Original subtitles

(light music)

- [Narrator] Who was I then? Adeline Virginia Stephen.

The second daughter of Leslie and Julia Stephen,

born on the 25th of January, 1882,

descended from a great many people,

some famous, others obscure.

Born into a large connection,

born not of rich parents, but to-do parents.

Born into a very communicative, literate, letter writing,

visiting articulate, late 19th century world.

(orchestral music)

- She was a late Victorian.

She started writing in the First World War.

She was reacting against her parents' generation.

She did the most astonishingly bold, new,

dangerous, risky things with the form of the novel.

And I think that's still very influential

and still actually exciting and pleasurable

for people who read it.

- One of the things that is unique, I think. in her work

and what she was trying to do,

once she came really to be a modern writer,

I mean with the novel Jacob's Room

and then with 'Mrs. Dalloway',

is that she wanted to provide

a picture of consciousness.

- She writes about what's important,

what's the meaning of life, what are we here for?

What does it feel like to be alive?

How can we find meaning in things?

And also what happens minute by minute when we are.

- What gives Virginia Woolf that extraordinary power

is that she has more verbal sophistication,

more verbal skill than anyone else, and she knows it.

But what she is writing about

are things that everyone experiences,

the experience of loneliness, the fear of death,

the sense of isolation.

- She used, in a way,

the extremity of the experiences,

sometimes the unbearable experiences

she had known in her childhood

as material for her work to transform high moments

in the novels into something more than prose,

I mean into poetry.

- She's very much in our minds as readers

and especially as women readers

because she was a radical feminist.

I think another reason why she's still with us

and has such an important afterlife

is her lifelong struggle

with illness, with mental illness.

- But she grew up in what might be called today

a dysfunctional family,

especially the girls were very badly treated

in lots of ways.

- And I think that the terrible, courageous,

difficult struggle that she had to keep on an even keel

and to produce the enormous amount of work that she did

is a very haunting story and a very troubling story.

And I think it speaks to us today.

- [Narrator] The day mother died, 20 something years ago,

the smell of reeds in the hall

is always in the first flower still.

Without remembering the day, I was thinking of her,

as I often do, as good a memorial as one could wish.

- One of the things that's striking

about Virginia Woolf's family

is of course loss.

I mean that her mother dies when she's young.

- When she was 13, died at 49 of heart failure.

Her half sister who had been looking after them all,

in what was a turbulent and quite difficult family life

with a very domineering and needy father, died soon after.

- I think that death was a very important subject for her

and that she did suffer mental breakdowns,

particularly after her sister, Stella's, death,

her first major breakdown.

Then after her father's death in 1904, a major breakdown.

- [Narrator] Death was defiance.

Death was an attempt to communicate.

People feeling the impossibility of reaching the center,

which mystically evaded them.

Closeness drew apart, rapture faded. One was alone.

There was an embrace in death.

- The family environment in which he grew

was deeply damaging.

Her half sister was sectioned.

Her father exploited her half sister

and then her sister using them as mother's,

little mothers to look after the rest of the family

when he couldn't manage.

- It's her father's death that she thinks, years later,

actually liberated her.

- [Narrator] Father's birthday, he would've been 96,

yes today and could have been 96.

Like other people, one as known.

Mercifully it was not.

His life would've entirely ended mine.

What would've happened?

No writing, no books, inconceivable.

- Basically all of her novels and all of her work

would've been impossible if he had lived.

- And her brother, Toby, died in his twenties

a couple of years after that.

So there was this series from the age of 13

through to the age of 24 of hammer blows,

which were accompanied by very perilous

and troublesome times for her.

A number of very major breakdowns

during some of which she tried to kill herself.

- [Narrator] In the first place,

it is not true to say that when the door opened

and with a curious hesitation and self effacement

Turner or Strachey glided in,

that they were complete strangers to us.

We had met them and Bell, Woolf, Hilton Young and others

in Cambridge at May Week before my father died.

- So it was quite a surprise to her friends and her family

when she decided to marry Leonard Woolf.

- Virginia Woolf famously teased her unmarried friends

when she got engaged to Leonard Woolf saying,

I'm marrying a penniless Jew.

She actually was courageous about it because on the face,

that they were very different people.

- He was a civil servant who'd been working

in Salon as it then was.

He had a middle class Jewish family

whom she didn't like at all,

deeply in love with him in her own way,

and also horribly anti-Semitic

in many of the things that she says.

