but Woolf repeatedly changed the draft. The changes she made in the text were in response to changes in her own life.

She has been hailed as one of the greatest novelist of the twentieth century, one of the foremost modernists and one of the greatest innovators in the English language. In her works she experimented with stream-of-consciousness and the underlying psychological as wll as emotional motives of characters.

Cirginia Woolf's peculiarities as a fiction writer have tended to obscure her central strength: Woolf is arguably the major lyrical novelist in the english language. Her novels are highly experimented: a narrative, frequently uneventful and commonplace, is refracted in the characters' receptive consciousness.

After completing the manuscript of her last novel, Between the Acts, Woolf fell into a depression similar to that which she had earlier experienced. On 28 march 1941, Woolf put on her overcoat, filled its pocket with stones, and walked into the River Ouse near her home and drowned herself.