Creators on Creating – Evening over Sussex: Reflections in a Motor Car / Virginia Woolf
Biography:
The distinguished writer Virginia Woolf was born on January 25, 1882. She was a curious and playful youth with a passion for writing. At a very young age, she highlighted her families entertaining stories by starting a family newspaper, the Hyde Park Gate News. This lively young girl dealt with sexual abuse, multiple family deaths, and mental illness (manic depression illness). She used all these events as contributors to her writing including context reflecting on the back and forth nature of these happenings from different ages, approaches, and vantage points (Dalsimer,2001).
During her teenage and early adulthood year, she wrote journals and letters. One of her essays “A Sketch of the Past and 22 Hyde Park Gate” focused on the sexual abused by her half-brothers George and Gerald Duckworth. She started having nervous breakdowns at a young age. In 1895, at the age of 13, the first one was triggered by her trying to cope with the sudden death of her mother from rheumatic fever. A few years later she experienced her second on after the death of her father in 1904. Concluding the second breakdown, she was institutionalized
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They were a passionately in love, he stayed by her side and knew her depression was beginning to impact her at a rapidly declining rate. As she worked on her final book, Between the Acts, it became more evident. During World War II the couple made a pact “if Germany invaded England, they would commit suicide together, fearing that Leonard, who was Jewish, would be danger” The couple’s London home destroyed during the Blitz, the Germans bombing of the city.” As passed, Virginia could not bear her despair, so she put on her overcoat and inserted stones in the pockets walking to her self-imposed death in the River Ouse. She was declared dead on March 28, 1941 (Virginia Woolf Biography,