Maxwell Bennett

2013

Virginia Woolf, perhaps the greatest narrative writer in English of the twentieth century, had a tragic life. Her suicide at 59, in 1941 during the Second World War, was the fi nal act in a series of earlier attempts against a background of sexual abuse and the loss of members of her loving family. This fi nal act had its additional stress engendered by the extraordinary circumstances that Britain faced in the years just prior to her death, with the bombing of her home in London and of the fl ights of German raider aircraft close to her country residence near the coast.