Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) is regarded as one of the twentieth century's most inventive writers. She was a prolific writer of essays, diaries, letters, and biographies, and is perhaps best known as the author of Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927). Woolf was born in London to well-to-do parents who owned a small hotel near Hyde Park. Her father was rector of a church in Sussex until he died when Virginia was eight years old. Her mother married his assistant two years later. Woolf had an elder sister, Angelica, and a younger brother, Leonard. She attended a fashionable school where she met many of the leading thinkers of her time, including George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, and Thomas Hardy. Woolf started writing poems at age thirteen and published her first book of poems three years later. She continued to write prolifically throughout her life, producing over twenty books including novels, poetry collections, essays, and biography. Woolf was a prominent member of the Bloomsbury Group, a famous literary community that included other important writers such as E. M. Forster, Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, and Lytton Strachey. Woolf was diagnosed with tuberculosis at the age of twenty-one and spent most of the next five years recovering from these illnesses and undergoing treatment.