Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf went to university at Cambridge, continued her studies in London, and in 1912 married the writer, political thinker and civil servant Leonard Woolf. She had been writing articles for The Times Literary Supplement for some years, and teaching, too; but in 1917 the two of them set up their own publishing house, The Hogarth Press, which published T.S. Eliot and Katherine Mansfield, among others, and which by the early 1920s had become a business rather than a hobby.

Virginia Woolf committed suicide in 1941, filling her coat pocket with either a big stone or several stones and walking into the River Ouse near her home in Sussex. She and Leonard had had a suicide pact in the case of a German invasion (he was a politically active Jewish intellectual, and they both knew what that would mean if the Nazis arrived), but for all the immediacy of the war and the destruction of their London home in the bombings, and despite the disappointments over her most recent book, the most likely cause of her suicide was the intensity of her depression. It was the sort of thing she had gone through several times in the past; but this time, it was too much, the fight too big. Having so assiduously created herself and her life, it was perhaps inevitable that she should decide on the fact, the means and the method of her death. --Naxos Audiobooks