Virginia Woolf-Suicide

This is Virginia Woolf's note to her husband, Leonard Woolf, explaining her suicide, on March 28, 1941. She was fifty-nine years old.  Today she probably would be diagnosed with bipolar disorder.  She had established herself as one of the great Modernist authors.

Dearest,

I feel certain 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 till 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.

*****

In June 2018 I entered a blog post "Suicide" the subject of which were the suicides of Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain, both popular cultural figures.  In that post I stated, "Albert Camus, a philosopher and author, held that suicide is the central philosophical concern. Camus in “The Myth of Sisyphus” stated “There is only one really serious philosophical question, and that is suicide.”  Suicide is rarely an issue until something goes wrong and there is a deficit of meaning. Woolf was plagued by her mental condition throughout her lifetime. Indeed, when she revealed Mrs. Ramsay's assumptions about life in "To the Lighthouse" which were: "She took a look at life . . .  A sort of transaction went on between them, in which she was on one side, and life was on another, and she was always trying to get the better of it, as it was of her" these were assumptions she probably shared. It seems for Woolf life finally "got the better of it" and the prescient words that Mr. Ramsay uttered in the novel, "we perish, each alone" prevailed for Virginia Woolf as they shall for each of us.