Born into a privileged house with the name of Adeline Virginia Stephen in 1882,

author Virginia Woolf was raised by free-thinking parents. She began writing as a
young girl. She wrote modernist classics, as well as pioneering feminist works. In
her personal life, she suffered bouts of deep depression. Because of some
traumatic episodes in her life like sexual assault Woolf stated that she first
remembers being molested by Gerald Duckworth when she was six years old. It
has been suggested that this led to a lifetime of sexual fear and resistance to
masculine authority. A background of over-committed and distant parents, a
dysfunctional family. She ended up committing suicide in 1941, after two tries she
got to end her life at the age of 59 by drowning herself in a river.
While she is best known for her novels, especially Mrs. Dalloway and To the
Lighthouse , Woolf also wrote pioneering essays on artistic theory, literary
history, women’s writing, and the politics of power. A fine stylist, she
experimented with several forms of biographical writing, composed painterly
short fictions, and sent to her friends and family a lifetime of brilliant letters.
Several years before marrying Leonard, Virginia had begun working on her first
novel. The original title was Melymbrosia. After nine years and many drafts, it was
released in 1915 as The Voyage Out. In 1925, Woolf received rave reviews for
Mrs. Dalloway, her fourth novel. The mesmerizing story interweaved interior
monologues and raised issues of feminism, mental illness and homosexuality in
post-World War. Mrs. Dalloway was adapted into a 1997 film, and inspired The
Hours, a novel by Michael Cunningham.
Mental illness is a common theme in Woolf’s novels. PTSD was not examined
closely during Woolf’s time; rather, it was seen as a blanket diagnosis
pertaining to any and all residual mental effects of war. Woolf herself
struggled with bouts of mental illness throughout her life, and some believe
that Clarissa’s in Mrs Dalloway was meant to be autobiographical.
Woolf was an icon for literature thanks to many aspects such as her haunting
language, her prescient insights into wide-ranging historical, political,
feminist, and artistic issues, and her revisionist experiments with novelistic
form during a remarkably productive career altered the course of Modernist
and postmodernist letters.