Virginia Woolf

"Penguin Illustrated Lives" is a series of photographic biographies that offers a fresh, intimate portrait of some of our favourite writers.

An incisive, lively text is accompanied by over 100 evocative images, many in colour and some previously unpublished, which depict the author's world - family, friends and artistic circle together with original book jackets, letters and other ephemera.Virginia Woolf was one of the most significant novelists of the 20th century and a leading figure in the Bloomsbury Group.

In her brilliant, experimental novels, such as "To the Lighthouse" and "The Waves", she extended the boundaries of fiction writing.

While Woolf delighted in the friendships and intrigues of her literary milieu, her life was marred by mental illness, and in 1941 she drowned herself.

Her life and work reveal her feminist ideals, her modernism and her acute sensitivity to the minute details of human life.