It’s the birthday of Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), of whom I am in fact just the least bit afraid due to wigging out after reading Mrs. Dalloway (1925) while experiencing culture shock abroad. (Great novel. Maybe don’t read it while you’re feeling iffy.) Woolf is known for fluid, nonlinear experiments with narration (think stream of consciousness) that shaped the modern novel, and for novels such as To the Lighthouse (1927), Orlando: A Biography (1928, not actually a biography), The Waves (1931), and the aforementioned Mrs. Dalloway.

Woolf was born in London to parents who had both already been widowed and had children before marrying each other. Woolf and her three full siblings therefore had four older half-siblings, and plenty of family politics came of this, with these siding against those but this or that one occasionally changing loyalties. Woolf’s father was a literary person in his own right, and her mother is described by britannica.com as beautiful and having “a reputation for saintly self-sacrifice.” (Frankly that sounds like a lot of work.) Woolf’s mother died in 1895 when Woolf was only 13, a devastating event for Woolf. In 1897, a half-sister died (more devastation) and in 1904 Woolf’s father died (still more devastation), and at this point Woolf had a nervous breakdown and threw herself out a window—her first suicide attempt. In 1906, one of Woolf’s full brothers died. Woolf would struggle with depression and possible bipolar disorder off and on for the rest of her life.

After their father’s death, Woolf’s sister Vanessa moved the full siblings to Bloomsbury in London, and there they lived an artistic, bohemian sort of life and entertained a great deal. Woolf married Leonard Woolf, her brother’s friend, in 1912, and they had a long and mutually supportive marriage (although Woolf also later had a thing with Vita Sackville-West, also a writer, and probably other women as well). Woolf and her husband founded their famous Hogarth Press in 1917 and published their own work as well as the work of others, such as T.S. Eliot and Maxim Gorky, and of course Woolf’s most important novels—so, self-publishing. (Her first novel, The Voyage Out, was published in 1915 by her half-brother’s publishing firm.) Woolf also wrote tons of essays, the most famous of which is the book-length essay “A Room of One’s Own” (1929).

In 1941, after finishing her last novel, Between the Acts (published posthumously that year), Woolf found herself heavily depressed by the war, unable to write, and hearing voices. On March 28, she filled her pockets with stones, walked into the River Ouse, and drowned. Her body was found on April 18. She was 59 years old.

Have a vastly more cheerful day than this post and stay scrupulously honest to the data.