The queen of stream of consciousness writing, Virginia Woolf was ahead of her time. We know that people throw that expression around all the time but Woolf took typical narrative structures and kicked them in the teeth, like a true Modernist writer, choosing instead to write long, flowing sentences that reflected the way a person thought, rather than how they spoke, and it resulted in sentences like the one you just read right here. Who needs periods when you can just resort to commas every time you want your reader to take a breath?

Woolf was best known for her novels To The Lighthouse, Mrs Dalloway and her collection of essays A Room of One’s Own. She challenged gender roles and heteronormativity and even questioned how her own privilege impacted how she viewed class. She turned down honorary degrees from various universities and even wrote a biography of Victorian poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning, but told from the point of view of her dog!

Woolf was married to writer Leonard Woolf but also had relationships with women - one long-term relationship being with author Vita Sackville-West, who was the inspiration for her novel Orlando, about a poet who can change sex and live for hundreds of years. All in all, a bisexual queen!