VIRGINIA WOOLF'S PSYCHIATRIC HISTORY

Her written output over the years was large and the bulk of it has been published. Research on Robert Schumann, a musician who suffered from cyclothymia, shows the relationship between his mood swings and his musical productivity (Slater and Meyer,1959). This made me think that calculating Woolf's output over the years and comparing it with her illnesses might give some objective measure of any effect of ill-health on her writing.

I have measured the number of words written annually in essays, letters and books, and month by month in her diaries. This is a short summary.

The word counts for both essays and letters climb from 1902 to a peak in 1908. There is a sharp decline in 1910, falling almost to zero between 1913 and 1915. There is then a dramatic surge in 1916, peaking in 1918-1919. The figures fall away in 1920-21 and reach new peaks in 1925(essays) and 1931(letters). These fluctuations coincide with the major illnesses in 1911/12 and 1915, and the illness in 1920. Minor illnesses in 1925/26, 1928/29 and 1931 have little or no effect on the output of publications, but lead to gaps in her journal.

The graph -covering 1918 to 1941 for which diaries are extant - shows the close relation between gaps of a month or more in the diary (shown above the line), and periods of minor illness greater than one month (shown below the line). The peaks in the graph coincide most obviously in 1920, 1925, 1928 and 29, and in 1933, 34 and - the longest period of all - during 1936.

LIFETIME MOOD VARIATIONS

Calculations based on output and gaps in diaries give a fairly accurate estimate of incapacity or true illness, but do not capture minor mood swings not severe enough to be incapacitating but noted by Woolf and her husband.

Caramagno(1992) has attempted to measure Woolf's mood swings, both mild and severe, over her lifetime, by collecting information not only from her diaries and biographies but also from her husband's diaries and notebooks( unpublished), in which he recorded briefly but carefully her ups and downs over many years. Caramagno uses a system of scoring. Upswings are graded from +1 to +4 and downswings as -1 to -4. The resulting graph shows the ups and downs in her moods totalled for each year from 1895 until 1941; it is worth stressing that this includes even mild mood swings which I would not label as 'illness'. Above the line are the upswings or periods of elation; below the downswings or periods of depressed mood. It is obvious that there were few periods of one without the other. The major illnesses appear as much larger fluctuations in the graph.

To give a clearer view of year to year severity I have amalgamated these figures to show total swings - ie in any direction - for each year. The resulting graph shows figures from 1895 to 1941. Regular diaries were not kept until 1918, and the figures from before then are unreliable because of the lack of detail about minor mood swings. But the three major illnesses are clearly visible in the left hand side of the graph, and the right hand side shows the frequency of minor mood changes over the last twenty years of her life.

SEASONAL VARIATIONS

The diaries show a marked seasonal variation over the years, with spring peaks from March to May, and troughs of low activity from November to February. The graph shows this; the months being grouped in pairs to smooth the data, the other axis showing the number of published diary pages divided by twenty. From year to year the diaries show fewer variations; she kept them very faithfully for decades. If anything her diary output increases with the years, with peaks in 1935 and 1940.

From Caramagno's data (see above) one can extract figures for total mood swings in terms of month of the year throughout her life. I have done so, grouping the data in pairs of months as in the graph for diary output above. The graph shows that the months producing the most swings are from May to August  (score 104) inclusive; fewest occur in the winter months of November and December (score 65). the mean score for all months is 89 and these differences are highly significant statistically. This is quite contrary to what would be expected if Woolf had suffered from seasonal affective disorder. These increased mood swings in the summer months are very clear in the timing of her major breakdowns (summer 1895, May 1904, and July 1913).

Note that productivity is highest in the Spring, mood disturbance in the summer; the two do not coincide. These findings accord with other studies. Jamison(1989) compared productivity and mood fluctuations over the months of the year for 47 British writers and artists. All showed peaks of productivity in Spring and Autumn, and those among them who had been treated for affective illness showed more mood disturbance in the summer months.

She produced novels fairly steadily from 1920 until her death. The Voyage Out took shape over some years and was finally completed in 1913. After the major illnesses of the war years, Night and Day followed in 1918/1919, and from then on there is little pause. The books were written regularly and fairly quickly, apart from Jacobs Room, The Years, and Between the Acts, all of which required extensive rewriting.

All in all, this output is prodigious. Her husband remarked that most of her waking hours over the years were spent in some kind of work involving writing and reading. From the fluctuations in output above we can draw limited conclusions. First, the severity of the wartime illnesses halted all her writing for several years, but was followed by a great burst of productivity which lasted for the rest of her days. Secondly, her many minor illnesses over the years are reflected in a lack of diary entries at the time, but have virtually no effect on her annual output of fiction and non-fiction.

If you can't see a frame on the left of the screen click here