- But she and Leonard were very dependent upon one another

and a remarkable couple

who spent a great deal of time together

and obviously did so very successfully.

- They also rowed like mad.

- [Narrator] Oh dear, we quarreled almost all morning

and it was a lovely morning.

And now gone to Hades forever,

branded with marks of our ill humor.

Which began it? Which carried it on? God knows.

This I will say, I exploded and L smolders.

However, quite suddenly we made it up,

but the morning was wasted.

- They were very political.

He became a very important central figure

in the socialist movement in his time.

He was a literary editor, he was a journalist

and he had a regime.

He knew that she could easily fall ill.

She fell violently ill soon after their marriage

and was more or less incarcerated for about two years.

This is during the first World War.

- [Narrator] 15 Years ago, she had gone under.

It was nothing you could put your finger on.

There'd been no scene, no snap,

only the slow sinking, water-logged, of her will into his.

- Leonard Woolf, at first, trusted medical opinion

and he took her to see the eminent Sir Henry Head

in September, 1913.

And Virginia Woolf went away from that doctor's appointment

and took an overdose of veronal and only survived

because her stomach was pumped out in time.

- And Leonard Woolf made a crucial decision,

which was not to have her sent to an asylum.

He was going to look after her.

- He must have suffered in the marriage.

But his sense of the personal,

not the literary or social value of his wife,

was so strong and so extreme that he was willing

to suppress himself for her sake.

- And I read this as a form of sympathetic,

practical guardianship and not as a form

of tyranny or constriction or repression.

- But it does seem to me that Leonard Woolf

was very protective and almost, yes,

in a motherly role to his wife.

But maybe it came too late.

- [Narrator] I was interrupted somewhere on this page

by the arrival of Mr. Elliot.

Mr. Elliot is well expressed by his name,

a polished, cultivated, elaborate, young American.

talking so slow that each word

seems to have special finish allotted it.

- She could be very snobbish, she could be very snarky.

You didn't wanna trust her with a secret

'cause she'd immediately go off and tell six other people.

She could be fantastically rude and condescending.

- Christopher Isherwood talks about how Virginia Woolf

was one of the greatest conversationalists,

but also one of the great gossips in the world.

And I think all of that goes hand in hand.

She was an observer. She observed herself.

She observed other people.

- [Narrator] I don't like old ladies who guzzle.

My comment upon Ethel Smyth last night.

No doubt, a harsh one,

but she champed and chopped and squabbled over her duck

and then was overeaten and had to go home.

- She could be savage. She was a terrible snob.

She could be extremely funny about her friends

and talk about them in ways that were extremely cutting.

- She was very snarky about the middle classes

and the middle brow.

She was extremely unfair to very good novelists,

like Arnold Bennett, because she thought he was too taken up

with the material world.

- So far, no gossip and no soul.

Yet I've seen Bob, Desmond, Lytton, Sebastian Sprott,

Dorothy Bussy, Mrs. Elliot,

this last making me almost vomit.

So scented, so powdered, so egotistic,

so morbid, so weekly.

- She's fantastically intolerant and bigoted in many ways.

All this is part of the wild energy

of her creative imagination.

But it's the sort of dark side,

and I think it is related to her mental illness

and to her anxiety about being vulnerable.

When her friend,

with whom she had a very conflicted relationship,

Katherine Mansfield first came to visit, she says,

- [Narrator] The dinner last night went off.

The delicate things were discussed.

We could both wish that one's first impression of KM

was not that she stinks like a, well, civet cat

that had taken to street walking.

- Virginia Woolf was very hard

and judgmental of her friends.

But I think she was also very harsh

and judgmental of herself.

And so she didn't let herself off easy as an artist

or even recognizing some of her impatience,

to put it kindly, with other people.

And so you find in her diaries and her letters,

self-criticism as pungent

as her criticism of other people.

- [Narrator] Here are my resolutions

for the next three months,

the next lap of the year.

First to have none, not to be tied.

Second to be free and kindly with myself,

not goading it to parties,

to sit rather privately reading in the studio,

to make a good job of The Waves.

- And here she is at the end of The Waves.

And I think I should preface this by saying

that in her diary when she put her pen down

after writing these immortal words,

she felt very close to mental illness.

- [Narrator] Here in the few minutes that remain,

I must record heaven be praised, the end of The Waves.

I wrote the words, O Death, 15 minutes ago.

It is death. Death is the enemy.

