The author Virginia Woolf was a leading light of the Bloomsbury movement in the early 20th Century, a group of artists and intellectuals with a bohemian approach to love and sexuality. In her writing, Virginia forged a playful, imaginative style that threw off the conventions of the time. In her personal life, she was just as controversial.
Breaking boundaries
Virginia was happily married to Leonard Woolf for almost thirty years, but also had an intense affair with another writer, Vita Sackville-West. Virginia's love of Vita inspired the novel Orlando, (1928), which imagines Vita (as Orlando) living through centuries, shifting gender and commenting on the changing assumptions about love, marriage and women’s role over time. Orlando’s ancestral home is based on Knole, Vita’s family home, and expresses her attachment to the place.