Virginia Woolf (1882–1941), one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century, remains well worth reading. Lovers of English literature admire her wonderful style, and advocates of women’s rights appreciate the sentiments she expressed in her essay “A Room of One’s Own”. During most of her life she was afflicted by intense mood swings between depression and manic excitement, and she had what she called episodes of “madness” when she hallucinated and had severe, near-catatonic withdrawals. Many modern psychiatrists believe that at least some of her symptoms would now be interpreted as bipolar disorder.

In 1895 her mother, Julia Stephen, died suddenly, and Virginia, only thirteen years old, suffered her first breakdown. Two years later, the death of her half-sister Stella intensified her psychological fragility. She had frequent relapses of her symptoms, and it has been suggested that sexual abuse by her half-brothers during adolescence may have contributed to some of her later mental illness.

Woolf also suffered from severe headaches and periodic fever, retrospectively diagnosed by some as complications of influenza or undiagnosed lupus. She may also have had an eating disorder. Her illnesses gave her unique insights and intensified her stream-of-consciousness narrative techniques. In her essay “On Being Ill”, she examines how illness disrupts the personality, forcing individuals to confront their vulnerability and to see the external world in a new light.

Medical treatment of mental disorders in Woolf’s time was based on rest, isolation, and heavy sedation. She was subjected to the “rest cure,” a common treatment for women in the Victorian and Edwardian periods. This regimen, also described by Charlotte Gilman in The Yellow Wallpaper, included forced isolation, excessive bed rest, overfeeding, and the prohibition of intellectual stimulation such as reading and writing, an approach that likely exacerbated her distress.

Her doctors also frequently prescribed chloral hydrate for insomnia and bromides for anxiety—now known to have significant side effects and addictive properties. Gender biases in medicine often caused her symptoms to be dismissed as mere “nervous disorders” or “feminine complaints” rather than being seen as serious medical conditions.

Woolf’s husband, Leonard Woolf, played a central role in managing her health and disease. A political writer and a key figure in the Bloomsbury Group, he was her caregiver for much of the time. Recognizing the importance of providing a quiet environment and minimizing stress, he was more progressive than many doctors of the time, especially in opposing unnecessary institutionalization. His devotion was vital in allowing Woolf to write her many masterpieces, including Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927), both of which explore themes of mental instability and perception.

Woolf’s perceptive critique of the great masters of English literature makes her two volumes of The Common Reader particularly worth reading. In “On Not Knowing Greek” she writes: “It is vain and foolish to talk of knowing Greek, since in our ignorance we should be at the bottom of the class, since we do not know how the words sounded, or where precisely we ought to laugh, and how the actors acted…and it is more strange, then, that we should wish to know Greek, try to know Greek, be forever be drawn back to Greek.”

Also, in her first volume of The Common Reader, she advises that if you wish to be remembered three hundred years hence, your best approach might be to keep a diary, as did John Evelyn. There is also much to be said in reading her essays on Defoe, Addison, George Eliot, Charlotte Bronte, and her excellent description of Margaret Cavendish, the Dutchess of Newcastle, as “garish in her dress, eccentric in her habits, chaste in her conduct, course in her speech,” succeeding during her lifetime “to draw upon her the ridicule of the great and the applause of the learned.”

The second volume of The Common Reader features chapters on the Sentimental Journey by Laurence Sterne, who finds “they order these matters better in France,” and writes about Lord Chesterfield’s letters to his son, whom he wants to cultivate the Graces: “Let us return to oratory, or to the art of speaking well; which should never be entirely out of our thoughts.” He tells this seven-year-old boy that “a man can make no figure without it in parliament or the church or in the lawyer, and he advises him to study oratory and master the art of speaking well, never abuse people, devote his mornings to study and his evenings to good society, dress as the best people dress, behave as they behave, and never be eccentric egotistical or absent-minded.”

In her essay on Thomas De Quincey, Woolf comments on how he suffered from a tendency to meditate too much and observe too little. In Dr. Burney’s Evening Party, the pompous Mr. Greville stands in front of the fireplace on a cold evening until Dr. Samuel Johnson, old and almost blind, suddenly raises himself from his silent abstractions and announces that, “If it were not for depriving the ladies of the fire, I would like to stand upon the hearth myself.” Woolf relates that the effect of this outburst brought the house down. It was as good as comedy, all faces twitching with amusement until Greville slunk away to a chair, rang the bell “with force,” and demanded his carriage.

Also in the second Common Reader, Virginia Woolf describes how at another literary poetry evening, a little woman dressed in black suddenly rose from her chair and stepped to the center of the room to solemnly announce, “I am Christina Rossetti,” and having said that, returned to her seat. Woolf implies that what she really meant was, “I am a famous poet, and here you are, ignoramuses, rambling about unimportant trifles.”

There are also other essays worth reading such as the ones on William Hazlitt, Thomas Hardy, and Robinson Crusoe, as well as several books. The Voyage Out, her first book written in 1915, is about a cruise in the Mediterranean by a romantic young girl called Rachel, who remembers Lord Macauley’s poetry, among others:

Lars Porsena of Clusium
By the Nine Gods he swore
That the great house of Tarquin
Should suffer wrong no more.

In Woolf’s essay, Rachel dies from typhoid fever; Mrs. Ramsey, who in To the Lighthouse reflects on her past life, dies suddenly in the middle of the night; and Orlando is constantly changing from man to woman and from woman to man. It is in that latter book that Virginia Woolf reflects:

No passion is stronger in man’s breast than the desire to make others believe as he believes. Nothing so cuts at the root of his happiness and fills him with rage as the sense that another rate low what he rates high… Not love of truth but desire to prevail sets quarter against quarter and men against men.

The relationship between Woolf’s creativity and her illness remains a subject of ongoing medical and literary analysis. Tragically, her struggle with mental illness culminated in her suicide in 1941, when, facing another episode of depression and fearing the return of psychotic symptoms, she filled her pockets with stones and walked into the River Ouse. She left a suicide note expressing her love for Leonard and her despair in feeling that she was going mad again and not wanting to go through another of those terrible times that had dominated so much of her life.