Virginia Woolf: Genius and Madness

Her Death

There is something forever haunting in that last image of her. This tall, elegant writer putting on her coat to protect herself against the dreary British weather, deliberately weighing it down with rocks in her pockets, and silently wading deep into the River Ouse one last time. She was a good swimmer, yet she forced herself to drown.

That morning, their housekeeper had noticed Virginia Woolf was in one of her moods, went to warn her husband Leonard, and set out to prepare her favorite dish for lunch. Leonard tried to distract her with some company and housework before allowing her to go to the cottage to write. He had learned that brooding over her usually made her more anxious and his worrying always made her feel worse. When she said she was going for a walk, he didn’t really suspect a thing, neither did the neighbors who saw her. She loved taking long solitary walks by the river. But this time, she never returned.

The lunch sat idly for hours before a search party was called in the evening. The police followed her footprints to the edge of the river. Leonard looked out for her on the banks until dawn. Her body washed up three weeks later.

I had already read Mrs. Dalloway and admired Woolf’s stream of consciousness monologues – deep and provoking, what it must be like to live inside someone else’s mind, in the limitless complexity of it – before I knew the details of her death. But learning about her suicide definitely laid more gravity to her work. I feel it in all her lonely characters. And looking back on her life, it isn’t hard to trace the layers of brilliance and sadness that plagued it simultaneously.

Her Life

Virginia Woolf was born to writer parents. Her father was a prominent essayist, historian, critic and editor of the Dictionary of National Biography. Her mother, a nurse by profession, wrote a book about it. She and her sister grew up in their father’s vast library and were mostly self-taught, something she resented while all her brothers went to school and university. She showed an affinity to writing early, composing letters and telling stories when she was five. At nine, she started a hand-written magazine with her sister as the illustrator. But at 13, tragedy struck, and her mother died of influenza. Woolf suffered her first nervous breakdown. A sister would also fall ill and die. And later she would disclose her half-brother’s sexual abuse around this time. When her father died, she had an even worse breakdown. She saw hallucinations, heard voices in her head, spoke in a foreign language, tried to jump out of a window, and had to be institutionalized for three months.

After her recovery she and her siblings decided to leave the “house of death” and moved to Bloomsbury. There they became part of a literary group that included TS Eliot, Aldous Huxley and Bertrand Russell. It was a very liberal group who shunned Victorian traditions, having many extramarital homosexual affairs amongst each other. Woolf herself had several affairs with other women, most notably Vita West, the inspiration for Orlando. Her husband, also a member of Bloomsbury, entrusted her care to her other lovers. The group of course influenced and encouraged her work, and though not political, supported the suffrage movement. She and Leonard set up their own printing shop, Hogarth Press, and she was able to publish books on her own. In 1920, they began a Memoir Club, focusing on autobiography. She contributed three books but they would not be published until after her death.

Her Books

The next two decades were her most prolific with Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927 – an almost autobiographical account of Woolf’s childhood summers in St. Ives), Orlando (1928 – where the main male character lives for 300 years and turns into a woman in between is considered the first trans novel), A Room of One’s Own (1929 – a book-length essay based on lectures she gave regarding the lack of opportunity for women writers is considered the first feminist text), The Waves (1931 – rich with the lyrical internal monologues Woolf is known for, the six childhood friends based on members of the Bloomsbury group), The Years (1936 – a family saga over 50 years that experiments with settings of time and space), several plays, and hundreds of essays. While her letters and journals from that time show a more whimsical side. She loved to gossip. She had pet names for family and loved ones – Mongoose for Leonard, Dolphin for her sister Vanessa, and ape for herself.

Her Mind

She was certainly an enigma. And certainly the earlier tragedies were catalysts to her mental illness. Today, she would be treated for bipolar disorder, taking into consideration the possible causes, including her father’s own depression. But back then, mental illness was mostly unknown and completely misunderstood. She was forced to take sedatives, confined to bed, and forbidden to work or write for long periods of time which only made her feel more helpless. One psychiatrist even blamed her mental state on her intelligence and education, believing women were better off simply left to domestic chores at home. She hated the psychiatrists, the forced bed rest, and feared being committed so much she once tried to overdose on barbiturates to avoid being sent back to an institution.

She learned it was actually writing that helped her cope with her illness. She later attributed much of her writing to her own madness. And in this, she not just gave the kind of psychological insight into madness only someone who is truly mad can give, but illuminated it in her groundbreaking prose. With those voices in her head, she pioneered and perfected the stream of consciousness style that would inspire future writers – from Allen Ginsberg and David Foster Wallace to Sadie Smith and Jose Saramago.

It is in this enigma I found my literary heroine. The brilliant mind of a tortured soul. The experimental feminist writer without whom the canon of literature would be incomplete. She was vivacious, inventive, sensitive, moody, even cruel in her madness. In A Room of One’s Own, Woolf wrote that women of genius in repressive societies can’t help but go mad. And in Mrs. Dalloway, the war veteran Septimus, suffering from PTSD, jumps out of the window to his death rather than be taken to a sanitorium. An act Clarissa Dalloway in the book, and I imagine Woolf herself, found so much more dignified. At the beginning of WWII, their Bloomsbury home was destroyed by the Blitz. She and Leonard, who was Jewish, talked of the possibility of being imprisoned by the Germans. She became more agitated and helpless. So it should not be surprising this was her end – feeling the onset of another madness she could not control, she chose to drown herself instead.

Her last note to her husband read –