In 1941 in Richmond, England, Virginia Woolf beelines toward the river near her house, having left suicide notes for her husband, Leonard, and her sister, Vanessa. Trying to focus solely on her intention to drown herself, she nonetheless notices the beauty of her surroundings—“the downs [chalk hills], the church, and a scattering of sheep, incandescent, tinged with a faint hint of sulfur, grazing under a darkening sky” (13)—as well as the sound of bombers overhead. She passes a farmworker whose name she can’t remember and thinks how lucky he is to be cleaning a ditch rather than living as a failed writer (which is how she views herself).

As she sinks into this feeling of failure, she’s reminded of two things that haunt her: indistinct, hallucinatory voices, and migraines that obliterate her sense of self. As she reaches the river, she questions whether the bombers she sees in the sky, that she heard earlier, are a hallucination. She selects a rock, marbled and the size of a pig’s skull, and puts it into the pocket of her heavy jacket before stepping into the shallows of the river. She thinks of how all the people in her life have failed to prevent her suicide.