English writer Adeline Virginia Woolf was BOTD in 1882. Born in London, the daughter of biographer and literary critic Leslie Stephen, she was home-schooled, later attending King’s College London, where she first came into contact with the suffragette movement. After her mother’s death, she suffered a nervous breakdown, the first of many recurrent illnesses throughout her life. Following her father’s death in 1904, she and her siblings moved to the bohemian neighbourhood of Bloomsbury, forming a literary and artistic circle known as the Bloomsbury Group. Their friends included writer and notorious homosexual Lytton Strachey (who once proposed marriage to Virginia), E. M. Forster and John Maynard Keynes. In 1912, she married writer Leonard Woolf, with whom she had a loving (though probably sexless) marriage. Together, they set up the Hogarth Press, publishing Woolf’s writing and a number of important Modernist texts, including T. S. Eliot‘s poem The Waste Land. She published her first novel, The Voyage Out, in 1915, slowly developing a more experimental prose style as she absorbed the work of James Joyce and Marcel Proust. Her novels Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse and The Waves combined a feminist sensibility with radical narrative technique, now commonly referred to as “stream of consciousness”. Her 1928 novel Orlando, a picaresque about an aristocrat who lives for 400 years and changes gender, was inspired by her love affair with the aristocrat and writer Vita Sackville-West. Woolf also had relationships with Sibyl Colefax, Ottoline Morrell, Mary Hutchinson and (possibly) Violet Dickinson, though avoided the amorous attentions of Ethel Smyth. She is best known for her 1929 essay A Room of One’s Own, setting out the economic conditions that prevent women from being artists, and Three Guineas, an anti-Fascist polemic. Her diaries, published posthumously, provide a lively and acidic portrait of her life, times and friendships. Woolf drowned herself in 1941, following a period of mental illness after the completion of her last novel, Between the Acts. She was 59. Now hailed as one of the greatest prose innovators of the 20th century, she is also acknowledged as an important feminist thinker. She received an unexpected boost in popularity in Edward Albee‘s 1962 play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, in which her name forms part of an unexplained joke between the play’s four hard-drinking characters. Woolf’s bisexuality, mental illness and struggle to write Mrs Dalloway were portrayed in Michael Cunningham‘s 1998 novel The Hours, imagining the links between Woolf and two of her readers at different points in time. A national bestseller and winner of the Pulitzer Prize, The Hours was filmed by Stephen Daldry in 2001, winning an Oscar for Nicole Kidman’s performance as Woolf. The resulting publicity of Cunningham’s book and the film launched a major revival in Woolf’s popularity, with Mrs Dalloway entering the bestseller lists for the first time in its history. Woolf has also been portrayed by Elizabeth Debicki in the 2013 biopic Vita & Virginia, focusing on her affair with Sackville-West.