John Steinbeck in 1939 Born

Mental health[edit]

Much examination has been made of Woolf's mental health (e.g., see Mental health bibliography). From the age of 13, following the death of her mother, Woolf suffered periodic mood swings from severe depression to manic excitement, including psychotic episodes, which the family referred to as her "madness".^[246][160] However, as Hermione Lee points out, Woolf was not "mad"; she was merely a woman who suffered from and struggled with illness for much of her relatively short life, a woman of "exceptional courage, intelligence and stoicism", who made the best use, and achieved the best understanding she could of that illness.^[ad][249]

Psychiatrists today consider that her illness constitutes bipolar disorder (manic-depressive illness).^[250] Her mother's death in 1895, "the greatest disaster that could happen",^[251][252] precipitated a crisis of alternating excitability and depression accompanied by irrational fears, for which their family doctor, Dr. Seton, prescribed rest, stopping lessons and writing, and regular walks supervised by Stella.^[253] Yet just two years later, Stella too was dead, bringing on her next crisis in 1897, and her first expressed wish for death at the age of fifteen, writing in her diary that October that "death would be shorter & less painful". She then stopped keeping a diary for some time. This was a scenario she would later recreate in "Time Passes" (To the Lighthouse, 1927).^[38][254]

The death of her father in 1904 provoked her most alarming collapse, on 10 May, when she threw herself out of a window and she was briefly institutionalised^[52] under the care of her father's friend, the eminent psychiatrist George Savage. Savage blamed her education—frowned on by many at the time as unsuitable for women^[100]—for her illness.^[86][255] She spent time recovering at the house of Stella's friend Violet Dickinson, and at her aunt Caroline's house in Cambridge,^[256] and by January 1905, Dr Savage considered her "cured".^[159] Violet, seventeen years older than Virginia, became one of her closest friends and one of her more effective nurses. She characterised this as a "romantic friendship" (Letter to Violet 4 May 1903).^[257][ae] Her brother Thoby's death in 1906 marked a "decade of deaths” that ended her childhood and adolescence. From then on, her life was punctuated by urgent voices from the grave, that at times seemed more real than her visual reality.^[3]

On Dr. Savage's recommendation, Virginia spent three short periods in 1910, 1912, and 1913 at Burley House at 15 Cambridge Park, Twickenham (see image), described as "a private nursing home for women with nervous disorder" run by Miss Jean Thomas.^[259][260] By the end of February 1910, she was becoming increasingly restless, and Dr. Savage suggested being away from London. Vanessa rented Moat House, outside Canterbury, in June, but there was no improvement, so Dr. Savage sent her to Burley for a "rest cure". This involved partial isolation, deprivation of literature, and force-feeding, and after six weeks she was able to convalesce in Cornwall and Dorset during the autumn.

She loathed the experience; writing to her sister on 28 July,^[261] she described how she found the phony religious atmosphere stifling and the institution ugly, and informed Vanessa that to escape "I shall soon have to jump out of a window."^[3] The threat of being sent back would later lead to her contemplating suicide.^[262] Despite her protests, Savage would refer her back in 1912 for insomnia and in 1913 for depression.

On emerging from Burley House in September 1913, she sought further opinions from two other physicians on the 13th, Maurice Wright, and Henry Head, who had been Henry James' physician. Both recommended she return to Burley House. Distraught, she returned home and attempted suicide by taking an overdose of 100 grains of veronal (a barbiturate) and nearly dying,^[263] had she not been found by Ka Cox, who summoned help.

On recovery, she went to Dalingridge Hall, George Duckworth's home in East Grinstead, Sussex, to convalesce on 30 September, accompanied by Ka Cox and a nurse,^[264] returning to Asham on 18 November with Cox and Janet Case. She remained unstable over the next two years, with another incident involving veronal that she claimed was an "accident", and consulted another psychiatrist in April 1914, Maurice Craig, who explained that she was not sufficiently psychotic to be certified or committed to an institution.

