On the 28th March 1941, with her overcoat pockets full of stones, Virginia Woolf walked slowly and deliberately into the River Ouse.

This new documentary explores the life of the writer Virginia Woolf. It starts with her suicide. Her husband Leonard Woolf eventually realises what has happened, though her body was not found until the 18th April. Leonard Woolf had effectively kept his wife alive throughout their marriage supporting and encouraging her through her numerous dark times and breakdowns.

Drawing upon key biographers, literary critics and psychologists, the programme seeks to understand a remarkable but deeply troubled and disturbed life. Virginia Woolf had started life with the same darkness that was to haunt her throughout her life. She was allegedly abused as a child by her much older half-brother Gerald Duckworth. Her mother died when she was only 13 and this led to her first of many mental issues and nervous breakdowns.

From 1915, when she published her first novel The Voyage Out, Virginia Woolf maintained an astonishing output of fiction, literary criticism, essays, letters, diaries and biography. In 1912 she married Leonard Woolf, and in 1917 they founded the Hogarth Press. She was a founder member and at the centre of what was to become the Bloomsbury Group.

Virginia Woolf deeply disliked what she regarded as the cruel male-dominated world and the complacent and harsh attitudes associated with it, made explicit she believed in the death and destruction of the First World War. She was distinctively preoccupied with self-awareness. She focused on her own sense experience and how sense experience could be portrayed. She also loved landscape, particularly the Sussex Downs.

The programme draws out the remarkable character and commitment of her husband Leonard Woolf, who was distinguished in his own right and the guardian of Virginia Woolf s life during their marriage. It explores Virginia Woolf s overwhelming desire for individuality with its lesbian affairs, most notably with Vita Sackville-West; her mix of snobbery and anti-Semitism with radicalism; and her eventual suicide, when she feared that she would be unable to manage her incipient move towards forms of unbearable insanity.