It is for her beauty, her psychic pain, and the odd and tragic circumstances of her life as much as for the quality of her work that Virginia Woolf has attracted a certain type of critical attention; as one sharp commentator noted, she is the Marilyn Monroe of the intellectual world, “genius transformed into icon and industry.” While Woolf’s diaries and letters demonstrate that she could be cruel and vulnerable in equal parts, her popular image has come to elevate the vulnerabilities to the point of obscuring the tough, self-protective streak that sustained her and kept her alive and productive for a lifetime of nearly sixty years. An idealized and essentially misleading picture of Woolf as female victim of patriarchal oppression has become the dominant one, and countless stupid and condescending books and articles have supported it, the newest and stupidest being Who’s Afraid of Leonard Woolf by the Australian author Irene Coates.[1]

Although Coates presents herself as a bold individualist who daringly trespasses on hallowed ground by suggesting that the Woolfs’ marriage was less than idyllic and that Virginia was not really “mad” at all, her diatribe contains nothing new; it’s merely the last in a long and not very distinguished line of psychostudies of the perennially fascinating writer. As long ago as 1977, Jean Love, in Virginia Woolf: Sources of Madness and Art, was referring to Woolf’s “so-called madness,” a tag Coates uses repeatedly. In 1978, Roger Poole’s widely read book The Unknown Virginia Woolf established an entire school of anti-Leonard critical studies and advanced exactly the same theses that Coates insists upon: Leonard was a reductive, left-brained rationalist, constitutionally incapable of understanding or handling the sensitive artist he married, and Virginia’s madness was no madness at all but an avenue of escape and creative independence. (Coates blithely ignores Poole’s book, presumably because its existence negates her right to be considered an original thinker; his name does not appear in her text or bibliography.) Finally, in 1981 Stephen Trombley published All That Summer She Was Mad: Virginia Woolf, Female Victim of Male Medicine, another serious claim, and taken seriously by the academic community, that Virginia Woolf was sane.

Now there is some (very slight) excuse for Love, Poole, and Trombley: they wrote their studies before the publication of the plethora of information on manic-depressive illness that has recently become available to the general reader. In light of current knowledge, it has been widely accepted that Virginia Woolf, like many writers and creative artists, suffered from manic-depression, or bipolar disorder as it is also called. Hers was an almost textbook case, with onset occurring early in life and proceeding in periodic bouts broken up by long stretches of sanity and good health. Bipolar disorder is a hereditary condition, and several members of Woolf’s family, the Stephens, also suffered from affective disorders. Virginia’s father, Sir Leslie Stephen, and her brother Adrian both had a mild form of manic-depression bearing the clinical name of cyclothymia, while her other full siblings, Thoby and Vanessa, underwent periodic episodes of depression; one of their first cousins was a manic-depressive, and their half-sister Laura Stephen was either retarded or disturbed in some unidentified way— possibly she was autistic—and spent her life in an asylum.

To posthumously diagnose Virginia Woolf as a manic-depressive is not to go very far out on a limb. Yet many of Woolf’s academic worshippers have passionately resisted the diagnosis, especially feminist scholars who have a great deal invested in the image of Woolf as a victim of patriarchal oppression, and who have fashioned an up-to-date Foucaultian model of Woolf’s madness and femaleness as a form of transgression and “otherness.” Another and more reasonable objection was the persistent use of the terms “mad” and “madness”—words used by Woolf herself—which are not at all useful in describing manic-depressive illness. Unlike, for example, schizophrenics, manic-depressives are normal most of the time, and suffer from their disease only periodically; literal-minded scholars—and so many Woolf scholars have been painfully literal—cannot accept that a woman who was clearly sane for much of the time can have had anything much the matter with her.

