XV

ON JANUARY 25, 1941, Virginia Woolf reached the age of fifty-nine. She did not suffer from the usual infirmities of advancing age, like deafness or loss of memory, and although she told several people that her hands had begun to tremble, there is no sign of this in her manuscripts, which remained clear and distinguished till the end. Her letters were cheerful, and those she wrote to Vita were especially affectionate, as if she was appealing for a renewal of their love: “How I long to hear from your own lips what’s been worrying you—for you’ll never shake me off—no!” “How much I depend on you, and should mind any word that annoyed or hurt you.” Again: “What can one say—except that I love you, and I’ve got to live through this strange quiet evening thinking of you sitting alone.” They were reunited by the experience of the war, their neighbor counties, Sussex and Kent, being the most vulnerable to invasion and the skies above them scarred by the same planes in combat. Vita once managed to make the journey to Rodmell in spite of petrol rationing. On February 17, she spent a night there, and lectured to the village Women’s Institute on her journeys to Persia. It was the last time that the two women met.

Almost to the end Virginia was capable of much enjoyment and intensive work. After her death Leonard discovered as many as eight drafts of a review she had written of a biography of Mrs. Thrale, her last piece of criticism, and while revising Between the Acts she was also toying with Anon, her history of literature. She was enjoying her household chores—making butter, beating carpets, arranging books—and visitors saw little change in her manner. This was Elizabeth Bowen’s recollection of a two-night visit in February: “I remember her kneeling back on the floor—we were tacking away, mending a torn Spanish curtain in the house—and she sat back on her heels, and put her head back in a patch of sun, early spring sun. Then she laughed in this consuming, choking, delightful, hooting way. That is what has remained with me.”

Her diary offers some more somber clues. On January 26 she wrote that she was “in a trough of despair,” but it seemed short-lived; and on March 8 she wrote of “my despondency,” but “I shall conquer this mood, and I will go down with flying colours.” Various things contributed to her depression. The war, of course, and the renewed threat of invasion in the spring; the destruction of her two London homes; the rationing of basic foods; the difficulty of travel; Angelica’s love affair with David Garnett (whom she later married), which Virginia considered “grotesque” given their disparity in age. More important was her fear of failure as a writer. Leonard’s criticism of Roger Fry may still have rankled, but it was mainly Between the Acts that worried her. She thought it foolish, not worth publishing. She told her new doctor, Octavia Wilberforce, at the end of December that it was “a completely worthless book,” and her disappointment with it never left her during the remaining months of her life. Although Leonard genuinely praised the book, thinking it “better than anything she has written,” as he told her American publisher, Donald Brace, Virginia was insistent that it needed extensive revision, if not canceling altogether. This was not merely her usual reaction on finishing a book. It was something more terrible. She sensed a decline in her creative energy. “I’ve lost all power over words,” she told Dr. Wilberforce, “can’t do a thing with them.” What was the point of living if she was never again to understand the shape of the world around her, or be able to describe it? In any case, who cared about books in wartime? “Its difficult, I find, to write,” she told another friend. “No audience. No private stimulus, only this outer roar.” To end her life at this point was like ending a book: it had a certain artistic integrity.

It is only in retrospect that her intimates recognized the signs of approaching disaster. Vanessa “never suspected the danger.” Vita and Ethel Smyth thought her no more affected by the war than they all were, and her letters gave them no other clue. Leonard in his autobiography said that he “had no foreboding until the beginning of 1941,” and that it was not until January 25 that she showed the “first symptoms of serious mental disturbance.” She had begun to hear voices. She ate but little. She was advised by Dr. Wilberforce, who had become her closest confidante, that she should stop working for a space: she needed rest, and as far as wartime rationing allowed, a proper diet. Virginia would not heed these warnings. She sensed that she was going mad again, and although she well knew that rest had cured her before, she was convinced that she would never recover this time. It was better to die while she was sane than linger on as a burden to others. But there was nobody with whom she could discuss it. If she opened her heart to Leonard, Vanessa or even Wilberforce, they would put her under constraints to prevent her from harming herself. She must escape them, and face them with the accomplished fact.

She left three suicide notes behind her. Joanne Trautmann and I brooded over them for a long time (the originals are in the British Library), and came to a conclusion different from Leonard’s and Quentin Bell’s, who believed that she had written all three on the day of her suicide. We concluded from the evidence of the letters themselves that she had first attempted to kill herself on March 18, 1941. She arrived back at Monk’s House dripping wet, and told Leonard that she had fallen by accident into a water-filled ditch. He had not found the letter that she had left for him, and suspected nothing. It was the most significant of the three, and I give it in full:

Tuesday

Dearest, I feel certain that I am going mad again: I feel we cant go through another of those terrible times. And I shant recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and cant 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 dont think two people could have been happier till this terrible disease came. I cant fight it any longer, I know that I am spoiling your life, that without me you could work. And you will I know. You see I cant even write this properly. I cant read. What I want to say is that 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 cant go on spoiling your life any longer.

I dont think two people could have been happier than we have been.

 

After writing this letter, she lived another ten days. In her diary, which she continued to write until March 24, there was no hint of what she had done or intended to do. She wrote a similar letter to Vanessa, but hid it with her first letter to Leonard, and simulated calm. Although Leonard was aware that she might be on the verge of a major breakdown, he reasoned that if he bothered her, or appeared to be monitoring her every movement, he might drive her to take the very action that noninterference might avert. He did, however, persuade her, much against her will, to visit Dr. Wilberforce in Brighton on March 27, but nothing much resulted from the consultation. Wilberforce said afterward that she foresaw no immediate danger and counseled Virginia, once again, to rest. On the same day Virginia wrote to John Lehmann telling him not to publish Between the Acts: “its too silly and trivial.”

Next morning, Friday, March 28, 1941, she went as usual to her garden lodge, and having spent some time there alone, she wrote a second, shorter, letter to Leonard, repeating the sense of the first. Leaving it in the lodge, she took her two earlier letters into the house and put them where Leonard would find them. Then, about midday, she walked the half mile to the River Ouse, and thrusting a large stone into the pocket of her fur coat, she threw herself into the water. Although she could swim, she forced herself to drown. It must have been a terrifying death.

Leonard, on discovering her notes, searched the river bank and saw her walking stick floating on the surface, but no sign of her. There was little doubt what had happened. He told Vanessa, who by chance called at Monk’s House that afternoon, and wrote one letter, to Vita: “I do not want you to see in the paper or hear possibly on the wireless the terrible thing that has happened to Virginia. . . .”

Vita hoped that they would never find her body: “I hope that it will be carried out to sea.” But three weeks later it was found by some children who thought it was a floating log washed up by the bridge at Southease, not far from the place where she had drowned herself. After the inquest, she was cremated at Brighton, with only Leonard as a witness, and her ashes were interred in the garden at Rodmell, with the last words of The Waves as her epitaph:

 

Against you I will fling myself unvanquished and unyielding, O Death.