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Virginia Woolf was born in 1882 . When she was only 13 years old, her sister Julia died resulting in Virginia's first nervous breakdown. In 1904 Virginia's father died and three months later she suffered a second breakdown and attempted to kill herself . In 1912 Virginia married Leonard Woolf but in September 1913 attempted a second suicide. Since then she suffered constantly from fits of depression, diseases and several breakdowns, until she took her life in desperation in 1941. In his autobiography, Leonard Woolf describes Virginia's fear of criticism as so great that it directly caused fits of depression and rage. For Virginia Woolf madness was not the hideout of a genius mind, on the contrary, it endangered her very existence as a person and an artist ': . . . whenever she finished a book, a condition of mental exhaustion settled in and for weeks she was in danger of collapsing. ' Virginia Woolf is a classic example of a truly inspired, but very ill artist. Her illness never was the source, but always a direct result of creativity.

The novel, in writer’s own words, attempts to present
‘the world seen by the sane and the insane side by side’ through the characters of the
‘sane’ woman protagonist Mrs Clarissa and the ‘insane’ World War veteran Septimus
Warren Smith and the ‘societal oppression’ confronted by the both in the form of brutality, meaninglessness and loneliness of the modern British society. The sanity of
Mrs Clarissa Dalloway and other characters is as much open to question as the overt insanity of Septimus and they are frequently shown to exchange places as far as normalcy and mental illness is concerned. Having herself experienced the periodic and recurrent bouts of insanity and yet being a
‘sane woman’ and a tremendously creative and prolific writer, the socially constructed categories of ‘madness’ and ‘sanity’ for Virginia Woolf, are nothing but “absurd simplifications” which need to challenged ‘per se.’ She has