Fifty-five years ago, on a brisk March morning, the novelist Virginia Woolf walked from her country house at Rodmell, in Sussex, England, to the banks of the nearby River Ouse. There she lay down her walking stick and picked up a large stone, forcing it into the pocket of her coat. Then she walked on. The stone did the trick; it was three weeks before her body surfaced on the far shore.
To Leonard, her husband, she had left a note propped on the mantelpiece. Dearest, it read, I feel certain I am going mad again . . . and I shan’t recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can’t concentrate. . . . I don’t think two people could have been happier till this terrible disease came. . . . V.
The diary Woolf kept from 1915 until four days before her suicide suggests that her terrible disease may have been manic depression, now also known as bipolar illness. This condition, classed by psychiatrists as a mood disorder, involves a series of emotional peaks and valleys that over time often become higher, lower, and closer together. Some sufferers experience deep depressions and moderate manic episodes; others have moderate, short-lived depressions but become so manic they begin to hallucinate.
Woolf’s depressive episodes were cyclic--sometimes seasonal, sometimes connected with finishing a book. Yet in between her depressions and episodes of outright mania, she managed to be highly productive and was often lively and charming. I always felt on leaving her that I had drunk two glasses of excellent champagne, her friend Nigel Nicolson has recalled. She was a life enhancer.
If accurate, the diagnosis of bipolar disease puts Woolf in impressive company. It’s not just that she is thereby entitled to join the ranks of mad artists who have always figured in the popular image of creativity. Bipolar illness elevates her to a more elite group. Over the past two decades a swelling chorus of psychologists, psychiatrists, and even a few neuroscientists have begun to suggest that bipolar illness somehow enhances the ability to make art. This mysterious and still hypothetical link, they say, may account for the persistence of the more generalized hoary stereotype.
