Virginia Woolf was born in London in 1882. In 1904 Virginia and her sister, the painter Vanessa Bell, moved to Bloomsbury and became the centre of 'The Bloomsbury Group'. This informal collective of artists and writers which included Lytton Strachey and Roger Fry, exerted a powerful influence over early twentieth-century British culture. In 1912 Virginia married Leonard Woolf. Her first novel The Voyage Out was published in 1915, followed by Night and Day (1919) and Jacob's Room (1922). It was during this time that she and Leonard Woolf founded The Hogarth Press. The majority of Virginia Woolf's work was first published by The Hogarth Press, and these original texts are now available, together with her selected letters and diaries, from Vintage Classics, which belongs to the publishing group that Hogarth became part of in 1987. Between 1925 and 1931 Virginia Woolf produced what are now regarded as her finest masterpieces, from Mrs Dalloway (1925) to the poetic and highly experimental novel The Waves (1931). She also maintained an astonishing output of literary criticism, short fiction, journalism and biography, including the playfully subversive Orlando (1928) and A Room of One's Own (1929) a passionate feminist essay. On 28 March 1941, a few months before the publication of her final novel, Between the Acts, Virginia Woolf committed suicide. Helen Dunmore was born in Yorkshire in 1952. She was a poet, short story writer and novelist. Her novels include Zennor in Darkness, Talking to the Dead, Your Blue-Eyed Boy, With Your Crooked Heart, The Siege, Mourning Ruby , House of Orphans and Betrayal. Her second novel, A Spell of Winter, about a brother and sister brought up by their grandfather in his decaying house in the country won the first Orange Prize for Fiction in 1995. She died in June 2017.
