Adeline Virginia Woolf (née Stephen; 25 January 1882 - 28 March 1941), known professionally as Virginia Woolf, was an English writer and one of the foremost modernists of the twentieth century.
During the interwar period, Woolf was a significant figure in London literary society and a central figure in the influential Bloomsbury Group of intellectuals. 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." Her parents were Sir Leslie Stephen (1832-1904) and Julia Prinsep Duckworth Stephen (née Jackson, 1846-1895).Leslie Stephen was a notable historian, author, critic and mountaineer.Woolf was educated by her parents in their literate and well-connected household. Her parents had each been married previously and been widowed, and, consequently, the household contained the children of three marriages. Woolf was born in 1882 in London, and throughout her life she had the opportunity to surround herself with London’s elite thinkers. She began writing early and published her first novel, The Voyage Out, in 1915. She would go on to write numerous novels, short stories, and works of non-fiction.