The Waves

Adeline Virginia Woolf (25 January 1882-28 March 1941) was an English writer. She is considered one of the most important modernist 20th-century authors, pioneering the use of stream of consciousness as a narrative device.

Woolf was born into an affluent household in South Kensington, London. She was the seventh child of Julia Prinsep Jackson and Leslie Stephen in a blended family of eight, which included the modernist painter Vanessa Bell. She was home-schooled in English classics and Victorian literature from a young age. From 1897 to 1901, she attended the Ladies' Department of King's College, London, where she studied classics and history, coming into contact with early reformers of women's higher education and the women's rights movement. After her father's death in 1904, the Stephen family moved from Kensington to the more bohemian Bloomsbury. There, in conjunction with their brothers' intellectual friends, they formed the artistic and literary Bloomsbury Group. In 1912, she married Leonard Woolf, and in 1917, the couple founded the Hogarth Press, which published much of her work. They rented a home in Sussex and permanently settled there in 1940.