Virginia Woolf's diary entry for 10 November 1917, with its riverside walk, its glimpse of despair and rapid recovery, is strongly redolent of her second novel, Night and Day, on which she was currently at work. This is a novel that fluctuates between the outer and inner life, between social comedy and alienation, between the solid houses and streets of London and the ceaseless flux of the river – for her husband, Leonard Woolf, an emblem ‘of the mystery and unreality of human things’.

By 1917, many illusions had been lost: the Great War was in its fourth year and scarcely nearer resolution. As a pacifist, Woolf was sickened by it and by the patriotic sentiment and the ‘violent and filthy passions’ it aroused (Letters ii, 71). She felt herself becoming ‘Steadily more feminist’, faced with ‘this preposterous masculine fiction’ (Letters ii, 76). To what extent the war had contributed to her breakdown of 1915 cannot be determined, but both her private experience of psychic illness and the public trauma of the war promoted a sense of inner and outer worlds being pulled violently apart.