It is death against whom I ride with my spear couched

and my hair flying back like a young man's,

like Percival's when he galloped in India.

I strike spurs into my horse.

Against you, I will fling myself,

unvanquished and unyielding, O Death.

The Waves broke on the shore.

- Virginia Woolf thought of The Waves, in part,

as a memorial to her brother, Toby.

And she talked about weeping

when she was thinking about Toby while writing the book.

- [Narrator] Anyhow, it is done.

And I have been sitting these 15 minutes in a state of glory

and calm and some tears thinking of Toby.

- And it is at the end of the novel,

the image of a wave starting again

and the wave become the,

it's a bit like the continuity of life or eternity in time,

that the waves come again and again and again.

- [Narrator] Yes, this is the eternal renewal.

The incessant rise and fall and fall and rise again.

And in Me too, the wave rises.

It swells, it arches its back.

I'm aware once more of a new desire,

something rising beneath me

like the proud horse whose rider first spurs

and then pulls back.

- But then there's always another wave rising far out.

And that is crucial to Virginia Woolf's psyche

and her achievement, that she was always conscious

of that other wave rising, recuperating itself.

- After Leslie Stephen died in 1904, the family

which was the two brothers, Toby and Adrian,

and Virginia's sister, Vanessa, who became a painter,

moved to the area of London that's called Bloomsbury.

- [Narrator] In fact, the dominion that Bloomsbury exercises

over the sane and insane alike

seems to be sufficient to turn the brains

of the most robust.

Happily, I'm Bloomsbury myself and thus immune,

but I'm not altogether ignorant of what they mean.

And it's a hypnotism very difficult to shake off

because there's some foundation for it.

- But it was a life of young people finding their own way,

making lots of ridiculous mistakes,

falling into all kinds of complicated relationships.

And above all, talking honestly and candidly

about sex, about homosexuality, about their feelings,

about art, about politics,

because they felt, all of them in their different ways,

that they'd grown up in an environment

where you couldn't speak the truth.

- [Narrator] I thus detect another element in the shame

which I had at being caught looking at myself

in the glass in the hall.

I must have been ashamed or afraid of my own body.

Another memory, also of the hall, may help to explain this.

There was a slab outside the dining room door

for standing dishes upon.

Once when I was very small,

Gerald Duckworth lifted me onto this.

And as I sat there, he began to explore my body.

- It's a wrong conclusion, I think,

to draw from that experience

that she simply from that time on,

suffered with insoluble mental problems.

Now I don't,

it obviously contributed to who she was

and to her fragility.

But that puts us

at a loss when we look at

how much she transcended

that suffering, real suffering,

and how much she was able to do

with her art and her work and how productive she was.

- In her own experience of sexual abuse.

Whatever it exactly was, she's record recorded it.

She said that her brother, George,

would rush into her bedroom at night.

- Sleep had almost come to me.

The room was dark, the house silent.

Then creaking stealthily, the door opened.

Treading gingerly, someone entered.

'Who?'. I cried.

'Don't be frightened.', George whispered.

'And don't turn on the light. Oh, beloved, beloved.'

And he flung himself on my bed and took me in his arms.

- In the episode of her being abused

by her half-brothers,

there is no sense that there was anybody

to talk to about it or or to know about it.

And there was nobody to stop them,

must have increased this sense of not being protected

and not being able to protect herself.

And when the sense of exposure became too great

or when the whatever it was rushed in her,

she couldn't cope.

- So there was abuse and she had reason to fear men,

reason to fear male sexuality.

And I think that why she was so bonded

with her Bloomsbury group

is that this was a civilized group in her terms.

The men were civilized in that they believed

in the same values as she believed

that one must care for other people,

that one must be responsible.

- Virginia Woolf is often accused

of being an egotist or a narcissist.

And she was indeed deeply interested

in her own experiences and emotions.

And she, in her diaries and in her letters,

she analyzes herself all the time, moment by moment.

And she is extremely up and down.

She's a very volatile character.

- [Narrator] The day after my birthday, in fact, I'm 38.

While I've no doubt that I'm a great deal happier

than I was at 28

and happier today than I was yesterday.

Having this afternoon arrived at some idea of a new form

for a new novel.

- So if you're gonna write fiction about,

which she thought should be about people,

because fiction is basically about human beings.

How do you do it?

The old conventions,

which she saw in the 19th century novel

and the early 20th century,

what used to be called the Edwardian novel,

she didn't think worked for her.

