Virginia Woolf
She grew up in a man of letters’ house with no right to a university — only the brothers were taught — and read her father’s library on her own all her life. After her parents’ deaths the house in Bloomsbury became the meeting place of a circle that gave a whole generation of English culture its name. With “Mrs Dalloway” and “To the Lighthouse” the novel moved inside consciousness for her: a day laid out in thought, memory and voices interrupting one another. The essay “A Room of One’s Own” (1929), with its demand of money and a room of her own for a woman who means to write, became one of the founding texts of feminism. With her husband she ran the Hogarth Press, which printed Eliot and the first English translations of Freud. Bouts of mental illness pursued her all her life; in March 1941 she walked into the river Ouse with stones in her pockets.
She was born in London on 25 January 1882 at 12:15 Greenwich time. The hour was entered that same day in the diary of her father, Leslie Stephen.