Adeline Virginia Woolf (née Stephen) was an English writer renowned for her role as a pivotal figure in 20th-century modernist literature and as a pioneer of the stream of consciousness narrative technique. Born into an affluent household in South Kensington, London, she was the seventh child of Julia Prinsep Jackson and Leslie Stephen, in a blended family of eight, including the modernist painter Vanessa Bell. Woolf was educated at home in English classics and Victorian literature from a young age. Between 1897 and 1901, she attended the Ladies' Department of King's College London, studying classics and history, and became involved with early reformers of women's higher education and the women's rights movement.

Following her father's death in 1904, the Stephen family moved to the more bohemian Bloomsbury, where Woolf, along with her siblings and the brothers' intellectual friends, formed the artistic and literary Bloomsbury Group. In 1912, she married Leonard Woolf, and together they founded the Hogarth Press in 1917, which published much of her work. They moved permanently to Sussex in 1940.

Woolf's professional writing career began in 1900. During the inter-war period, she was a central figure in London's literary and artistic society. Her first novel, The Voyage Out, was published in 1915 through her half-brother's publishing house, Gerald Duckworth and Company. Her best-known works include the novels Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), and Orlando (1928), as well as her essays, notably A Room of One's Own (1929). Woolf has been a significant subject of feminist criticism since the 1970s, and her works have been translated into more than 50 languages, inspiring feminism and drawing widespread commentary. She has been the subject of plays, novels, films, and is commemorated by statues, societies, and a building at the University of London.