There are 2 entries for this date: Virginia Woolf and Robert Burns.

On this date in 1882, novelist and essayist Virginia Woolf, nee Adeline Virginia Stephen, the daughter of freethinker Sir Leslie Stephen, and Julia Jackson Duckworth, was born in London. Starting at an early age, she and her sister Vanessa were sexually abused by two half-brothers. Virginia's mother died when she was in her early teens. This was followed by the death of her caretaking half-sister Stella, then her father from a slow cancer in 1904, and finally her brother Toby in 1906. Virginia had the first of several major breakdowns following Toby's death. Virginia moved into the home of her sister Vanessa and her husband Clive Bell in Bloomsbury, which became the hub of the intellectual and largely freethinking Bloomsbury group. In 1905, Virginia began working for the Times Literary Supplement. She married Leonard Woolf in 1912. Her first book, The Voyage Out, was published in 1915, followed by Night and Day (1919), Jacob's Room (1922), Mrs. Dalloway (1925), and Orlando (1938). Woolf wrote more than 500 essays, among them "A Room of One's Own" (1929), in which she famously observed: "A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction." Her "Three Guineas" was likewise a feminist rallying cry to women to come into their own. Woolf pioneered the modern novel, employing stream-of-consciousness and a non-linear narrative. Orlando featured an androgynous protagonist, reputedly inspired by Vita Sackville-West, with whom Virginia Woolf had a love affair. Virginia Woolf committed suicide by drowning herself during a recurring period of mental breakdown and despair in early WWII, writing her husband: "I owe all my happiness to you but can't go on and spoil your life." D. 1941.

On this date in 1759, Robert Burns was born. The Scottish farmer-poet, who once described himself as being full of "enthusiastic, idiot piety" as a boy, early on questioned religious belief. He directed his pen against Calvinism in his first poem, "Two Herds" (1785), a satire on rival theology, followed by "Holy Willie's Prayer" and "Holy Fair." Biographers, unsure whether to term Burns an agnostic or a deist, agree he rejected Calvinism ("I am in perpetual warfare with that doctrine," letter to Mrs. Dunlop, Aug. 2, 1788), churches ("Courts for cowards were erected, / Churches built to please the priest"), doubted the existence of god ("O Thou Great Being! what thou art / Surpasses me to know"), and the existence of an afterlife. From Burns' poem, "To a Louse on Seeing One on a Lady's Bonnet at Church": "O wad some pow'r the giftie gie us / to see oursels as others see us!/ It wad frae monie a blunder free us / An' foolish notions." He wrote Mrs. Dunlop on Aug. 21, 1792, that "still the damned dogmas of reasoning Philosophy throw in their doubt." The celebrated "Ploughman Poet" bequeathed the world the lyrics of "Auld Lang Syne," striking a welcome secular note with which to end the Western New Year: "We'll take a cup o' kindness yet / For auld lang syne." When he died at age 37 of heart disease, 10,000 people attended the burial. Today his birthdate is celebrated in Scotland and abroad. D. 1797.