One of the great modernist novelists and feminist essayists, Virginia Woolf was a prominent member of the Bloomsbury Circle in England and wrote for the Times Literary Supplement. She started Hogarth Press with her husband Leonard Woolf.  The press published her books and works of other famous writers at the time (T.S. Eliot’s Waste Land, fiction of Katherine Mansfield, Maxim Gorky and E.M. Forster; and translations of Sigmund Freud).

Virginia experienced the early death of her mother, half-sister, brother, and father. As a child, she was molested by her half-brother. She suffered depression throughout her life, but managed to produce an enormous body of work before drowning herself in the River Ouse on March 28, 1941.

“Woolf developed innovative literary techniques in order to reveal women's experience and find an alternative to the dominating views of reality …  concern with feminist thematics is dominant in A Room of One's Own (1929).  In it she made her famous statement: ‘A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.’ The book originated from two expanded and revised lectures the author presented at Cambridge University … in October 1928. Woolf examined the obstacles and prejudices that have hindered women writers. She separated women as objects of representation and as authors of representation, and argued that a change in the forms of literature was necessary because most literature had been ‘made by men out of their own needs for their own uses.’" Petri Liukkonen, Director of the Kuusankoski Library, Finland.