Woolf is one of the most important writers of the period of the Second World War. She was born in London in 1882, the daughter of the Victorian literary critic Leslie Stephen, and was educated at home. Her approach to literature was surely influenced by her childhood: her mother died when she was thirteen and after this loss she had the first of a long series of nervous breakdowns which affected her all her life; after the death of her father she moved with her sister and two brothers in a new area of London. There with other intellectuals she founded the Bloomsbury Group, which emphasised subjectivity, aesthetic enjoyment, personal ties of affection and intellectual honesty: all these were values shared by the intellectuals of that period.

All Woolf’s novels are concentrated on the analysis of human consciousness: feelings, internal thoughts and reactions become more important than the events of the plot. Moreover all the elements of nature become the counterparts of the internal emotions of the characters, especially of the protagonists. For this reason she uses a symbolic world, like the one of "TO THE LIGHTHOUSE": the journey to the lighthouse (an external event) is only the counterpart, the symbol, of an internal journey of self-awareness of the main character; the alternation of light and darkness symbolises the contradictory aspects of life; the sea in the first part is a positive aspect, counterpart of the positive situation of the characters, in the second part its destructive aspect symbolises the decay of the environment and the sorrow which has struck the family.

The loss of certainties, caused by war, is represented in her attention to the protagonists’ feelings and the use of the interior monologue to show the shift of points of view.

The period of the German invasions was stressful for everyone: even Woolf’s London house was bombed. So current events haunted her mind leading her to death: the war, the threat of invasion and her adolescence were the causes of her suicide. In fact, on 28^th March, 1941, she drowned herself in the river Ouse.

Her illness represents the crisis and her death represents the collapse of that period: in a letter to her husband she wrote that she was doing what seemed the best thing to do, she could not go on spoiling her husband’s life any longer: so the suicide was seen as a reasonable and altruistic act.

In the first period in which her mind was more nervous than usual, her husband was afraid because his wife would be captured and treated by the Nazis: so he provided to have lethal doses of morphine to use in case of a German invasion, but Virginia decided to use it when she wanted to end her life. In fact she had tried to kill herself several times, even while she was writing "THE VOYAGE OUT" and "BEETWEN THE ACTS": in particular, this last one resulted worthless in its last part because of her eccentric and irregular behaviour. All these are symptoms of severe depression, typical of the period of the Great War: she feels "mad", hopeless and her self–criticism led her to suicide. So the war reminded her of the idea of death, not of suicide. "I feel a sense of complete uselessness of my life": these are her words in a letter to one of the few friends; the conclusion is that "it would be better to end my life". Her doubt was in the fact that she did not want to kill herself, but, on the other hand, "what are the arguments against it?".

So all her characters reveal their own thoughts, sensations and impressions, like she was aware of her undertow of sadness, melancholy and great fear. Her desire to convey the nature of human consciousness through words was destroyed: "I’ve lost all power over words", she wrote.