- She largely avoids these

kind of large social novels where

you're seeing upstairs and downstairs at the same time.

- [Narrator] She had known happiness, intense happiness.

And it silvered the rough waves a little more brightly

as daylight faded and the blue went out of the sea

and it rolled in waves of pure lemon,

which curved and swelled and broke upon the beach.

And the ecstasy burst in her eyes

and waves of pure delight raced over the floor of her mind

and she felt it is enough. It is enough.

- Such moments are inhabited

by a much larger rhythm

than a lot of other passages.

And I think our moments

where some kind of

well, ecstasy is reached,

I mean in fact almost

well, orgasmic ecstasy,

she cries at a point. It is enough. It is enough.

And I think that's very much a female cry.

- So she wants to turn the focus away

from the traditional subjects of fiction

into the shadows of moments of being

and the inner life.

And to do this, she has to develop a new style.

So there's a rational for the lengthening of her sentences

and the fragmented narrative,

because she begins to inject silences into her narrative.

She accepts the fact that there is much

one cannot define or even record

and one's got to allow for what can't be said.

- She's trying to get a narrative

that moves like water inside other people's minds

and lives and then goes back out again.

Very interested in nature and the natural world.

And then goes back in again.

- [Narrator] I faint. I fail.

Now my body thaws.

I am unsealed, I am incandescent.

Now the stream pours in a deep tide, fertilizing,

opening the shut, forcing the tight folded flooding free.

To whom shall I give all that now flows through me

from my warm, my porous body?

- Part of this has to do with her sense

of what is unique about every individual human being

and what every human being has in common.

She's aware of the way in which say everyone has a body

that is different, but everyone has a body in the same way.

- She thought of life as something dangerous

and she was extremely sensitized

to what was going on around her, always from the first.

She kept in her mind all her life,

very, very vivid memories of childhood.

For instance, of going to the house in Cornwall

where they went for three months every summer

down in St. Ives.

- So when she was growing up, I mean at St. Ives,

there's a great sense of place that's later

put into 'To the Lighthouse'.

- [Narrator] Well, Leonard has read 'To the Lighthouse'

and says, it is much my best book and it is a masterpiece.

He said this without my asking.

- There's a family called the Ramses

who are very closely based on Virginia Woolf's parents

and her siblings.

- At the beginning of 'To the Lighthouse'

when James is with his mother,

and there is some hope of going 'To the Lighthouse',

she donates to James the kind of high sensitivity

that was hers and that she wrote

about her own childhood and the interruption

that comes from the father saying,

it won't be fine tomorrow,

which means they won't be able to go.

Brings out of James an extreme violence,

a sort of murderous violence in relation to the father.

- [Narrator] Had there been an ax handy,

a poker, or any weapon

that would've gashed a hole in his father's breast

and killed him there and then,

James would have seized it.

Such were the extremes of emotion

that Mr. Ramsey excited in his children's breasts

by his mere presence.

- You see them in the house,

all focused around Mrs. Ramsey.

And you see her in a kind of combative

and complicated relationship with her very needy, demanding,

obstreperous literary husbands.

- I suppose that I did for myself

what psychoanalyst do for their patients.

I used to think of father and mother daily,

but writing the Lighthouse laid them in my mind.

- Virginia Woolf certainly turns well unbearable experiences

like the abuse she has suffered

into poetry very strikingly

in the Time Passes section of 'To the Lighthouse'

because the decay of the house

resonates on so many levels.

I think it also means a psyche or self

under the assault of a form of destruction

that is very subtle.

- And the woman, the young woman who's observed all this

in the first half and who's sort of fallen in love

with Mrs. Ramsey, is a painter called Lily.

And she's painting a painting of Mrs. Ramsey

in the first part of the novel.

And in the last part of the novel,

she gets this painting out again and she thinks about it,

and she tries to start it again.

But Mrs. Ramsey of course, isn't there.

- [Narrator] Mrs. Ramsey, Mrs. Ramsey, she cried

feeling the old horror come back.

To want and want and not have Mrs. Ramsey.

It was part of her perfect goodness to Lilly.

Sat there quite simply in the chair,

flicked her needles to and fro

knitted her reddish brown stocking,

cast her shadow on the step.

There she sat.

- But this appearance is like what the novel has done

is bring her back from the dead.

So it makes the novel into a kind of ghost story

in a very surprising way.

