In 1910 Virginia Woolf helped trick the Royal Navy by posing as Abyssinian royalty in the Dreadnought Hoax. This episode uses that subversive stunt as a lens on a writer who reinvented modern literature despite being denied a formal university education.

We trace her privileged but tragic Victorian childhood, the founding of the Bloomsbury Group, the Hogarth Press she built to bypass publishing gatekeepers, her stream-of-consciousness masterworks, and her death in 1941.

• The Dreadnought Hoax and her subversive intelligence
• Her home-library education and family tragedies
• The Bloomsbury Group and its Thursday evenings
• Founding the Hogarth Press to publish freely
• Mrs Dalloway, Orlando, and A Room of One's Own