A brief story about Virginia Woolf : The tragedy of a creative spirit

Virginia Woolf was born Adeline Virginia Stephen on January 25, 1882 .

Virginia Woolf the writer of Mrs. Dalloway (1925) , Orlando: A biography (1928) , The lighthouse (1927) , A room of one's own (1929) , The waves (1931) .. and many other books .

The foremost modernist and feminist literary figures of the twentieth century.

She has been a victim of several nervous breakdowns since a young age after the death of her parents and her sister . 

On 1912 she met a fellow writer named Leonard Woolf. Virginia married Leonard and in 1917 they started "Hogarth Press" which operated out of their home in London.

 Yet “Her comfortable marriage did not assuage periods of depression, prompted by self-doubts and, to a lesser extent, world affairs” (Gracer 2)

She has always been afraid of the next nervous breakdown waiting at the corner.

Her mental instability was thought due to nest of bacteria in the roots of her teeth and, in an attempt to cure her, her psychiatrist, George Savage ,recommended she have three of her teeth pulled in June of 1922.

Virginia was still suffering , serious mood swings followed with a severe depression , She wrote to a friend in a letter  :“I’m so cross. Three teeth pulled out that might have lasted a lifetime, and temperature still up. Next they’ll cut out my tonsils, and then I suppose adenoids, and then appendix, and then — what comes next?”

She lost all hope in treatments and gave up on her psychiatrist . 

Her husband had been supporting and he dedicated a great part of his life observing , caring and trying to study her case . 

In his autobiography "Beginning again", Leonad , wrote : 

"I am sure that, when she had a breakdown, there was a moment when she passed from what can be rightly called sanity to insanity. ... In all these cases of breakdown there were two distinct stages which are technically called manic-depressive. In the manic stage she was extremely excited; the mind raced; she talked volubly and, at the height of the attack, incoherently; she had delusions and heard voices, for instance she told me that in her second attack she heard the birds in the garden outside her window talking Greek; she was violent with the nurses. During the depressive stage all her thoughts and emotions were the exact opposite of what they had been in the manic stage" (Beginning Again 76)’” 

Virginia would isolate herself to write , deprive herself from sleep and from food .. 

She was possessed by her passion and pushed foreward by her disease . 

She is the one who said : “Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.” ,  “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” , and Leonard gave her that room where she would go and stay for days writing .

She was the one who dared to imagine what if Sheakspear had a sister  and the one who gave her characters a steady life that she could not have for herself and portrayed her emotions into every line she wrote.

She was "Rooted but she flows " .

She gave a new definition for feminisme , as for her " A feminist is any woman who tells the truth about her life " . 

She loved life and loved art and loved her husband . 

On 1941 , her house had been wrecked by a bomb by the Germans . 

The Woolf family had to move , which caused an instability and a threat to Virginia's mental state . 

She saw a mental breakdown waiting for her . 

She felt It deep inside .. 

Virginia Woolf the great author who said " You cannot find peace by avoiding life ".

The one who wnated to explore the unseen and to defy the banality of her daily life : “I have a deeply hidden and inarticulate desire for something beyond the daily life.” disappeared one evening and left This note to Leonard :

 “Dearest, I feel certain that I am going mad again. I feel we can’t go through another of those terrible times. And I shan’t recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can’t concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do. You have given me the greatest possible happiness. You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I don’t think two people could have been happier ’til this terrible disease came. I can’t fight any longer. I know that I am spoiling your life, that without me you could work. And you will I know. You see I can’t even write this properly. I can’t read. What I want to say is I owe all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good. I want to say that — everybody knows it. If anybody could have saved me it would have been you. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can’t go on spoiling your life any longer. I don’t think two people could have been happier than we have been. V.”

Three weeks later, some children made the gruesome discovery when Virginia’s body washed up near the bridge at Southease .

Her body had been buried under one of the two close trees in her backyard, which she had nicknamed “Virginia and Leonard.” .Leonard marked the spot with a stone tablet orned with the last lines from her novel "The waves":

“Against you I fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death! 
The waves broke on the shore.”