- The kind of triumph that Lilly Briscoe had

at the end of 'To the Lighthouse'

seems to be the same triumph

that Virginia Woolf felt when she finished The Waves.

She wrote in her diary that in effect,

she let herself go.

She simply felt herself riding on the wave of the prose

and felt, I'm paraphrasing hopelessly here,

a tremendous exhilaration of a kind

she had never imagined before.

- If you look at 'To the Lighthouse',

it's obviously about a certain kind of family

of a certain class.

And then there are other characters,

the artist Lily Briscoe and other people

that gives you a sense Virginia Woolf understands

more than just about her own world.

- [Narrator] Mrs. Dalloway said she would

buy the flowers herself.

- The beginning of 'Mrs. Dalloway', where Clarissa Dalloway,

who is a society hostess,

goes out to buy the flowers

for the party that she's having that evening.

It couldn't be more trivial,

it couldn't be more superficial.

And off she goes, this middle-aged woman

who's recently been very ill.

And she goes into the streets of London,

you see them sort of shimmering with activity and busyness

and everybody absolutely relieved

that the war is over and they can go to parties

and go shopping.

But under it, you are going to see the corpses.

You're going to feel and hear and see

the millions of corpses and deaths

that underlie this shimmering surface.

- So in 'Mrs. Dalloway' in particular,

you have all of the thoughts of Clarissa Dalloway

that will tell you as the reader

what Clarissa Dalloway is like

with an occasional turn outward.

Where there is a third person watching Clarissa Dalloway

to tell us what she looks like.

So that the novel can be a seamless view

inside Clarissa Dalloway's mind,

but situated firmly on the streets of London

in a realistic way.

- Doctors in the early 20th century

when faced with manic depression or bipolar disorder

didn't really know what to do.

So they invented regimes

and that's spelt out very dramatically in 'Mrs. Dalloway'.

- Where Septimus Warren Smith

feels so completely porous

as it were, exposed.

I mean his own fiber is continuous

with the wind in the leaves or the birds flying.

- [Narrator] There remained only the window,

the large Bloomsbury lodging house window.

The tiresome, the troublesome

and rather melodramatic business of opening the window

and throwing himself out.

- Virginia Woolf did make use of her mental breakdowns

when she wrote 'Mrs. Dalloway'.

She gave to Septimus. Warren Smith,

the same mad experiences that she had had.

hearing the birds singing and in Greek, for example,

in the trees.

And what she was doing was identifying

with someone utterly different from herself

and recognizing the breakdown as a misery.

- [Narrator] But he would wait till the very last moment.

He did not want to die.

- She treats Septimus Warren Smith's suicide

as a kind of triumph.

He refuses to give into the doctors

who want to shut him away from those he loved

and those who the doctor who wants to treat him

as a set of symptoms rather than as a person.

- [Narrator] There he lay with a thud, thud, thud

in his brain and then a suffocation of blackness.

- She always writes in this voice

which tries to get in and out

of people's minds and feelings.

And if you say, I, if you write a first person novel,

you cut yourself off from doing that.

So she never does that.

There is no I in the fiction,

there is plenty of I in the essays

and in in the letters and the diaries,

but not in the fiction.

- [Narrator] We began our printing off this afternoon

and we printed 300 copies of the first page of Prelude.

But we should be glad of another press.

- The Hogarth Press was started actually

as a sort of a therapeutic hobby

that Leonard Woolf thought would be really good

at a time when Virginia Woolf had been ill.

So they bought this small hand press

and some type in 1915

and then nothing really happened for a couple of years

because she was so ill.

And then they started printing by hand,

small, short essays and stories.

So what's remarkable about the Hogarth Press is two things.

One, it started as this very small,

rather amateurish operation

on the kitchen table in Richmond.

And it grew into one of the most important, influential

radical publishing houses in England.

The other thing it did, of course,

was to free her from the constraints

of having to write under the thumb

of another publisher.

Who in the first instance,

the publisher of her first two novels

was her half brother, Duckworth,

whom she had had unpleasant relationship with

in her childhood.

- [Narrator] I have worked very methodically

and done my due of articles

so that with luck I shall have made 320 pounds by journalism

and I suppose at least 300 pounds by my novel this year.

- She was very proud that her books earned money

and she writes with great energy about the importance

of her independent income for women writers,

it's one of the key stories of her life

that women needed to earn money

in order to be free of constrictions.

