Virginia Woolf, the English writer, was born on January 25, 1882, as Adeline Virginia Stephen in Kensington, London. The much-admired author, who created ‘Mrs Dalloway’, is considered a pioneer of feminism and modernism.

On her birth anniversary, here are some lesser-known facts about the writer:

1.  Virginia lost her mother when she was 13.

2.  As a teenager, she suffered from anxiety. So, her doctor suggested she should stop all her lessons and play outside for four hours a day.

3. One summer, Virginia started believing that birds chirped in Greek.

4. She and her husband, Leonard Woolf, founded the Hogarth Press, which became Virginia’s publisher.

5.  After she got married, she thought of learning some domestic skills and hence, enrolled herself in a culinary school. She once, accidentally, baked her wedding ring in a pudding.

6. Virginia started writing professionally in 1900. Her ‘Haworth, November 1904’ was published anonymously in a women’s supplement to The Guardian journal. She also wrote for The Times Literary Supplement.

7. In her ‘A Room of One’s Own’, published in 1929, she wrote about a female author should approach her work. In this book-essay, she explored social injustices and lack of free expression for women. “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction,” she wrote in the book.

8. She loved attending concerts and the Opera and listened to Beethoven’s late quartets while writing ‘The Waves.’

9. The writer suffered from bouts of mental health issues. She went through nervous breakdowns and suffered from depression. At the age of 59, she died by suicide on March 28, 1941.

10. Her last novel, ‘Between the Acts’, was posthumously published in on July 17, 1941.