"And I haven't said anything very much, or given you any notion of the terrific high waves, and the
infernal deep gulfs, on which I mount and toss in a few days...." Letters, 3, 237.

But she does say enough and does give us a notion of what was wrong. Even if there was no other evidence, Virginia Woolf's
own account of herself in her diaries, letters, and autobiographical writings yields ample evidence about the nature of her illness,
She writes about her swings to elation and down to depression when they are mild and not incapacitating; she writes descriptions of her major illnesses in retrospect, and she writes as few others have done about the relationship between her writing and the creativity engendered by illness. More intelligent, more sensitive, more verbal, and more insightful than most of the psychiatrically disordered, her testimony is courageous and informative.

Her husband Leonard also deserves praise. Less emotional, careful about facts to the point of pedantry, he recorded her
symptoms carefully over the years, and wrote about them accurately in his volumes of autobiography.
"But as far as symptoms were concerned, Virginia was suffering from manic-depressive insanity." (Beginning Again,p.161)
He has had little thanks and much abuse for his objectivity. Maligned as a controlling husband, when he was striving to carry out the medical advice he had been given, he has been accused of holding her back when he probably did much to keep her in good health for many years. Anyone familiar with the burdens of living with and caring for a spouse with affective illness must express admiration for his fortitude. Relatives have to be cheerful when the patient is depressed, and when the patient suddenly becomes well and ebullient, the carer is left struggling in his or her wake, unable to cope with rapid swings of mood. Leonard deserves praise and admiration too.

Lastly, her doctors. They made many mistakes, as would have any other doctors of the period. They were distinguished
practitioners, and most of their failings were shared by the whole profession at the time. Perusal of their textbooks has shown
them to be more skilled diagnostically than they have been given credit for, and although they had no effective treatments, they did their best and do not deserve the obloquy that has been heaped upon them.

In the face of the overwhelming evidence for manic-depressive psychosis, the illness of poets and writers, it is time to dismiss
much of the amateurish psychoanalytic speculation that Virginia Woolf has been exposed to for too long. Psychodynamic ideas
have a useful place in discussing her relations with her parents, and the effects of childhood sexual abuse on her adult sexuality
and on her personality; they can be used to discuss the content of her unhappiness, but do not explain her illness.

It is unfortunate that literary criticism has been so resistant to modern psychiatric knowledge, and to the facts as they were made clear so many years ago by Virginia Woolf, her husband and her foremost biographer, Quentin Bell, who also had the courage, when writing about a family member, to tell the truth about her illness.
 
 

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