Other scholars and Woolf fans resisted the idea of manic-depression because they found it reductive to boil Woolf’s genius down to pathology, as though it were the disease writing and not the woman. This is simply to misunderstand the nature of the illness, which does not flatten out the personality of the sufferer but if anything makes it more distinctly his or her own, intensifying and crystallizing the individual vision. Woolf, like Byron, Shelley, Robert Lowell, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and other sufferers from bipolar disorder, found rich material for her art in her periods of illness. “As an experience,” Woolf wrote, “madness is terrific I can assure you, and not to be sniffed at; and in its lava I still find most of the things I write about. It shoots out of one everything shaped, final, not in mere driblets, as sanity does. And the six months … that I lay in bed taught me a good deal about what is called onesself.” It cannot be a coincidence that such a high proportion of writers have been manic-depressives: medical studies have indicated that creative artists suffer from eight to ten times the rate of major depressive illness, ten to forty times the rate of manic-depressive illness, and up to eighteen times the rate of suicide of the general population.

If Irene Coates had spent a tiny fraction of the time reading about manic-depressive illness that she devoted to wallowing in Bloomsburiana, she might have sensed the thinness of her theory. (To take an example at random: she characterizes mania as “uncontrollable rage,” when it is nothing of the sort.) There is not a single book on mental illness included in her bibliography, and this in spite of the fact that recent years have seen several first-class popularizations of the subject, notably Dr. Kay Redfield Jamison’s Touched By Fire: Manic Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament, which contains a chapter on Virginia Woolf and the Stephen family. Also strangely absent from Coates’s bibliography is Thomas Caramagno’s prize-winning The Flight of the Mind: Virginia Woolf’s Art and Manic-Depressive Illness (1992), one of the few truly respectable and revealing books on Woolf’s psychological history and its relation to her work to appear.

But Coates’s argument for Woolf’s sanity is only half of her agenda. The other half is her contention that Leonard Woolf was a sadistic, oppressive, scheming husband who married Virginia for her money and position, promoted his own interests above hers throughout her life, was consistently unfaithful to her, and finally drove her to suicide.

I myself have always thought Leonard deserved the Purple Heart for keeping Virginia safe, cared for, and out of the nut-house for three decades, but I am certainly prepared to listen to nasty gossip: Leonard has always sounded too good to be true, and, as Regina Marler pointed out in Bloomsbury Pie, her amusing study of the evolving public passion for all things Bloomsbury, the “saintly characterization of Leonard” in Quentin Bell’s official biography of Virginia “invited reaction… . In later writings, Leonard would increasingly be portrayed as controlling, small-minded, tightfisted, and dogmatic, first as a husband, then as a literary executor.”

Coates has a special ax to grind when it comes to Leonard. Author also of a pseudo-scientific tract called The Seed Bearers: Role of the Female in Biology and Genetics, she subscribes to a strict creed of male “left-brain” rationality and rigidity and female “right-brain” fluidity and flexibility, and ruthlessly presses these templates onto her two elusive subjects. Leonard had a “black and white, rigid left-brain,” a “limited rationalist attitude”; he personified “the alienated and alienating male egocentricity that drives a man to attempt to make the world in his image.” Virginia, as a right-brained woman with the additional advantage of having been spared the male-oriented classical education that stunted men like Leonard, was free to explore “the depth and precision of her perceptions.”  

Throughout their partnership he embodied the heavy rock walls that were never able to confine her spirit. That free spirit was able to descend down the column of upward energy when the walls he erected around her loomed too ominously over her head; in this way Virginia escaped from him to find enrichment in the darkness below.

Woe betide the critic or biographer who sets herself the task of writing about, and sitting in judgment upon, people vastly more intelligent, subtle, humorous, and educated than she: this is the job Coates has taken on, and she is sadly unequal to it. When Leonard characterizes his kindergarten teacher for example, a Mrs. Mole, as “incompetent,” Coates chastises him for expressing “male contempt for women’s intellectual capabilities.” When he describes how he and his brother managed as school captains to change the atmosphere of their prep school, “as we were both strict disciplinarians … from that of a sordid brothel to that more appropriate to fifty fairly happy small boys under the age of fourteen,” she leaps to the titillating conclusion that Leonad thus “learnt to wield power at an early age and taste the pleasures of being a ‘strict disciplinarian.’” And of course that pleasure would lead inevitably, according to a mind soaked in late twentieth-century intellectual clichés, to further exercises in misogyny and imperialism. Leonard, serving with the Colonial Civil Service in Ceylon, came to “personify the belligerent, autocratic imperialist administrator and was able to indulge to the full the strict disciplinarian side of his nature,” claims Coates, not troubling to provide any evidence for this statement; he also had an “appalling attitude towards women, who are objectified.” As if all men don’t objectify women! In any event Coates herself isn’t above a little objectification: you can hardly get through a paragraph of her prose without stumbling over the ubiquitous word “patriarchy.”

