On this day in 1941, Virginia Woolf (books by this author) committed suicide. It's unfortunate that her death has overshadowed so much of her life, for, while she did attempt suicide a number of times and suffer crippling bouts of depression and insomnia, hallucination and headache, in between these episodes she was lively, witty, creative, and amusing. For much of the decade of the 1920s, she was active and productive, writing three of her most famous books — Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), and Orlando (1928). She often fell into a kind of trough upon completion of a project, however, as if the process exhausted her mentally, physically, and emotionally. She associated her worst major depressive episode — which lasted two years — with World War I, even though her depression began the year before the war began, and in 1940 she was shaken by the German Blitz in World War II. Bombed out of two London houses, she and her husband retreated to the country, and it may have been the destruction of her beloved city coupled with the constant threat of German invasion that triggered her final, fatal attack.

The chief treatment prescribed for Woolf when she suffered from depression was something known then as the "rest cure." She would be confined to her home, or to a nursing home, and not allowed to read or write, the two things she found most therapeutic and restorative to her troubled mind. She was giving sleeping draughts for her insomnia, but they didn't work and only increased her headaches. She grew to fear the dreaded rest cure, which felt like torture, and would try to soldier on and keep her suffering a secret, so that she might be allowed to keep writing. She wrote, "You can't think what a raging furnace it still is to me — madness and doctors and being forced."

Late in 1940, she completed Between the Acts, which would be published after her death. She tried to absorb herself in a new project, a book about literature, but found herself struggling, unable to write, which was the only therapy that worked for her. She wrote in her diary, "Shall I ever write again one of those sentences that gives me intense pleasure?"

Shortly before her death, she wrote the following to her husband, Leonard Woolf, and left it for him to find: "Dearest, I feel certain that I am going mad again. I feel we can't go through another of those terrible times. And I shan't recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can't concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do."

Then a little before noon, she walked out, taking her hat and her walking stick and her overcoat, in the pocket of which she placed a large stone, and drowned herself in the River Ouse, near their home in Sussex.

a wonderful tribute. must read for all literature lovers out there.