English novelist and essay writer Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) is regarded as one of the foremost literary figures of the twentieth century, one of the greatest innovators in the English language.

In her works she experimented with stream-of-consciousness, the underlying psychological as well as emotional motives of characters, and the various possibilities of fractured narrative and chronology.

In the words of E. M. Forster, she pushed the English language "a little further against the dark," and her literary achievements and creativity are influential even today.

Born Adeline Virginia Stephen in London to Sir Leslie Stephen and Julia Prinsep Stephen, she was educated by her parents in their literate and well-connected household at 22 Hyde Park Gate, Kensington, with its immense library from which Virginia (unlike her brothers, who were formally educated) was taught the classics and English literature.

Her most famous works include the novels Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), and Orlando (1928), and the book-length essay A Room of One's Own (1929) with its famous dictum, "a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction".

The sudden death of her mother from influenza in 1895, when Virginia was 13, and that of her half sister Stella two years later, led to the first of Virginia's several nervous breakdowns. The death of her father in 1904 provoked her most alarming collapse and she was briefly institutionalised.

Her breakdowns and subsequent recurring depressive periods, modern scholars have claimed, were also induced by the sexual abuse she and Vanessa were subject to by their half-brothers George and Gerald (which Woolf recalls in her autobiographical essays A Sketch of the Past and 22 Hyde Park Gate).

Throughout her life, Woolf was plagued by drastic mood swings. Though these recurring mental breakdowns greatly affected her social functioning, her literary abilities remained intact.

Modern diagnostic techniques have led to a posthumous diagnosis of bipolar disorder, an illness which coloured her work and life, and eventually led to her suicide.

Woolf married writer Leonard Woolf in 1912. Many biographers have concluded that the marriage was never fully consummated, and that Woolf's sexuality was primarily directed toward women.

However, the couple shared a close bond, and in 1937 Woolf wrote in her diary "Love-making — after 25 years can’t bear to be separate ... you see it is enormous pleasure being wanted: a wife. And our marriage so complete."

They also collaborated professionally, in 1917 founding the Hogarth Press, which subsequently published most of Woolf's work.

The ethos of Bloomsbury discouraged sexual exclusivity, and in 1922, Woolf met and fell in love with Vita Sackville-West.

After a tentative start, they began an affair that lasted through most of the 1920s. In 1928, Woolf presented Sackville-West with Orlando, a fantastical biography in which the eponymous hero's life spans three centuries and both genders.

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