Needless to say, the business of living interferes with the solitude so needed for any work of the imagination. Here's what Virginia Woolf said in her diary about the sticky issue: "I've shirked two parties, and another Frenchman, and buying a hat, and tea with Hilda Trevelyan, for I really can't combine all this with keeping all my imaginary people going.

". Her most famous works include the novels Mrs Dalloway (1925) To the Lighthouse (1927) and Orlando (1928) and the book-length essay A Room of One's Own (1929) with its famous dictum "A woman must have money and a room of her own if Virginia Woolf is to write fiction. During the interwar period Woolf was a significant figure in London literary society and a central figure in the influential Bloomsbury Group of intellectuals.