Her recovery was shortlived. She had recommenced her diary on the first day of 1915. The entries stop after the 15th February, signalling the beginning of the most serious attack of her life. Again it lasted nine months and again brought the threat of permanent insanity.
She kept a dental appointment on the 17th February, and she and Leonard went to see about a printing press. The next day she had a headache, began to sleep poorly, and was showing signs of psychological disturbance. She complained of 'restless aching.'
On the morning of 23rd February she suddenly became incoherent. The attack lasted two days, and she then partly recovered for a week. Leonard recalled: 'One morning she was having breakfast in bed and I was sitting by the bedside talking with her. She was calm, well, perfectly sane. Suddenly she became violently excited, thought her mother was in the room, and began talking to her - that was the beginning of the long second stage in a complete mental breakdown.' In another part of his autobiography, he writes: 'She talked almost without stopping for two or three 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.'
Compare her doctor's description of mania in the 1916 edition of his own textbook. 'These patients are constantly on the move and never rest.; they may sing, dance, laugh, or shout continuously. Speech is very incoherent...' 'Association of ideas is more active than in normal conditions, and it is for this reason that the patient is incoherent, as he is unable to find words quickly enough to express his thoughts. the acute maniac may rhyme, or his ideas may be suggested by objects round about. These patients are usually very impulsive and destructive and at times may be violent'.
Some faint idea of her incoherence and flight of ideas can be obtained from a letter written to Leonard during convalescence after similar symptoms in early 1912:
'I shall tell you wonderful stories of the lunatics. By the bye, they've elected me King. There can be no doubt about it. I summoned a conclave, & made a proclamation about Christianity. I had other adventures, & some disasters, the fruit of a too passionate & enquiring disposition. I avoided both love & hatred. I now feel very clear, calm, and move slowly, like one of the great big animals at the zoo. Knitting is the saving of life.... I must go out and post this. I have got 5/- which I am going to spend on chocolates & and a sleeping draught, if the shops are open, & I escape molestation. I shan't want the sleeping draught - in any case.' Some of the oddities can be put down to private jokes, but, as Quentin Bell says, it has a 'crazy ring'. Much of the oddity is due to the sudden jumps in thought, expressed in the unusually short sentences.
Her mood in 1915 can be judged directly from a letter written on the 25th February to a family friend: 'How wonderfully things have changed in the last few days.....it is so wonderful that I can hardly believe it...' Another, written the following day, also shows signs of instability. It is addressed to Lytton Strachey, and although she was accustomed to talk in a liberated way, this letter seems unusually disinhibited and disconnected, and, like the previous note, expresses a sense of increased well being typical of hypomania:
'....buy a parrot for Clive... trained of course to talk nothing but filth and to indulge in obscene caresses .....I am now well again and it is very wonderful......I have to keep lying down but I am getting better..' Another letter written by Leonard to her dictation on the first of March has a similar flavour. There are no more letters until the end of August.
As soon as symptoms had appeared Leonard, following Dr Maurice Craig's advice, had commenced her usual regime - bed rest, avoidance of company and stimulation, and hypnotics (Veronal) at night. Quentin Bell describes her symptoms as quite unlike the first phase. 'Now she entered into a state of garrulous mania, speaking even more wildly, incoherently and incessantly, until she lapsed into gibberish and sank into a coma' This accurately describes hypomania proceeding to mania and its extreme phase, manic stupor.
There were good and bad days, but no improvement: Quentin Bell reports '..more harrowing symptoms, for now Virginia was violent and screaming, and her madness culminated in virulent animosity towards Leonard himself.'
Her relapse coincided with their move from lodgings to Hogarth House. While Leonard undertook the removal, Virginia was admitted to a nursing home on the 25th March. She then moved to their new home to be cared for by four nurses for the next two months. On the 20th May Leonard's diary notes laconically: 'excitable and irritable all day.' Thereafter he did not see her for two months.
Vanessa, after a visit, wrote to Roger Fry: '...up and down, at times being pretty reasonable and at others v violent and difficult..... Woolf himself seemed to have reached a state when he didn't much care what happened which was rather dreadful...'
In April Jean Thomson told Violet Dickinson that Virginia's mind seemed 'played out' and that her whole personality had deteriorated; she doubted whether she would recover. By late June Vanessa was writing: '....she's really getting better slowly but it sounds most depressing as she seems to have changed into a most unpleasant character. She won't see L at all and has taken against all men. She says the most malicious and cutting things she can think of to everyone and they are so clever that they always hurt.' Vanessa thought 'the worst thing to me' her sister's comments about a new book of poems by their friend Frances Cornford which she had annotated cruelly: '....they are simply like rather nasty schoolboy wit, not even amusing.'
Evidently her symptoms were less florid but she had not returned to her usual self and her illness seemed to have produced an unpleasant character change, which the family feared might be permanent.
But improvement began in June. There were favourable reviews of The Voyage Out when it was finally published, and by September she was well enough to be moved to Asham with a nurse.
Even in October she quotes the nurse beside her in a letter she is writing: 'Only one page, Mrs Woolf!' And these letters after the months of silence retain a malicious, anti-male, and disinhibited colouring, suggesting that she has not completely recovered. For example, on 22nd October, she writes to Lytton Strachey - who may well have enjoyed this kind of thing - 'By God! What a bore that man is!.....proposes to live next door to us at Richmond and there copulate day and night and produce 6 little Waterlows. This house for a long time stank to me of dried semen. And its only a kind of mutton fat in his case. You see what straits we are reduced to...Nurse now thinks I shd stop writing...'
In early November the last nurse left Hogarth House. The nursing bills for these months totalled £81, an expense the Woolfs could ill afford; more at that time than the annual wages of two servants.
Her management had been strict. Even when she was convalescent her activities were rigorously controlled: she was allowed to write for only an hour daily. The Weir Mitchell high calorie diet was followed to such good effect that she gained three stones during the year - 60 pounds over the two years of illness. In October she was three stones above her normal weight. The previous year, three weeks after attempting suicide, she had weighed 8stones 7pounds, and her weight fell even further subsequently. For the rest of her life she was convinced that weight loss made her ill. She wrote to a friend in 1922: 'I'm glad you are fat; for then you are warm and mellow and generous and creative. I find that unless I weigh 9 stones I hear voices and see visions and can neither write nor sleep.'
The worst years were over. She was now to enter on years of activity and achievement, turning the ideas generated in the fire of psychosis into her fiction. She would never be so ill again until the last months of her life.
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