The rest of the summer of 1914 went better for her, and they moved to Richmond, but in February 1915, just as The Voyage Out was due to be published, she relapsed once more, and remained in poor health for most of that year.^[265] Then, despite Miss Thomas's gloomy prognosis, she began to recover, following 20 years of ill health.^[266][267] Nevertheless, there was a feeling among those around her that she was now permanently changed, and not for the better.^[268]

Over the rest of her life, she suffered recurrent bouts of depression. In 1940, a number of factors appeared to overwhelm her. Her biography of Roger Fry^[269] had been published in July, and she had been disappointed in its reception. The horrors of war depressed her, and their London homes had been destroyed in the Blitz in September and October. Woolf had completed Between the Acts (published posthumously in 1941)^[242] in November, and completing a novel was frequently accompanied by exhaustion.^[270] Her health became increasingly a matter of concern, culminating in her decision to end her life on 28 March 1941.^[260]

Though this instability would frequently affect her social life, she was able to continue her literary productivity with few interruptions throughout her life. Woolf herself provides not only a vivid picture of her symptoms in her diaries and letters, but also her response to the demons that haunted her and at times made her long for death:^[250] "But it is always a question whether I wish to avoid these glooms... These 9 weeks give one a plunge into deep waters... One goes down into the well & nothing protects one from the assault of truth."^[271]

Psychiatry had little to offer her in her lifetime, but she recognised that writing was one of the behaviours that enabled her to cope with her illness: ^[250] "The only way I keep afloat... is by working... Directly I stop working I feel that I am sinking down, down. And as usual, I feel that if I sink further I shall reach the truth."^[272] Sinking under water was Woolf's metaphor for both the effects of depression and psychosis— but also for finding truth, and ultimately was her choice of death.^[250]

Throughout her life, Woolf struggled, without success, to find meaning in her illness: on the one hand, an impediment, on the other, something she visualised as an essential part of who she was, and a necessary condition of her art.^[250] When she was able to control her illness, it informed her work, such as the character of Septimus Warren Smith in Mrs Dalloway (1925),^[195] who, like Woolf, was haunted by the dead, and ultimately takes his own life rather than be admitted to a sanitorium.^[3]

Leonard Woolf relates how during the 30 years they were married, they consulted many doctors in the Harley Street area, and although they were given a diagnosis of neurasthenia, he felt they had little understanding of the causes or nature. The solution was simple—as long as she lived a quiet life without any physical or mental exertion, she was well. On the other hand, any mental, emotional, or physical strain resulted in a reappearance of her symptoms. These began with a headache, followed by insomnia and thoughts that started to race. Her remedy was simple, to retire to bed in a darkened room, eat, and drink plenty of milk, following which the symptoms slowly subsided.^[273]

Modern scholars, including her nephew and biographer, Quentin Bell,^[274] have suggested her breakdowns and subsequent recurring depressive periods were influenced by the sexual abuse which she and her sister Vanessa were subjected to by their half-brothers George and Gerald Duckworth (which Woolf recalls in her autobiographical essays "A Sketch of the Past" and "22 Hyde Park Gate") (see Sexual abuse). Biographers point out that when Stella died in 1897, there was no counterbalance to control George's predation, and his nighttime prowling. Virginia describes him as her first lover, "The old ladies of Kensington and Belgravia never knew that George Duckworth was not only father and mother, brother and sister to those poor Stephen girls; he was their lover also."^[275][3]

It is likely that other factors also played a part. It has been suggested that these include genetic predisposition, for both trauma and family history have been implicated in bipolar disorder.^[276] Virginia's father, Leslie Stephen, suffered from depression, and her half-sister Laura was institutionalised. Many of Virginia's symptoms, including persistent headache, insomnia, irritability, and anxiety resemble those of her father.^[277] Another factor is the pressure she placed upon herself in her work; for instance, her breakdown of 1913 was at least partly triggered by the need to finish The Voyage Out.^[278]

Virginia herself hinted that her illness was related to how she saw the repressed position of women in society, when she wrote in A Room of One's Own that had Shakespeare had a sister of equal genius, she "would certainly have gone crazed, shot herself, or ended her days in some lonely cottage outside the village, half witch, half wizard, feared and mocked at". These inspirations emerged from what Woolf referred to as her lava of madness, describing her time at Burley^{[3][279][280]} in a 1930 letter to Ethel Smyth:

As an experience, madness is terrific I can assure you, and not to be sniffed at; and in its lava I still find most of the things I write about. It shoots out of one everything shaped, final, not in mere driblets, as sanity does. And the six months—not three—that I lay in bed taught me a good deal about what is called oneself.^[281]

