This afternoon I picked up Virginia Woolf's first volume of diary again and was completely absorbed yet again - there's something about journals, about looking in through someone else's window on the world, hearing their thoughts - or those thoughts and events that they saw fit to write about - that has this fascination to me - that they, at that time, on that day were thinking about these things. What strikes me about Virginia Woolf from her diary is how connected she was - always seeing people, lunching with people, walking with people, and of course this very warm loving ( yes I'd use that word specifically) relationship with Leonard. As I was reading I came to a gap. The last entry of the 1915 diary is on 15th February, she has just bought a dress. Then there is nothing until Friday 3rd August 1917. Apparently back on the 16th February 1915 she had a headache, and then in Anne Bell's words "... from then onwards, with increasingly sleepless nights and restless aching days, she slid inexorably into madness" (The Diary of Virginia Woolf Vol 1 1915-19, Penguin Edition, p13). Apparently from June she began to improve, then from November she no longer needed a nurse and she " slowly returned to normal life, shaken, older-looking and heavier" (ibid). Of course she had had episodes of mental illness before, but this episode seems so sudden and violent, with no obvious cause. Leonard Woolf dared not see her for two months as she "took against" him.
I went to an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in 2014 - there were portraits and letters as well including the last heart breaking letter that she left for Leonard before she walked into the River Ouse with her cardigan pocket full of stones. It was a tremendously upsetting thing to see and read. Of course I'm reading the journals of Sylvia Plath too. Both women with so much sensitivity, energy and life it hardly bears belief that they both committed suicide.
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