Virginia Woolf

Born Adeline Virginia Stephen in 1882 into a prominent literary household in Kensington, Woolf was educated entirely at home through her father's vast library. The deaths of her mother in 1895 and her half-sister Stella two years later triggered the first of several devastating mental breakdowns that would recur throughout her life. With her sister Vanessa and brother Thoby she became the center of the Bloomsbury Group, the circle of writers, artists, and intellectuals that reshaped English cultural life. She married Leonard Woolf in 1912, and together they founded the Hogarth Press, which published works by T.S. Eliot and Freud as well as her own novels. Between 1925 and 1931 she produced her greatest fiction: Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando, The Waves, and A Room of One's Own. Each novel pushed further into the stream of consciousness, dissolving the conventions of plot and character to capture the movement of the mind itself. Haunted by the onset of another breakdown as World War II engulfed England, she filled her pockets with stones and walked into the River Ouse near her Sussex home on March 28, 1941.

In 1910, a young Virginia Stephen and a handful of Bloomsbury friends disguised themselves as a delegation of Abyssinian royalty, false beards and ceremonial robes and all, and talked their way aboard HMS Dreadnought, the Royal Navy's mightiest battleship. Officers bowed and gave the impostors a full ceremonial tour while they murmured nonsense. The prank reached the front pages and mortified the Admiralty.