Essayist

Writer · 1882 – 1941

Virginia Woolf was an English writer, a central figure of literary modernism, whose novels Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse pioneered stream of consciousness, and whose essay A Room of One's Own became a landmark of feminist thought.

• Mrs Dalloway
• To the Lighthouse

Writer · 1899 – 1986

Jorge Luis Borges was an Argentine writer whose brief, dazzling stories of labyrinths, infinite libraries and mirrored worlds made him one of the most influential figures in 20th-century literature and a master of modern short fiction.

• Ficciones
• The Library of Babel

Essayist · 1533 – 1592

Michel de Montaigne was a French Renaissance thinker and nobleman who invented the essay as a literary form, using candid self-examination to explore the human condition with unmatched honesty and wit.

• The Essais
• Inventing the essay

Essayist · 1803 – 1882

Ralph Waldo Emerson was an American essayist, lecturer and poet who led the Transcendentalist movement and, through works such as "Self-Reliance" and "Nature", shaped American thought and called a new national literature into being.

• Self-Reliance
• Nature