Virginia Woolf turned fifty-four on January 25, about three weeks after this last volume of her diary began, and the last page was written four days before she drowned, on March 28, 1941. Inevitably, this is the chronicle of diminishing hope and confidence in both public and private affairs. These were the unsettling years leading up to the Second Great War in Virginia's life, with its initial slow development and subsequent terrifying rapidity. In the private sphere, she had to suffer a lot: illnesses, her own and her husband's, more disturbing because less expected; deaths: sudden or prolonged, of friends; that of his nephew, violent and devastating; those who played, like that of his mother-in-law; the tangible dangers and destruction of war; intangible ones, but no less disabling for the purposes of their own vulnerable nature.
But despite the horrors and sorrows of these years, this diary is by no means a gloomy or discouraging chronicle." — Olivia de Miguel