Virginia Woolfe was truly talented author, who wrote in the 1920’s. She was considered a gifted woman and a pioneer for feminist authors yet she was plagued by mental illness from her youth until her suicide. She suffered from manic depression that was said to have been aggravated by her troubled youth. She experienced many traumas, including the death of her mother at age 13 and sexual abuse by her stepbrother at the age of 12. However Woolf was able to find temporary escape from her illness by using the characters in her novels to express her unusual and often disturbing thoughts and feelings about herself and the world around her. She was known for using several characters in each of her novels to express the different aspects of herself. In her novel To the Lighthouse she used the character Lily to express the anxiety she faced in trying to impress her father, however in her novel Mrs. Dalloway she used the character Clarissa to express her views on suicide where as in the same novel she used Septimus to express the pain she has had to endure from being mentally ill. To the Lighthouse was Virginia Woolf’s second novel in which she was noted for having expressed herself through the use of characters. Having had a very talented and renowned father Virginia was under much stress to well and make a name for herself. Even when she was just a young girl the Woolf family had already made their name, known for their artistic and intellectual talents. Mr. Woolf was a literary critic that was known for being exceptionally well educated. This kind of recognition lead to extreme pressure being placed upon the young Virginia, pressures she would feel throughout the rest of her life. And it was these pressure that lead to her feelings of inadequacy. In order to express these repressed feelings, when Virginia Woolf wrote the novel To the Lighthouse she used the character Lily. Early on in this novel, shortly after the re...
