10 Authors Who Died In Mysterious Or Strange Ways

Virginia Woolf was a modernist writer. She was a pioneer in the use of stream of consciousness as a narrative device alongside her contemporaries, Marcel Proust, and James Joyce. She was an early feminist, an important figure in the London literary scene, and suffered severe mental illness - as the opening paragraph of her suicide note attests:

“Dearest, I feel certain that I am going mad again. I feel we can't go through another of those terrible times. And I shan't recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can't concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do.”

And so, on 28 March 1941, she filled her pockets with stones and walked into the River Ouse.