When I started this work I  felt so surprised with the personality of Virginia Woolf. 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.

"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.

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.