A room of her own
No author has captured the existential dread of modern life like Virginia Woolf. Her transgressive writing focused on the tedium and boredom of adulthood, on the decorum of civilization, and the interior lives of every on the planet. Like her characters, Woolf was impossible to really know. Whether you're reading "A Room Of One's Own," "To The Lighthouse," or "Orlando," Woolf's characters each lead rich lives inside their heads while rarely making a peep in polite conversation.
She took her own life on March 28, 1941, but this colorized photo of the author gives new life to someone who most audiences see as dreary and dour. Unlike the black and white photos of Woolf that permeate her biographies, this retouched shot makes her look like someone you could run into on the street, someone that you would want to help.
Born Adeline Virginia Stephen in January 1882, the young author spent much of her early life in London. She grew up at 22 Hyde Park Gate in Kensington, the same area where Winston Churchill spent the last years of his life following World War II. Her father, Sir Leslie Stephen was an esteemed author and biographer whose work influenced his literary daughter but not in the way he hoped.
Virginia was still living at home when she enrolled at King's College London where she studied the classics at the "King’s Ladies’ department" between 1897 and 1901 while her brothers were enrolled at Trinity College Cambridge. This clear disparity in how her education was stunted simply because of her gender became something that was touched on in many of her most beloved works.
The outskirts of agony
Following the death of her father in 1904, the Stephen family moved out of their dreary home. Virginia and her half-brother George spent a month on the coast of Pembrokeshire, where she realized that she wanted to be an author. Then it was off to France where things once again grew dark. Virginia suffered a nervous breakdown on the trip and attempted to commit suicide in May 1905. After taking to bed for a few weeks she and her brother Adrian traveled to Portugal and Spain.
In 1906, Virginia's brother Thoby passed away from typhoid and a year later her sister Vanessa was married. This led Virginia to move once again. She moved to a home in Fitzroy Square in London and this is where she began work on her first novel, The Voyage Out. She continued to move from house to house while she was being courted by Leonard Woolf. Following their marriage in 1912, she suffered another mental breakdown which pushed the publication of her novel back to 1915. She followed that up with her second novel, Night and Day, before releasing a collection of experimental short stories that still define her writing style today.
Wild mood swings
Throughout Woolf's life she went through a series of manic episodes that were then referred to as "madness," although today she would be diagnosed as bipolar. Woolf was wealthy enough that she was able to receive treatment for her mental health, but more often that not she was put on bed rest or placed in private hospitals for women with similar disorders.
From the time Woolf was a teenager to her death she was dealing with wild mood swings that no one really understood how to treat, especially not in the Victorian era. Woolf herself described her ever-changing mental state as the "lava of madness." Even when she was feeling well she knew that something dark was bubbling below the surface of her happy disposition. In 1930 she wrote to composer Elizabeth Smith:
As an experience, madness is terrific I can assure you, 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. And the six months—not three—that I lay in bed taught me a good deal about what is called oneself.
Submerged truth
As Woolf's lava of madness churned away in her head she found a way to write works that not only distilled the experience of the middle and upper classes of England in the 1920s and '30s, but she crafted a way to speak about depression and the ennui of seeing the world around you change. It's clear from novels like Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse that Woolf never strayed far from the darkest parts of her imagination even when she was able to function in a neural typical fashion.
Woolf deconstructed class in her work while telling the stories of the wealthy, but she was giving a name to the gloom that she felt all around her. She may have been primarily an author of fiction, but in her essay A Room of One's Own she writes that the best fiction comes from a place of truth:
Fiction must stick to facts, and the truer the fact the better the fiction - so we are told.
Woolf's final days
What was it that finally pushed Woolf over the edge? Her depression, ever ebbing and flowing like the tides, had caused her to attempt suicide multiple times, but in 1941 she finally succeeded in taking her own life. At the onset of World War II, Woolf's mood grew gloomy. She constantly fought with her husband over his decision to join the Home Guard, and critical praise for her work was chilly.
In her diary at the time Woolf writes of an obsession with death. Reading it now it's clear what she was about to do, but these things often only spell themselves out in hindsight. On March 28, 1941, Woolf filled the pockets of her overcoat with rocks and walked into the River Ouse where she drowned. She left a note for her husband which read:
Dearest, I feel certain that I am going mad again. I feel we can't go through another of those terrible times. And I shan't recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can't concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do. You have given me the greatest possible happiness. You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I don't think two people could have been happier till this terrible disease came. I can't fight it any longer. I know that I am spoiling your life, that without me you could work. And you will I know. You see I can't even write this properly. I can't read. What I want to say is I owe all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good. I want to say that—everybody knows it. If anybody could have saved me it would have been you. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can't go on spoiling your life any longer. I don't think two people could have been happier than we have been. V.