- [Narrator] The history of men's opposition

to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps

than the story of that emancipation itself.

- So her childhood,

the conditions of her childhood

affected her feeling,

as she came into the public and social world,

about the radical injustices to women

who couldn't vote, couldn't own property,

who were the possessions of their husbands

and whose writing was done, historically,

under tremendous difficulties.

- [Narrator] We went to a meeting called a suffrage rally

in Kingsway this afternoon.

The hall was fairly well filled,

the audience almost wholly women as the speakers were too.

- So she wrote two main books about this,

one in the twenties and one in the thirties.

The first one was 'A Room of One's Own',

which is an extremely famous, long-lasting

and influential essay about women writers

and it's also about education for women.

It started it's life as two lectures

for women undergraduates at Cambridge.

- [Narrator] Thank God, my long toil at the women's lecture

is this moment ended.

I'm back from speaking at Girton in floods of rain.

Starved but valiant young women. That's my impression.

Intelligent, eager, poor,

and destined to become school mistresses and shoals.

I blandly told them to drink wine

and have a room of their own.

- And in this she very whittily and charmingly

and funnily describes the history of women writers

and talks about ways in which women might be free.

- She lays bare the structure of society

as it is constructed along gender lines

as in 'A Room of One's Own'

or along economic lines and gender lines, the patriarchy,

in her later book 'Three Guineas'.

- [Narrator] L Gravely approves three guineas,

thinks it's an extremely clear analysis.

- In the context of the gathering fascist movement in Europe

and indeed in this country.

She writes a much angrier, much less palatable essay

called 'Three Guineas' in the late 30's

where she makes an equation

between the patriarchal tyranny of the Victorian household

and what is happening in the fascists movement.

So she draws a very bold and very angry comparison

between the kind of fathers

that existed in Victorian families

who prevented their daughters from having an education

or going out to work.

And the way in which someone like Mussolini

was encouraging a macho

war-like aggressive, repressive

way of thinking about the world.

(speaking German)

- She expresses her horror at the violence,

both domestic and military,

that men have perpetrated over all the centuries,

that women had to go far beyond the vote

if they were ever going to achieve or do down

that brutal society that destroys so many lives.

- You have only to look around the world now

to see that 'Three Guineas' is a book of great importance

and necessity to us still.

- [Narrator] I am pleased this morning

because Lady Rhonda writes that she is profoundly excited

and moved by the 'Three Guineas',

A good omen because this shows that certain people

will be stirred, will think, will discuss.

It won't altogether be fritted away,

but as the whole of Europe may be in flames,

it's on the cards.

One more shot at a policeman

and the Germans, Czechs, French will begin the old horror.

- And I think one of the politically impressive things

about Woolf is the way that she's open

to all kinds of different friendships.

The marriage is there throughout her life

as a very strong base, but she's going to have adventures,

emotional and intellectual adventures.

One of the most intense and dramatic of these

was with Vita Sackville-West.

- Well, Vita Sackville-West came into Virginia Woolf's life

at the end of 1922

and she had admired Virginia Woolf's writing

and she asked Clive Bell,

who was Virginia Woolf's brother-in-law,

the husband of her sister, Vanessa Bell,

to introduce her to Virginia.

- [Narrator] I am too muzzy headed to make out anything.

This is partly the result of dining

to meet the lovely, gifted aristocrat Sackville-West

last night at Clive's.

Knows everyone, but could I ever know her?

I am to dine her on Tuesday.

The aristocratic manner is something like an actresses,

no false shyness or modesty.

Makes me feel virgin, shy, and school girlish.

- Who unlike Virginia Woolf,

was a known saphist as this was then called.

And she had all kinds of spectacular affairs with women.

She too was married and had a long

and friendly companionship

with her husband Harold Nicholson.

- [Narrator] Vita comes to lunch tomorrow,

which will be a great amusement and pleasure.

I'm amused at my relations with her,

left so ardent in January, and now what?

Also I like her presence and her beauty.

Am I in love with her? But what is love?

- And was only after two or three years of the first meeting

that they became in any sense intimate.

And of course as the world now knows,

they became lovers.

- And they did clearly have an affair.

- Almost immediately there was this

great sense of attraction.

Virginia notes in her diary about Vita,

somewhat dismissively at the same time

as you can sense this great attraction.

- And quite critical of Vita as well.

She calls her donkey west. She thinks she's stupid.

She thinks she's a bit thick.

