Virginia Woolf

Woolf's mother died when she was thirteen, triggering the first of many mental breakdowns that recurred throughout her life, worsened by the sexual abuse she later said she suffered from two half-brothers. She married the writer and publisher Leonard Woolf in 1912, and together in 1917 they founded the Hogarth Press, printing her own experimental novels alongside Eliot, Katherine Mansfield, and the first English translations of Freud.

Mrs Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927) compressed whole lives into single days, dissolving conventional plot into the movement of thought itself. She kept writing and lecturing, A Room of One's Own (1929) arguing bluntly for women's material independence, while illness never fully released its grip. In 1941, fearing another breakdown as war closed in, she filled her coat pockets with stones and drowned herself in the River Ouse.