January 25

English author Virginia Woolf was born on January 25, 1882, in London. Her father, Sir Leslie Stephen, was a distinguished author. She was alarmingly prone to depression and nervous collapse, which caused the delay of her first novel, The Voyage Out (1913). Between the World Wars she became a major figure in London literary society and a member of the Bloomsbury Group of writers, intellectuals and artists. In Mrs. Dalloway (1925) the life of Clarissa Dalloway on a single June day is presented in stream of consciousness. Woolf’s introspective modernist novel, To the Lighthouse (1927), follows Mrs. Ramsay and her family on Scotland’s Isle of Skye and explores the nature of relationships, perception, subjectivity, and human transience and loss. In 1941, deeply depressed at the start of World War II, Woolf filled her overcoat pockets with stones and walked into the River Ouse in the south of England.