The common reader : first series

Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) was the daughter of the critic Leslie Stephen and grew up in a London house full of books. With her sister and friends she formed the circle of artists and writers known as the Bloomsbury Group, and with her husband Leonard she founded the Hogarth Press, which published her own books and those of T. S. Eliot.

Her novels Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse and Orlando changed the way fiction follows the mind, and her essay A Room of One's Own argued that a woman needs money and a room of her own to write. She suffered all her life from depression, and drowned herself in 1941.