Virginia Woolf - nonfiction - 1975 - p. 209

Published as a six-volume set in 1975, these letters span years of Virginia Stephen’s life up to her marriage to Leonard Woolf; they are comprised largely of musings on writing and are addressed to her female friends--particularly Violet Dickinson, a spinster who cared for Virginia during one of the latter’s bouts of severe depression. They detail her work in the women’s suffrage movement and reveal her anti-semitic and elitist tendencies as well as her interactions with the Bloomsbury Group, a set of prominent writers with generally progressive political views.

Also among the letters are missives from her time in a sanatorium, where she resided after a mental breakdown in 1904 that stemmed in part from her father’s death; she lived with depression all her life and drowned herself in 1941.

Key elements: art, Europe, father figures, feminism, homosexuality, lesbian, mental illness, suicide