--- title: Virginia Woolf: Read a 1941 Obituary for the Author description: The author drowned herself 75 years ago, on Mar. 28, 1941 canonical: https://time.com/4265948/virginia-woolf-1941-obituary/ author: Lily Rothman article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2016-03-28T12:00:09.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-02-22T16:04:15.931Z article:section: History og:title: Virginia Woolf: Read a 1941 Obituary for the Author og:description: The author drowned herself 75 years ago, on Mar. 28, 1941 og:url: https://time.com/4265948/virginia-woolf-1941-obituary/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltd991819cf260cea9/69888bccbc6cfccef23dc3ab/woolf.jpeg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 675 og:image:alt: Virginia Woolf og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Virginia Woolf: Read a 1941 Obituary for the Author twitter:description: The author drowned herself 75 years ago, on Mar. 28, 1941 twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltd991819cf260cea9/69888bccbc6cfccef23dc3ab/woolf.jpeg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # Read TIME's 1941 Obituary for Virginia Woolf  by [Lily Rothman](https://time.com/author/lily-rothman/)  ## Lily Rothman Rothman is managing editor at TIME. Mar 28, 2016 12:00 PM UTC  Portrait of Virginia Woolf, circa 1915 Portrait of Virginia Woolf, circa 1915Culture Club / Getty Images  by [Lily Rothman](https://time.com/author/lily-rothman/)  ## Lily Rothman Rothman is managing editor at TIME. Mar 28, 2016 12:00 PM UTC It was a spring Friday 75 years ago that writer Virginia Woolf wrote a note to her sister, another to her husband and then walked down to the River Ouse. When her husband read the [note](http://time.com/vault/issue/1941-05-05/page/99/) and rushed to trace her steps, he found only her walking stick, TIME reported. Though her body was not immediately found, her husband told the press that she was presumed dead. Later, it became known that Woolf had weighted her pockets with stones and drowned herself. She was 59. Reading TIME’s initial report on the author’s death, it’s noteworthy that the piece focuses nearly entirely on guessing the cause for the tragic decision. Was it World War II, which had left her London home destroyed? Was it her feeling that her latest novel, _Between the Acts_, wasn’t up to snuff? The question of mental health simmers below the surface (she had always been “morbidly self-critical,” the piece notes) but her suicide, in 1941, was painted by the press as something that must have had a clear cause and effect outside her own mind. That’s a marked contrast to current journalistic [guidelines](http://afsp.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/recommendations.pdf) for reporting on suicide, which stress the importance of not implying that a death resulted from a single event. It was in analyzing Woolf’s literary work that TIME’s obituary came closest to acknowledging the complex mental processes that might have been in play: --- > “” --- **_Read the full story from 1941, here in the TIME Vault:_** [An Artist Vanishes](http://time.com/vault/issue/1941-04-14/page/36/) ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/4265948/virginia-woolf-1941-obituary/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/4265948/virginia-woolf-1941-obituary/"},"headline":"Read TIME's 1941 Obituary for Virginia Woolf","datePublished":"2016-03-28T12:00:09.000Z","dateModified":"2026-02-22T16:04:15.931Z","description":"The author drowned herself 75 years ago, on Mar. 28, 1941","url":"https://time.com/4265948/virginia-woolf-1941-obituary/","keywords":["Books","People"],"thumbnailUrl":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltd991819cf260cea9/69888bccbc6cfccef23dc3ab/woolf.jpeg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Lily Rothman","jobTitle":"Rothman is managing editor at TIME.","url":"https://time.com/author/lily-rothman/"}],"articleSection":"History","image":[{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltd991819cf260cea9/69888bccbc6cfccef23dc3ab/woolf.jpeg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","width":1200,"height":675,"headline":"Virginia Woolf","caption":"Virginia Woolf - portrait of the English novelist and essayist.","creditText":"Culture Club / Getty Images","representativeOfPage":true}],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Time","url":"https://time.com/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://time.com/images/logo.png","width":528,"height":156},"foundingDate":"March 3, 1923","sameAs":["https://www.facebook.com/time","https://www.instagram.com/time/?hl=en","https://twitter.com/time","https://www.pinterest.com/timemagazine"]}},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"item":{"@id":"/section/history/","name":"History"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/4265948/virginia-woolf-1941-obituary/","name":"Read TIME's 1941 Obituary for Virginia Woolf"}}]}] ```