In the 1910 Dreadnought hoax, Virginia Woolf and her friends wore theatrical makeup to successfully pose as Abyssinian royals inspecting a top-secret battleship.

Writer Dorothy Parker famously quipped that the English bohemian collective "lived in squares, painted in circles and loved in triangles" due to their tangled affairs.

In her 1929 essay, Woolf argued that women needed a steady income of 500 pounds a year to secure the privacy and creative freedom required to write fiction.

Founded in their dining room in 1917, the independent press allowed the couple to bypass conservative publishers and print avant-garde literature free from censorship.