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PERSONALITY

There are many descriptions of her mature personality; indeed, the oral and written recollections of twenty-eight friends, relatives and servants have been published (Noble,72). They paint a consistent picture of an inconsistent individual. She was a mixture of shyness and liveliness. She 'was shy and awkward, often silent, or, if in the mood to talk, would leap into fantasy and folly and terrify the innocent and unprepared.'(Angelica Garnett). She was 'enormously generous.' 'Shop assistants made her feel shy and out of place'(ibid). Away from social life, she was a workaholic like her father. 'Leonard has said that of the sixteen hours of her waking life, Virginia was working fifteen hours in one way or another.'(John Lehmann).

Fellow writers elaborate on the extraverted side of her character. Elizabeth Bowen noted that 'her power in conveying enjoyment was extraordinary. And her laughter was entrancing. It was outrageous laughter, almost a child's laughter. Whoops of laughter, if anything amused her. ......She was awfully naughty. She was fiendish. She could say things about people, all in a flash, which remained with one. Fleetingly malicious, rather than outright cruel.'

Rosamond Lehmann confirms all this: 'Her conversation was a brilliant mixture of reminiscence, gossip, extravagantly fanciful
speculation and serious critical discussion of books and pictures. She was malicious and she liked to tease.....she gave an
impression of quivering nervous excitement, of a spirit balanced at a pitch of intensity impossible to sustain without collapse......She loved jokes, cracked them herself without decorum, and laughed at those of others.'

Her sense of fun showed in her dealings with children. She was fond of them and they enjoyed her company. Her future
biographer, Quentin Bell, was one who, in childhood, looked forward to her visits 'more than anything.' 'Virginia's coming - what fun we shall have'.(Clive Bell)

Frances Marshall says 'Argument was not her forte, but wild generalisations based on the flimsiest premises and embroidered with elaborate fantasy...'
In a television interview in 1967 her husband said: '.....the way that her mind worked when she was perfectly sane. First of all, in her own conversation she would do what I called "leaving the ground". Suddenly she would begin telling one something quite
ordinary, and incident she'd seen in the street or something like that; and when her mind seemed to get completely off the ground she would give the most fascinating and amusing description of something fantastic, quite unlike anything that anyone other than herself would have thought of, which would last for about five or ten minutes.'The young Stephen Spender often attended informal dinner parties given by the Woolfs. 'When entertaining she would, at the start of the evening, be nervous, preoccupied with serving the drinks. Her handshake and her smile of welcome would perhaps be a little distraught.' He was surprised, in the Thiries, that she often cooked and served the meal. She would often smoke a cheroot after dinner. The talk would be of literature, sometimes of politics, when she would fall silent and let the men talk. She loved to talk about social class divisions, and about the Royal Family, sometimes to the point of tedium, Spender thought. Despite her interest she did not approve of honours and refused the C.H. proffered in 1935.

Spender too saw her malicious side. She had one or two friends she cast in the role of jester and told anecdotes about - Ethel
Smyth and Hugh Walpole were constant targets of gossip.
The picture that emerges from reminiscences is remarkably consistent. Socially she was a talkative, formidably intelligent, witty,
and humorous woman. With friends she was talkative, given to flights of fancy, and fond of jokes and gossip. Even in private she talked. When her new housekeeper arrived in 1934, she was surprised: 'The floors in Monks House were very thin, the bathroom was directly above the kitchen and when Mrs Woolf was having her bath before breakfast I could hear her talking to herself. On and on she went, talk, talk, talk: asking questions and giving herself the answers. I thought there must be two or three people up there with her.....it startled me in the mornings for quite some time'.

She was often malicious. Shy at first in company, and ill at ease with strangers and those outwith her circle and social class, she
was warm and affectionate with children and intimates. At times carried away by her fantastical imagination, she had difficulty in
projecting herself into others work and lives and feelings. It was characteristic that she interrogated everyone she met about the
details of their lives. She wanted to know all the details of peoples lives. "Now what did you do,exactly, what did you do?",
Elizabeth Bowen remembers her asking, both of adults and children, making them scrutinise their lives, pinning them down, and of course provide her with copy.

Her love of fantasy led her to tease. If someone gave her a humdrum account of a holiday abroad, she would invent adventures
they must have had, which became more and more extravagant and unlikely as they developed.

Her friends saw little of the depressive side of her nature, probably because Leonard was ever alert for warning signs, and insisted that she withdraw from social life immediately they appeared. And the history of her attacks suggests that even when very depressed she could dissemble socially.

There is nothing in her friends' descriptions to suggest the oddity, the barrier to communication, met with in the recovered
schizophrenic. She could be rude at times, even snobbish, but she never experienced the slightest difficulty in communication - on the contrary. Friends delighted in her conversation, and many thought her the wittiest conversationalist of a highly articulate circle.

Mystical experience was not part of her public persona, but she had strange feelings of unreality when she was a child in 1894,
looking at a puddle in Hyde Park Gardens. She recalled this in her 1940 reminiscences:'when for no reason I could discover,
everything suddenly became unreal; I was suspended, I could not step across a puddle: I tried to touch something.....the whole
world became unreal' She quotes the puddle in The Waves, and writes in her diary of the 'semi-mystic very profound life of a
woman.' There are no other 'normal' abnormal experiences in her life; all other psychological symptoms are related in time and
character to her affective illnesses.

SUMMARY

The Virginia Woolf her friends knew was a cheerful witty and talkative woman, the kind of personality often associated with
manic-depressive psychosis. Friends of such patients characteristically say that when well they are the last people they would
believe liable to depression. Often such a personality is described as hypomanic - the individual who always seems one drink
ahead of the rest of the company without the aid of alcohol; ebullient, fond of jokes, flights of fancy, teasing, and overtalkative. In the years from 1915 until her death this is the personality which her friends saw and remembered.