Thomas Caramagno^[282] and others,^[283] in discussing her illness, warn against the "neurotic-genius" way of looking at mental illness, which rationalises the theory that creativity is somehow born of mental illness.^[284][282] Stephen Trombley describes Woolf as having a confrontational relationship with her doctors, and possibly being a woman who is a "victim of male medicine", referring to the contemporary relative lack of understanding about mental illness.^[285][286]

Death[edit]

Virginia Woolf's suicide letter to her husband. (Reading by Juliet Stevenson)^[287]

After completing the manuscript of her last novel (posthumously published), Between the Acts (1941),^[242] Woolf fell into a depression similar to that which she had earlier experienced. The onset of World War II, the destruction of her London home during the Blitz, and the cool reception given to her biography^[269] of her late friend Roger Fry all worsened her condition until she was unable to work.^[288] When Leonard enlisted in the Home Guard, Virginia disapproved. She held fast to her pacifism and criticised her husband for wearing what she considered to be "the silly uniform of the Home Guard".^[289]

After World War II began, Woolf's diary indicates that she was obsessed with death, which figured more and more as her mood darkened.^[290] On 28 March 1941, Woolf drowned herself by filling her overcoat pockets with stones and walking into the River Ouse near her home.^[291] Her body was not found until 18 April.^[292] Her husband buried her cremated remains beneath an elm tree in the garden of Monk's House, their home in Rodmell, Sussex.^[293]

In her suicide note, addressed to her husband, she wrote:

Dearest, I feel certain that I am going mad again. I feel we can't go through another of those terrible times. And I shan't recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can't concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do. You have given me the greatest possible happiness. You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I don't think two people could have been happier till this terrible disease came. I can't fight it any longer. I know that I am spoiling your life, that without me you could work. And you will I know. You see I can't even write this properly. I can't read. What I want to say is I owe all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good. I want to say that—everybody knows it. If anybody could have saved me it would have been you. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can't go on spoiling your life any longer. I don't think two people could have been happier than we have been. V.^[294][295]

Work[edit]

A portrait of Woolf by Roger Fry c. 1917

Lytton Strachey and Woolf at Garsington, 1923

Virginia Woolf 1927

Woolf is considered to be one of the more important 20th century novelists.^[296] A modernist, she was one of the pioneers of using stream of consciousness as a narrative device, alongside contemporaries such as Marcel Proust,^[297][298] Dorothy Richardson and James Joyce.^{[299][300][301]} Woolf's reputation was at its greatest during the 1930s, but declined considerably following World War II. The growth of feminist criticism in the 1970s helped re-establish her reputation.^[302][260]

Virginia submitted her first article in 1890, to a competition in Tit-Bits. Although it was rejected, this shipboard romance by the 8-year-old would presage her first novel 25 years later, as would contributions to the Hyde Park News, such as the model letter "to show young people the right way to express what is in their hearts", a subtle commentary on her mother's legendary matchmaking.^[303][304] She transitioned from juvenilia to professional journalism in 1904 at the age of 22. Violet Dickinson introduced her to Mrs. Lyttelton, the editor of the Women's Supplement of The Guardian, a Church of England newspaper. Invited to submit a 1,500-word article, Virginia sent Lyttelton a review of W.D. Howells' The Son of Royal Langbirth and an essay about her visit to Haworth that year, Haworth, November 1904.^[305][3] The review was published anonymously on 4 December, and the essay on the 21st.^[306][307] In 1905, Woolf began writing for The Times Literary Supplement.^[308]

Woolf would go on to publish novels and essays as a public intellectual to both critical and popular acclaim. Much of her work was self-published through the Hogarth Press. "Virginia Woolf's peculiarities as a fiction writer have tended to obscure her central strength: she is arguably the major lyrical novelist in the English language. Her novels are highly experimental: a narrative, frequently uneventful and commonplace, is refracted—and sometimes almost dissolved—in the characters' receptive consciousness. Intense lyricism and stylistic virtuosity fuse to create a world overabundant with auditory and visual impressions".^[309] "The intensity of Virginia Woolf's poetic vision elevates the ordinary, sometimes banal settings"—often wartime environments—"of most of her novels".^[309]