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VIRGINIA WOOLF

Pirandello is not the only author who concentrated his life and his works on the theme of “irrationality”. In English literature, in fact, we can consider Virginia Woolf as the example of woman haunted by the terror of losing her mind.
Virginia Woolf, one of Britain's greatest women writers was born into an intellectual and aristocratic family on 25 January 1882. she suffered periods of mental illness starting with her mother's death in 1895. her second serious mental breakdown began in May 1904, a few months after her father's death, and it was then she made her first attempt at suicide by jumping out of a window. Virginia was psychologically ill again in 1910 and, after her marriage at Leonard Woolf in 1912, she suffered increasingly from depression and delusion until, on 20 September 1913, she once more attempted at suicide by taking an overdose of veronal. Again, in 1915, she became seriously ill again growing violent even to Leonard. During the thirties she saw a number of friends die and she was particularly distressed by the death of her nephew in the Spanish Civil War. With the dark political events of the thirties, which made her fear of safety of her husband, who was a Jew, and the outbreak of the Second World War, she turned increasingly to a destructive introspection. Finally, in 1941, she felt the onset of madness and decided to commit suicide in March of that year: she drowned herself in the river Ouse, which ran near her house, leaving a note to her husband “I fell certain I am going mad again”.
However, when she was not going through a period of depression, Virginia Woolf had a very busy life, helping her husband in his printing press, which was to publish most of her works and those of other contemporary writers and the already famous Freud, working for the labour party and the feminist cause, but above all producing important essays, like THE COMMON READER and A ROOM OF ONE'S OWN, and great modernist...