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THE LIFE OF Virginia Woolf was an extended and desperate agon with psychosis. When she was thirteen, her mother died and Virginia Stephen collapsed. At twenty-two, she lost her father, Leslie Stephen, philosopher and historian, and again broke down. Eight years later, she married Leonard Woolf. The union lasted until her suicide and undoubtedly sustained her, but it is unlikely the marriage was ever consummated. Her lesbian relationship with the bad poet but great gardener Vita Sackville-West continued on and off for a decade, but then ended because of Vita's frequent escapades with both female and male lovers. Another cause of the rift was Vita's fascist sympathies.
A third crisis lasted for three years, from age thirty to thirty-three. Finally, under the terrible stress of German air bombardment, Woolf drowned herself at the age of fifty-nine.