Virginia Woolf heard the birds singing in Greek. She felt the walls of her room dissolve. She saw the dead -- her mother, her half-sister Stella -- standing in the garden. These were not metaphors. They were symptoms of the mental illness that shadowed her from adolescence to the March afternoon in 1941 when she filled her coat pockets with stones and walked into the River Ouse. She was fifty-nine.

The temptation is to read her life backward from that river, to see only the illness, but to do so is to miss the staggering achievement of a woman who, between breakdowns, reinvented the English novel. Mrs Dalloway, published in 1925, follows a single day in the life of a London society hostess preparing for a party. Nothing happens, in the conventional sense. Everything happens, in the sense that matters: the novel moves through consciousness the way consciousness actually moves -- associatively, digressively, through memory and sensation, registering the way a car backfiring in Bond Street can trigger the shell shock of a veteran or the way a bunch of flowers can summon a thirty-year-old kiss.

To the Lighthouse went further, dissolving plot almost entirely into perception. The novel's central section, "Time Passes," compresses a decade of war, death, and decay into twenty pages of prose so beautiful it reads like a sustained hallucination. Mrs. Ramsay, one of the great characters in English fiction -- modeled on Woolf's own mother, Julia Stephen, who died when Virginia was thirteen -- is present in the first section and absent in the third, and the gap between presence and absence is the novel's true subject.

Woolf was born Adeline Virginia Stephen in 1882, into the heart of the Victorian intellectual aristocracy. Her father, Leslie Stephen, was a philosopher and editor; her childhood home in Kensington was visited by Henry James, Thomas Hardy, and George Meredith. She was educated at home -- denied the Cambridge education her brothers received -- and that exclusion became the engine of A Room of One's Own, her landmark essay arguing that women need money and privacy to write, and that the history of literature is the history of that denial.

With her husband Leonard, she founded the Hogarth Press, which published T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, the first English translations of Freud, and all of her own novels. She was the center of the Bloomsbury Group, a circle of writers and artists who valued intellect, beauty, and emotional honesty above social convention.

Her diaries and letters -- thousands of pages, published in multiple volumes -- reveal a woman of savage wit, relentless self-criticism, and a capacity for joy that coexisted, always, with the darkness. She knew the darkness was coming. She also knew that what she had built, in the bright intervals between its visitations, would outlast it. It has.