Virginia Woolf

Adeline Virginia Stephen was born on Jan. 25, 1882 and died March 28, 1941. Woolf was an English author, feminist, essayist, publisher, and critic. She was one of the leaders in the literary movement of modernism. She was born the third child, into a comfortable upper middle class family. She married Leonard Woolf in 1912. Woolf suffered many nervous breakdowns. Her first nervous breakdown came after her mother's death. In 1941, after writing her last novel, Between the Acts, she feared the madness which she felt engulfing her again, filled her pockets with stones and drowned herself in the River Ouse.

In her works, she used a technique called "stream of consciousness", revealing the lives of her characters by revealing their thoughts and associations. Her most famous novel was, "To the Lighthouse", which was written in 1927, examines the life of an upper middle class British family. It portrays the fragility of human relationships and the collapse of social values. Her most famous feminist/socialist/pacifist work was, "A Room of One's Own".