Adeline Virginia Stephen—the woman known globally as Virginia Woolf—lived a profound and harrowing paradox during her late 19th-century upbringing. Upstairs in her wealthy London household, she enjoyed unparalleled intellectual freedom; her father handed her the keys to a vast, unexpurgated Victorian library and simply told her to read whatever she pleased. This immersive exposure allowed her to devour literature and history, cultivating the mind of an absolute genius. Downstairs, however, behind closed doors, she endured a horrific reality of profound family loss and hidden sexual abuse perpetrated by her older half-brothers, George and Gerald Duckworth. Rather than breaking her, this deeply unsettling tension between a borderless intellectual universe and a closing, unsafe physical reality forged her into one of the most resilient and revolutio ...