Adeline Virginia Woolf was born in London in 1882 into an affluent, intellectual household. Educated primarily at home in English classics and Victorian literature, she later attended King's College London, where she studied classics and history. Following her father's death in 1904, Woolf moved to the bohemian Bloomsbury district of London. There, she and her siblings became founding members of the Bloomsbury Group, an influential circle of writers, intellectuals, and artists.
Woolf began publishing professionally in 1900. In 1912, she married Leonard Woolf, and in 1917, the couple founded the Hogarth Press. This independent publishing house printed much of her own work alongside other contemporary literature. Woolf rose to prominence during the interwar period as a pioneer of modernist literature, particularly noted for her innovative use of stream-of-consciousness narration to explore the inner lives of her characters.
Her most celebrated novels include Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), and the genre-bending Orlando (1928). She also wrote influential non-fiction, most notably the feminist essay A Room of One's Own (1929). Woolf's work became a cornerstone of 1970s feminist criticism and continues to be studied and translated globally, cementing her status as one of the most significant literary figures of the twentieth century.
