Virginia Woolf was a famous English writer in the twentieth century. She wrote books like Orlando(1928) and Mrs. Dalloway(1925). She also was a central figure in the influential Bloomsbury Group of intellectuals.
Throughout her life she had different events that caused mental breakdowns, not just one, many produced by different life changing events, like deaths of her mom, dad and siblings. She even included some terms the doctors that were treating her used to describe her mental illness in her book Mrs. Dalloway (1925).
Virginia Woolf was a feminist, she even wrote about how women were excluded from some rights that men had, for example education at a university. In To the Light House (1927) she recreated her parents marriage and its inequality (men is superior in the relationship). As we can see, Woolf wrote a lot about things related with her life, as I just mentioned she was a feminist, so she wrote about her parents marriage inequality, she had a mental illness and she wrote a book using the same terms they used to describe her.
She was a Modernist writer at some point, modernism was a predominant genre during the 20th century, specifically until 1960s. Modernism was a self conscious break with the past, a search for new forms of expression. People no longer believed institutions were reliable, so they just trusted themselves, there was a break with traditions, all things are relative, concern with the subconsciuos etc. WW1 became one of the catalysts of this movement due to the damage it did, and how humans killed humans (stopped believing in institutions because they taught them what they know, and suddenly humans were killing each other because of them). Virginia Woolf wrote about modernism in To the light house (1927), it strays from conventional forms focusing on stream of consciousness.
Finally, she suicided walking into river Ouse with stones in her pockets, due to a new mental breakdown which she didn't believe she could handle. Virginia Woolf was a writer with her own ideals, and experiences which apparently made her writing really interesting.
