With the death of her mother in 1895, Virginia experienced her first nervous breakdown at the age of 13. In 1904, she suffered another breakdown when her father died, although she was soon well enough to begin working for a clerical paper and, later, reviewing with the Times Literary Supplement.
In 1912, she married Leonard Woolf, and the couple came to be considered part of the "Bloomsbury Group." This circle of avant-garde writers, artists, and philosophers was known for challenging artistic, sexual, and moral norms of the late Victorian era and documenting - in flagrant detail - their often homosexual affairs with one another in prolific diaries and letters.
In 1917, the Woolfs acquired a small printing press as a means of therapy for Virginia. The Hogarth Press would publish Virginia's own works and other significant modernist authors, including T.S. Eliot, as well as the first English translation of the works of Freud.
Virginia finished her first novel, The Voyage Out, in 1913 but did not see it published until two years later as a result of a severe breakdown which she would describe in letters and fiction the rest of her life. "I married, and then my brains went up in a shower of fireworks. As an experience, madness is terrific … 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." She would later say that this first novel was conventional, in contrast to the experimental nature of her later works, and that she wrote it "mainly to prove my own satisfaction that I could keep entirely off that dangerous ground." Among her more famous works are Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, The Waves, Orlando, and A Room of One's Own.
Woolf continued to suffer mood swings and breakdowns throughout her life. Her last novel, Between the Acts, was almost completed when she committed suicide at the age of 59 by walking into the River Ouse with a large rock in her pocket - an androgynous modernist casualty of manic depressive psychosis.
Note: Quotes cited from Virginia Woolf's Psychiatric History, Malcolm Ingram's homepage
(I. M. Ingram, MD, retired consultant psychiatrist with Southern General Hospital of Glasgow and professor at the University of Glasgow.
