The Marriage of Heaven and Hell by Peter Dally

Acknowledgements
    I am grateful to the Librarian, University of Sussex Library for permission to quote from the Leonard Woolf papers; the Society of Authors as the Literary Representative of the Estate of Virginia Woolf to quote from ‘On Being Ill’, Three Guineas, The Voyage Out, Mrs Dalloway, The Waves, To The Lighthouse, ‘Professions for Women’ all published by the Hogarth Press; the Executors of the Estate of Virginia Woolf for extracts from The Diary of Virginia Woolf, edited by Anne Olivier Bell (the Hogarth Press), The Letters of Virginia Woolf, edited by Nigel Nicolson (the Hogarth Press), Moments of Being, edited and introduced by Jeanne Schulkind (the Hogarth Press), A Passionate Apprentice: the Early Journals of Virginia Woolf, edited by Mitchell A. Leaska (the Hogarth Press), A Very Close Conspiracy by Jane Dunn (Jonathan Cape); Quentin Bell’s Biography of Virginia Woolf, vols 1 and 2 (the Hogarth Press), The Autobiography of Leonard Woolf, vols. 1 and 2 (the Hogarth Press), The Letters of Vita Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf, edited by Louise DeSalvo and Mitchell A. Leaska (Hutchinson), Lytton Strachey: the New Biography, by Michael Holroyd (Chatto & Windus); Deceived with Kindness; A Bloomsbury Childhood, by Angelica Garnett (Chatto & Windus); Oxford University Press for allowing extracts of The Prose and Poetry Writings of William Cowper, vol. 1, edited by James King and Charles Ryskamp, Leslie Stephen’s The Mausoleum Book, introduced by Alan Bell (Clarendon Press); Anny Thackeray Ritchie by Winifred Gerin, and Tennyson by Robert Bernard Martin; John Lehmann’s Virginia Woolf and Her World (Thames & Hudson); Orion Publishing for allowing extracts from The Letters of Leonard Woolf, edited by Frederic Spotts (Weidenfeld & Nicolson), Vita and Harold: the Letters to Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson, edited by Nigel Nicolson (Weidenfeld & Nicolson), Leslie Stephen: the Godless Victorian, by Noel Annan (Weidenfeld & Nicolson), Vita: the Life of Vita Sackville-West by Victoria Glendenning (Weidenfeld & Nicolson), and Vanessa Bell, by Frances Spalding (Weidenfeld & Nicolson); David Higham Associates for quotes from Virginia Woolf, by James King, Leonard Woolf’s The Wise Virgins (Arnold), Elders and Betters, by Quentin Bell (John Murray) and An Unquiet Mind, by Kay R. Jamieson (Alfred A. Knopf): Professor Pat Jalland at Melbourne University for extracts from Octavia Wilberforce (Cassell) and the Selected Letters of Vanessa Bell, edited by Regina Marler (Bloomsbury).

Preface
    Books on Virginia Woolf continue to flood the market, but an extraordinary gap exists regarding the illness from which she suffered: manic depression. Her diaries – surely the fullest year-by-year record ever of the effect of the disease on a creative life, work and relationships and, less reliably, her letters and her husband’s autobiography, are wonderfully revealing to the trained eye. Yet each new book, even when written by the medically qualified, fails to reveal the effects of Virginia Woolf’s mood swings, and the biological and environmental interactions responsible for them.
    The four children of Leslie and Julia Stephen were all talented, and from her earliest years Virginia stood out as the story-teller, the writer, the one who would continue the Stephen literary tradition. For most of the year the family lived in London, but summers were spent in St Ives in Cornwall and were the happiest times of Virginia’s childhood, their memory kept, squirrel-like, in her creative store. She was highly strung and imaginative, and often difficult, jealously demanding her ‘rights’. But in no way unusual; Virginia seemed a thoroughly normal child.
    The death of her mother at puberty, followed by that of her half-sister, was devastating, yet she weathered the shock and eventually emerged more or less intact. But during the emotional upheaval, chemicals in the brain that had