The brilliant novelist Virginia Woolf used this metaphor to describe her ongoing struggle with mental health in her diary on March 1, 1937, which was 42 years after her first nervous breakdown and four years before she drowned herself. What is most astonishing to me is how she was able to write while experiencing waves of depression, anxiety, and trauma related to sexual abuse at age six. Sometimes she heard voices. Medical treatment at that time consisted of milk and bedrest. And yet, she was one of the most innovative writers of the twentieth century who pushed the structural possibilities of literature.
Bell, Quentin. Virginia Woolf: A Biography, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972, vol. 2, p. 199.
Great post! Thanks for the reminder of this great writer!
And viewers will learn of other contexts of Woolf’s suicide,
discussed in my extended essay, with several images, “Dancing
On Hot Bricks” (2009; commissioned by Rapportage magazine);
.
Original host: Carl Kohler website. My essay’s signature image is
Kohler’s brilliant expressionistic drawing of Woolf. The essay has been
well received, listed as a resource in medical articles on this sad subject.
(Transmitted May 1st, 2024)