Woolf, (Adeline) Virginia

English novelist and critic. In novels such as Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), and The Waves (1931), she used a ‘stream of consciousness’ technique to render inner experience. In A Room of One's Own (1929) (non-fiction), Orlando (1928), and The Years (1937), she examines the importance of economic independence for women and other feminist principles.

Her first novel, The Voyage Out (1915), explored the tensions experienced by women who want marriage and a career. After the death of her father, Leslie Stephen, she and her siblings moved to Bloomsbury, forming the nucleus of the Bloomsbury Group. She produced a succession of novels, short stories, and critical essays, included in The Common Reader (1925 and 1932). She was plagued by bouts of depression and committed suicide in 1941.