He categorized her breakdowns into two distinct stages: Leonard, her dedicated lifelong companion, documented her illness with scrupulousness. According to Lee, Woolf’s symptoms conform to the profile of a manic-depressive illness, or bipolar disorder. Though Woolf’s mental illness was periodic and recurrent, as Lee explains, she “was a sane woman who had an illness.” Her “madness” was provoked by life-altering events, notably family deaths, her marriage, or the publication of a novel.
These were the first of her many mental collapses that would sporadically occur throughout her life, until her suicide in March 1941. According to nephew and biographer Quentin Bell, “All that summer she was mad.” The death of her close brother Thoby Stephen, from typhoid fever in November 1906 had a similar effect on Woolf, to such a degree that he would later be re-imagined as Jacob in her first experimental novel Jacob’s Room and later as Percival in The Waves. During this time, Virginia first attempted suicide and was institutionalized. A second severe breakdown followed the death of her father, Leslie Stephen, in 1904. Her unexpected and tragic death caused Virginia to have a mental breakdown at age 13. In May 1895, Virginia’s mother died from rheumatic fever. The Victorian family past filled her fiction, shaped her political analyses of society and underlay the behaviour of her social group.” As biographer Hermione Lee argues “Woolf was a ‘modern’. Woolf’s Victorian upbringing would later influence her decision to participate in the Bloomsbury circle, noted for their original ideas and unorthodox relationships. She later resented the degradation of women in a patriarchal society, rebuking her own father for automatically sending her brothers to schools and university, while she was never offered a formal education. While her brothers Thoby and Adrian were sent to Cambridge, Virginia was educated by private tutors and copiously read from her father’s vast library of literary classics. The Stephen family lived at Hyde Park Gate in Kensington, a respectable English middle class neighborhood. Virginia Adeline Stephen was the third child of Leslie Stephen, a Victorian man of letters, and Julia Duckworth. “Without Virginia Woolf at the center of it, it would have remained formless or marginal…With the death of Virginia Woolf, a whole pattern of culture is broken.”
Eliot describes in his obituary for Virginia. Woolf represents a historical moment when art was integrated into society, as T.S. Her letters and memoirs reveal glimpses of Woolf at the center of English literary culture during the Bloomsbury era. Woolf was a prolific writer, whose modernist style changed with each new novel. Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) was an English novelist, essayist, biographer, and feminist.
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