Classic Literature Writer

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Woolf learned early on, though, that it was her fate to be "the daughter of educated men." In a journal entry shortly after her father's death in 1904, she wrote: "His life would have ended mine... No writing, no books: — inconceivable."

Though her career as a writer didn't begin when her father died, her roll as one of the leaders in the literary movement of modernism did. This elite "Bloomsbury" group also included Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and T. S. Eliot.

In 1912 she married Leonard Woolf, a critic and writer on economics and politics. In 1917 the Woolfs founded Hogarth Press, which became a successful publishing house, printing the early works of authors such as Forster, Katherine Mansfield, and T. S. Eliot, and introducing the works of Sigmund Freud. Except for the first printing of Woolf's first novel, The Voyage Out (1915), Hogarth Press also published all of her works.

From the time of her mother's death in 1895, Woolf suffered from what is now believed to have been bipolar disorder, which is characterized by alternating moods of mania and depression. In 1941, at the apparent onset of a period of depression, Woolf drowned herself in the Ouse River. He dreaded World War II. She feared that she was about to lose her mind and become a burden on her husband. She left her husband a note explaining that she feared she was going mad and this time would not recover.