In January 1924 Woolf was writing her diary at Hogarth House - in 'a room of ones own'. She and her husband were about to move to Tavistock Square, and she reminisces about all that happened in that room over the years. Almost as an afterthought she ends the entry:
'PS I've had some very curious visions in this room too, lying in bed, mad, and seeing the sunlight quivering like gold water, on the wall. I've heard the voices of the dead here. And felt, through it all, exquisitely happy.'
She suffered many mood swings in her life, and many of the descriptions she and her husband give of the most acute of her illnesses depict elation (mania) as often as depression. Leonard, for example, writes in his autobiography:
'.....There were moments or periods during her illness, particularly in the second excited stage, when she was what could be called 'raving mad' and her thoughts and speech became completely uncoordinated, and she had no contact with reality. Except for these periods, she remained all through her illness, even when most insane, terribly sane in three-quarters of her mind. The point is that her insanity was in her premises, in her beliefs. She believed for instance, that she was not ill, that her symptoms were due to her own 'faults'; ........ and her power of arguing conclusively from false premises was terrific. It was therefore useless to attempt to argue with her...'
The first part of this account describes elation - the 'excited stage'. The cardinal symptoms of the state of severe elation - mania - are elevation of mood, pressure of talk, and flight of ideas. The second part observes the lack of insight in severe depression, with the patient convinced that she is not ill, that she is to blame for her state, and that she cannot be helped by family or doctors. It is equally typical of the condition. Before her suicide, these symptoms returned, with the conviction that her last novel was worthless, a view she had not held when she completed it. Leonard, again writing about her 1915 attack, says:
'She talked almost without stopping for 2 or 3 days, paying no attention to anyone in the room or anything said to her. For about a day what she said was coherent, the sentences meant something, though it was nearly all wildly insane. Then gradually it became completely incoherent, a mere jumble of dissociated words.' This is a textbook description of pressure of talk and flight of ideas.
Fifteen years later, she wrote Mrs Dalloway and portrayed mental illness in her fiction. She wrote in a letter: 'It was a subject that I have kept cooling in my mind until I felt that I could touch it without bursting into flame all over. You can't think what a raging furnace it is still to me - madness and doctors and being forced. But let's change the subject.' Here and elsewhere she consistently uses fire imagery to describe her illness.
In these and other letters to Ethel Smyth, the composer, she confided more about her illness in 1915 than she had ever done before. From the distance of June 1930 she wrote:
'And then I married, and then my brains went up in a shower of fireworks. 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. Indeed I was almost crippled when I came back to the world, unable to move a foot in terror after that discipline. Think - not one moment's freedom from doctor's discipline - perfectly strange - conventional men; 'You shan't read this' and 'You shan't write a word' and 'You shall lie still and drink milk' - for six months. But enough'
Nevertheless she returned to the subject the next month, writing to Ethel Smyth again: '...it is ten years since I was seeing faces, and five since I was lying like a stone statue, dumb to the rose (no it shd be blind, but I write in a hurry).' In October she goes into more detail: 'After being ill and suffering every form and variety of nightmare and extravagant intensity of perception - for I used to make up poems, stories, profound and to me inspired phrases all day long as I lay in bed, and thus sketched I think all that I now, by the light of reason, try to put into prose (I thought of the Lighthouse then, and Kew, and others, not in substance but in idea) - after all this, when I came to, I was so tremblingly afraid of my own insanity that I wrote Night and Day mainly to prove to my own satisfaction that I could keep entirely off that dangerous ground. I wrote it, lying in bed, allowed to write only for one half-hour a day.....it composed my mind.'
These descriptions give a vivid picture of one of her more lengthy and severe attacks. It was not the first or last. They began very early, when she was only thirteen. She had further attacks aged fifteen, twenty-two, twenty-four, twenty-eight and thirty. Aged thirty-one she had a severe illness lasting nine months in which she made a severe suicide attempt, and in 1915, aged thirty-three, an equally severe attack lasted nine months. Milder and threatened attacks punctuated the rest of her life.
Her first breakdown, lasting some six months, was in 1895, when she was only thirteen. Her mother had died on the 5th of May. Between 1895 and 1897, Quentin Bell writes, she lost the desire to write, but read feverishly and continually. She went through a period of morbid self-criticism, blamed herself for being vain and egotistical, compared herself unfavourably to Vanessa, and was irritable.
She kept a diary for six months in the first half of 1897, and erratically for the rest of the year, a lifelong pattern. Over many years her journal entries are lengthy and regular, except when she is unwell. In this early diary, only recently published, there are signs of gloom and preoccupation with death in the September entries. Her lessons were halted in November 1896, and resumed with Dr Seton's permission in the following February. Towards the end of 1896 her father wrote: 'I hope, though I still hope with trembling, that she is a bit better.' Despite the concern about her health she read hugely from her father's library; 'Gracious child, how you gobble', he said.
In April 97, between her step-sister Stella's peritonitis and death, Virginia witnessed a series of accidents; some she may have imagined or exaggerated. She became terrified of the simplest journey. On the 9th May Dr Seton again stopped her lessons, and prescribed milk, exercise, and medicine. When Stella, married and pregnant, became ill, Virginia had 'the fidgets', a Stephen family term that covered most nervous disorders. After Stella's death in July 97 she seemed to cope well.
