Virginia Woolf (1882–1941), née Adeline Virginia Stephen, was one of the most important writers of the twentieth-century modernist tradition. She was a pioneer in the usage of the stream-of-consciousness narrative device, and since the publication of her first novel, The Voyage Out in 1915, she published a steady and remarkable stream of essays, fiction, and literary criticism throughout her life. In 1912 she married Leonard Woolf, and together they founded Hogarth Press in 1917. Her friendship and relationship with the writer and gardener Vita Sackville West began in 1922 and carried on until Woolf died by suicide in 1941. Among her best-known works are Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and Orlando.
