Virginia Woolf, born Adeline Virginia Steven, (1882 – 1941) was a British writer and essayist who is widely considered one of the most important 20th-century modernist authors. She was a pioneer in the use of stream of consciousness as a narrative device and also was a part of the Bloomsbury group. In addition to this, she was an activist in support of gender equality, and much of this she realized through her writing.
Growing up, Virginia's parents' home was frequented by famous writers of the time such as Henry James and Thomas Hardy, which gave her exposure to the literary world from a young age. She married the writer and Vernon Lee's editor, Leonard Woolf, in 1912. In terms of her literary career, she wrote both fiction and non-fiction, her most well-known novels being Mrs. Dalloway (1925), A Trip to the Lighthouse (1927) and Orlando (1928) and the most well-known works of non-fiction being The Common Reader (1925) and A Room of One's own (1929), the latter being one of the works through which she realized her activism and support for the equality between men and women. In her personal life, she struggle with several severe mental illnesses and died by suicide at
the age of 59.
V. Woolf was a generation younger than Vernon Lee and was not one of her admirers. Although Woolf considered Lee old-fashioned, she would grow respect for the author and later discover that they both had worked to overcome similar struggles. Virginia visited Il Palmerino in the 1920s with her sister, Vanessa Bell.