Simplification to the point of fatuity is at work throughout Coates’s book. For instance: “Virginia, unlike Leonard, was open and straight in all her relationships.” That touchy, mercurial, malicious, and masochistic woman—open and straight? Or Virginia “became a lesbian with Vita because she was starved of the essential water of love.” Became a lesbian, when by her own admission she had never been physically attracted to any man, including her husband? Or—and this is my favorite—“We cannot apply conventional standards to members of the Bloomsbury Group, since they were rebelling against Victorian constraints.” In the tradition of recent Woolf scholarship, Coates takes dangerous liberties with her facts, cheerfully reading Woolf’s fiction as literal autobiography. (In an outrageous aside, she asserts that “It is admissable in [Woolf’s] case to read much of her creative writing as autobiographical, at least as something remembered because it was felt intensely at the time.”) Worse, she invents scenes between her key players, Leonard, Virginia, Vanessa Bell, and others and presents them as though they actually occurred.

But it is pointless to enumerate the hundreds or even thousands of false conclusions, clueless comments, and missed points in this book. Embarking on her researches with a firm conviction of her own righteousness, Coates found no reason to adjust her theories as she proceeded: “Whether anyone else agrees with me,” she writes in conclusion, “I neither know nor, deeply, care.” She presents Virginia’s last year or so as high melodrama, with Leonard in a sinister role: he keeps Virginia isolated; forces her down on her hands and knees to scrub floors; gets involved in a shady conspiracy with their neighbor Dr. Octavia Wilberforce (in reality a kind and generous friend to both the Woolfs); fornicates with the maid; and in the end stage-manages Virginia’s suicide and dictates her final notes to himself and to her sister. Coates, like Roger Poole before her, quotes only the sources that might, when sufficiently removed from their context, serve to bolster her ridiculous notions and ignores Virginia’s many letters and diary entries that speak of her love for Leonard, her dependence upon him, and her sense of peace when they are together. She also ignores all references to the real reasons behind Virginia’s eventual decision to die: the worries that her psychotic episodes were becoming more frequent and her rising sense, as World War II progressed, that she was losing both her audience and her gift.

“I have come to believe,” Coates says officiously, “that the Woolfs were inimical.” Well, so are most married couples, to some degree at least. Coates would have done well to read the play whose title she ripped off to make her own, Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? At one point in the play George, enraged by Martha’s drunken accusations, shouts out “I can’t stand it!”— to which Martha shoots back something to the effect of “You can stand it! You married me for it!” Now there is a little of George and Martha in nearly every couple, and the Woolfs were no exception. If Virginia decided to share her life with a perhaps excessively rationalistic man, it was because she, with her overdeveloped sensibility and fragile emotional defenses, needed that quality: similarly, however much Leonard might have chafed under the constraints of being an on-again off-again nursemaid, he was eminently suited to the task and must have found a certain fulfillment in it, or he would never have stuck it out for thirty years.

There is something weird and wonderful about every long-term marriage, and the Woolfs’ was more complicated than most. For Irene Coates, who would be hard put to make sense of anything more subtle than Thomas the Tank Engine, to try to analyze a partnership that has puzzled some of the finest critics of the century is an absurdity that doesn’t, in the end, merit the slightest notice—not even a dismissive review like this one. Not that the hubris of contentious ideologues like Coates will be punctured by adverse criticism. As Quentin Bell wrote to Sylvia Plath’s daughter Olwyn Hughes, commiserating about her struggles with legions of Plath scholars, “It is in fact amazing how closely these creatures seem to resemble each other: the leaden prose, the persistent lying, the equivocations, the crude feminism. I know them all from personal experience. And the worst part is that they teach.” And, he might have added, they keep coming—with no apparent end in sight.

Notes
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1. Who’s Afraid of Leonard Woolf: A Case for the Sanity of Virginia Woolf, by Irene Coates; Soho Press, 458 pages, $28. Go back to the text.