Virginia Woolfa room of her own

She was educated at home out of her father's library while her brothers were sent to Cambridge, a fact she never stopped writing about. In 1917 she and Leonard bought a small hand press, taught themselves to set type, and started the Hogarth Press on the dining-room table. It went on to publish her own novels, Eliot's poetry, and the first English edition of Freud.

Her objection to the novel was that it kept lying about what a day is actually like. Mrs Dalloway takes place inside one. To the Lighthouse gives its entire middle section to ten years passing through an empty house. None of this was decoration — it was an argument that consciousness does not arrive in plot order, and the form had to be rebuilt to admit it.

A Room of One's Own began as two lectures to women students at Cambridge and contains the least romantic sentence ever written about art: that a writer needs money and a door that locks. She had been ill on and off since her teens, and in March 1941 she drowned in the River Ouse, near the Sussex house she and Leonard had bought between the wars.

“A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.”

Virginia Woolf