And the Rest Is History by Marlene Wagman-Geller Page B

Virginia met the psychoanalyst in 1939 when he had fled Nazi Germany, she wrote in her diary, “A screwed up shrunk very old man: with a monkey’s light eyes, paralyzed spasmodic movements, inarticulate: but alert.”
    During the 1920s Virginia became the high priestess of the Bloomsbury Group, and the Hogarth Press also published her soon-to-be classic novels: Mrs Dalloway , To the Lighthouse , and Orlando . Leonard, an aspiring writer, never envied the success that eluded him; his entry into literary immortality was as Mr. Virginia Woolf.
    However, despite Virginia’s professional acclaim and adored husband, she was never able to keep at bay “the hairy black devils” of her mental instability. On and off, Virginia struggled with anorexia, insomnia, and headaches. What always presaged a complete nervous breakdown was when she began hearing birds singing in Greek. Leonard’s sign of the horror to come was when his brilliant wife began to talk, nonstop, in gibberish. He said of these precursors, “She talked almost without stopping for two to three days, paying no attention to anyone in the room or anything said to her ... Then gradually it became completely incoherent, a mere jumble of dissociated words.” Had it not been for his support, she would have been placed in an asylum. Instead, he ministered to her in her madness, and, when obliged to work, hired nurses.
    The 1920s also saw the birth of Virginia’s affair with the similarly married writer Vita Sackville-West, whose aristocratic family could trace their lineage to William the Conqueror. This relationship resulted in Woolf’s novel Orlando , which she dedicated “to V. Sackville-West.” Vita’s mother was enraged at the book, which exposed what she had tried so hard to conceal—her daughter’s fondness for women. She referred to Virginia as “the Virgin Woolf.” Leonard hailed his wife’s book as a groundbreaking literary masterpiece. He was also there to pick up the pieces of his wife’s heart when Vita cast Virginia away for another woman.
    Leonard never condemned his wife’s affairs. He remained committed to his tenet that Virginia’s happiness was his greatest good. Virginia also reciprocated his affection. She wrote in her diary, “Love-making—after 25 years can’t bear to be separate ... you see it is enormous pleasure being wanted: a wife. And our marriage so complete.”
    While the 1920s brought literary fame and Vita into Virginia’s life, the 1930s brought ever mounting depression. In 1935 Leonard and Virginia, along with their pet marmoset Mitzy, who liked to perch on Leonard’s shoulder, drove through Germany and saw the growing horrors of Nazism. Virginia had relinquished her earlier anti-Semitism and wrote to a friend, “My Jew has more religion in one toenail—more human love, in one hair.”
    In 1940, while the Woolfs were staying in their country home, Monk’s House, near the village of Rodmell in Sussex, they received the devastating news that their London home had been destroyed by the Luftwaffe . They were forced to remain in Sussex, which exacerbated Virginia’s psychological frailty, cutting her off from her circle of friends and the distractions of London. Moreover, the two realized that if the Nazis took over England, Leonard, as a Jew and an intellectual, would be sent to a concentration camp. The couple made a suicide pact: If Leonard was ever in danger of imprisonment they would shut their garage door, take a lethal dose of morphine, and end their lives together.
    The specter of world events, ones that threatened Leonard, her only emotional life jacket, contributed to Virginia’s ever-evolving web of depression. As with all the other onsets of her breakdowns, her words and writing began to slip away; the birds once more began to sing in Greek. In 1941, Virginia Woolf, her pockets laden with stones, journeyed