Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf reshaped the novel and argued that a woman needs money and a room of her own to write. Born in London in 1882 into a literary family — her father Leslie Stephen edited the Dictionary of National Biography — she was educated at home while her brothers went to Cambridge, a difference she never stopped resenting. Her mother died when she was thirteen and her father in 1904, and each loss produced a breakdown; she was sexually abused by two half-brothers, and had recurrent episodes of what is generally described as bipolar disorder throughout her life. She moved to Bloomsbury with her siblings and became the centre of the group that formed there, married Leonard Woolf in 1912, and founded the Hogarth Press with him in 1917 — which published her, Freud in translation, and Katherine Mansfield, and which she also set type for by hand. Her fiction abandoned plot for consciousness. Mrs Dalloway follows one day in London and moves between minds without warning; To the Lighthouse compresses a decade into a bracketed sentence while giving a single afternoon a hundred pages; The Waves has no narrative at all. A Room of One's Own in 1929 argued that the absence of women from literature is a consequence of exclusion from education and income rather than capacity, and imagined Shakespeare's equally gifted sister ending in suicide. Three Guineas connected patriarchy to fascism. She drowned herself in the River Ouse in March 1941, leaving a note saying she could not go through another of those terrible times. Leonard found the note and her walking stick on the bank three weeks before the body.

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