Virginia Woolf : How did the pioneering modernist completely change fiction?

Her fiction showed us that a person's inner life is as complex and strange as any plot

Virginia Woolf, the groundbreaking English novelist whose work focused on characters’ complex interior lives, is celebrated in a new Google Doodle.

Ms Woolf, who was born in London in 1882 and took her own life in 1941, would have been 136 on 25 January — an occasion Google is honouring with its latest tribute.

Her influence has far outlasted her life, helping to push the structural possibilities of literature and proving that the contents of a person’s mind can be as compelling and plot-shaping as the world around her. Her books regularly appear on lists of the greatest novels of the 20th century, and she is seen as a crucial architect of modernist literature.

She was a key member of the Bloomsbury Group, a collection of prominent intellectuals and writers whose other participants EM Forster and John Maynard Keynes.

Her most famous works, Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, use stream-of-consciousness narration that illuminates the perspectives of characters whose mundane tasks — in the case of Mrs Dalloway’s eponymous protagonist, preparing for an evening party — take on profound importance when viewed in the context of individual lives and histories, with all their desires, impressions and psychological depth.

“Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself,” the novel’s first line, has become one of the more famous openers in English literature.

In The Waves, Ms Woolf experimented further with shifting points of view by telling the story of six friends’ unfolding lives through their various first-person experiences over the course of decades.

The book operates on two seemingly contradictory premises: that our experience of life necessarily flows through our separate perspectives, dividing us from one another, and that our lives are nevertheless defined by the other people in them.

“I am not one and simple, but complex and many,” Ms Woolf wrote.

Nonfiction works like A Room of One’s Own helped establish Ms Woolf as an influential feminist thinker.

“A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction,” she wrote, a call for female independence that has become one of her most well-known lines.

London-based illustrator Louise Pomeroy created the Doodle tribute to Ms Woolf, which Google said was meant to reflect her “minimalist style”.