The death of her father on 22 2 04 - she was 22 - did not immediately precipitate a major illness. She showed appropriate grief and unexceptional guilt at the time. Six days after the death she wrote in a letter: 'The dreadful thing is that I never did enough for him all these years. He was so lonely often, and I never helped him as I might have done. This is the worst part of it now.'
A month after his death she went on holiday to Pembrokeshire, and in April to Venice, returning via Paris in the first week of May 1904. Her letters from abroad are normal and cheerful. A month later she was ill. There is a blank in her correspondence from May until September, except for a few skittish and disconnected letters in June. On the 24th June, 1904, she was sent by Dr. Savage to a Twickenham nursing home. A letter from there is surprisingly normal and cheerful. In July an isolated letter to her sister Vanessa pokes fun at the pious staff of the home. 'They are always wondering what God is up to. The religious mind is quite amazing.'
Details of her symptoms then are scrappy. Quentin Bell says that 'all that summer she was mad.' His account is presumably based on oral family recollections. He says that she mistrusted her sister Vanessa, that her grief became 'maniacal', and that her three nurses became 'fiends' to her. She heard voices urging her to acts of folly; believed that they came from overeating and that she must starve herself. Violet Dickinson took Virginia to her house at Burnham Wood, where she threw herself from a window but sustained no serious injury. Bell says that she lay in bed listening to the birds singing in Greek and imagined King Edward VII lurking in the azaleas and using the foulest language. It would be difficult to assert that she was not floridly psychotic at this time, aged twenty-two.
She convalesced in Cornwall in September. Letters become more frequent, and she appears back to her usual self. She wrote to Violet Dickinson on the 22nd: 'I think the blood has really been getting into my brain again. It is the oddest feeling, as though a dead part of me were coming to life. I can't tell you how delightful it is - and I don't mind how much I eat to keep it going. All the voices I used to hear telling me to do all kind of wild things have gone - and Nessa says they were always in my imagination.' Even in this convalescent period she has not gained full insight into her auditory hallucinations.
And four days later: '....if there were a God I should bless him for having delivered me safe and sound from the miseries of the last six months! You can't think what an exquisite joy every minute of my life is to me now, and my only prayer is that I may live to be 70.' She was not to be so fortunate.
On 30th September, 1904: 'I am longing to begin work. I know I can write, and one of these days I mean to produce a good book.' This supports her assertion in later years that ideas for books germinated during illness.
In October she went to stay with her aunt in Cambridge. On the 24th she reports: 'I don't sleep much. Otherwise I am very well'. She is critical of that 'tyrannical and I think short-sighted Savage', and of doctors in general: 'I never shall believe, or have believed, in anything any doctor says - I learnt their utter helplessness when Father was ill. They can guess at what's the matter, but they can't put it right' Recalling the 10th of May at the beginning of November she writes that 'I was then hardly knowing what I did or said.' Her letters are cheerful and somewhat aggressive; she often mentions anger and irritability.
She was well enough to assist Maitland, her father's biographer, in selecting her father's papers for his use. By the end of the year, back in London, she began to teach English and History at Morley college and to write articles. Her first was published in December 1904, and several more in early 1905. The cautious Dr Savage discharged her cured. The very next month she took part with her friends in the famous Dreadnought hoax, in which they posed as foreign potentates, and were entertained by senior naval officers aboard HMS Dreadnought. The hoax was successful and when they afterwards divulged the truth, there was a considerable scandal.
In 1906 came the fourth and last of the major bereavements that scarred Virginia Woolf's early adult life. Much has been made oi them in the search for causes, forgetting that in these days of large families, infectious diseases and no antibiotics, few families did not experience losses of this kind. Her brother Thoby Stephen died after contracting typhoid fever on a trip to Constantinople. The loss did not provoke illness. Her next attack, vague in detail, was in 1910, when she was 28. In March of that year she took to bed with headache, and Dr Savage was again consulted. Her health remained uncertain during the summer, and on the 21st June Vanessa consulted Dr Savage about her sister. At the end of June she was admitted to Miss Thomson's private nursing home at Twickenham for a rest cure and remained there for some six weeks until the 10th August.
There was a similar episode in 1912. Leonard Woolf first proposed to her on the 11th January. In the following weeks she was unwell. On 7 2 12 she wrote in a letter: 'It was a touch of my usual disease, in the head you know. I spent a week in bed, but now that's all over, except for miraculous dreams at night.........Savage is making me spend a fortnight in bed, as I can't sleep. It is very ridiculous.' She was readmitted to Miss Thomas's establishment on the 16th February, and went to Asham for a rest until 29th February. On the 9th March she consulted a 'psychologist' Dr Wright. Her letters in March and April have a flippant tone. In March she writes to Leonard: 'I shall tell you wonderful stories of lunatics.' She says that she spent a 'strange fortnight ' in bed, and that she has been 'knocked on the head by sleeping draughts.' In April she is making tasteless jokes about the Titanic disaster.'
A month later on 29th May she agreed to marry Leonard Woolf. Some symptoms persisted; in June she spent time in bed with headache before a holiday at the seaside. She married Woolf on the 10th August. The rigours of the honeymoon and their sexual difficulties are discussed elsewhere. On their return, periods of headache and being 'unwell' persisted until December.
If you can't see a frame on the left of the screen click here