She's a sort of thick aristocrat

as far as Virginia Woolf's concerned.

She's very rude to her, very critical of her.

And all that comes out in her book 'Orlando'.

- [Narrator] And instantly the usual exciting devices

enter my mind, a biography beginning the year 1500

and continuing to the present day called 'Orlando'.

- Which of course was a biography,

she called it, of Vita.

But in a most fantastic method

that 'Orlando' starts off as a boy

and halfway through the book changes into a woman,

but has still the same character.

And it was the character of course, of Vita herself.

And the book really forms the longest

and most charming love letter

in the whole of English literature.

- [Narrator] Here is a whole nervous breakdown in miniature.

Wednesday, only wish to be alone in the open air.

Thursday, no pleasure in life whatsoever.

Friday, sense of physical tiredness,

but slight activity of the brain.

- Virginia Woolf suffered from mental illness,

which at one point was called neurasthenia,

came to be called manic depression,

would now be called bipolar, a bipolar state.

So she would have periods of

extreme intense activity and elation

and she would have periods in which she sank

into deep depression and anxiety.

At their worst, these involved suicide attempts.

She suffered from fantastically bad headache,

terrible headaches.

- [Narrator] I've been in bed a week

with a sudden and very sharp headache.

And this is written experimentally to test my brain.

- And one of the ironies of the treatment of mental illness

in the late teens, early twenties was to rest completely.

And so sometimes when Virginia Woolf was most fragile,

she was kept on a milk diet

and doing absolutely no work at all.

And that was actually more dangerous in a certain way

than actually overworked.

- It's extremely hard to tell from the evidence

that you can put together

of her conditions,

whether actually some of the phases

of the hallucination

or some of the physical symptoms

that accompanied her depressions

might have been the results of the drugs she was given.

- She herself had had such dire experiences

at the hands of the doctors trying to treat her

after her breakdown,

after her mother's death, after her father's death

and at other points

that she consciously

or unconsciously associated Freud

and the claim for science that psychoanalysis gave itself

with those doctors who,

from their superior position as men of science,

had said what was wrong with her

and what could be good for her.

Neither of which corresponded

with anything of her own sense of herself

and her own sense of her experience.

- She was never psychoanalyzed.

She didn't want to be psychoanalyzed.

And although Leonard, at the Hogarth Press, and she

were publishing the translations of Freud,

the place was littered with volumes of Freud in translation,

which for years and years and years, she didn't pick up.

She wasn't interested in it and she was resistant to

because she clearly was extremely anxious

that psychoanalysis or reading Freud would somehow

stop her from functioning or make her too aware of herself.

So one of the very interesting things that happens

very late in her life is that she starts reading Freud.

- [Narrator] It was only the other day when I read Freud

for the first time that I discovered

that this violently disturbing conflict of love and hate

is a common feeling and it is called ambivalence.

- And although their views of what was wrong with the world

for him, the patriarchy breaking down

and for her, the loss of any kind of a mother

of motherly values, I mean they were not of a mind.

But I think that there was real sympathy

and probably real mutual understanding and respect.

- [Narrator] I have seen Marie Stopes,

Princesse de Polignac, Philip and Pippin Woolf

and Dr. Freud in the last three days.

Dr. Freud gave me a narcissus.

- I think the last couple of years of Virginia Woolf's life

were really harrowing in many ways.

- [Narrator] They came very close, we lay down under a tree.

The sound was like someone soaring in the air just above us.

We lay flat on our faces, hands behind head,

don't close your teeth at L.

They seemed to be soaring at something stationary.

Bombs shook the windows of my lodge.

I thought, I think of nothingness, flatness,

my mood being flat, some fear I suppose.

- There were shortages, food, petrol, all of that.

Their house was bombed in London,

bombed to smithereens, in Tavistock Square,

When they went up to salvage what they could

in a blitzed London.

- [Narrator] Back from half a day in London,

perhaps our strangest visit,

Mecklenburg Square roped off,

warden's there, not allowed in.

The house about 30 yards from ours

struck at one this morning by a bomb, completely ruined.

Another bomb in the square still unexploded.

That is a great pile of bricks.

Underneath all the people

who'd gone down to their shelter.

- The things she rescued were her diaries,

the volumes of her diaries.

Partly because she was writing about her childhood.

She was writing a memoir,

which I think she found both painful and also consoling.

She was finishing a novel

and that was always a very perilous moment for her.

The novel was about a country on the brink of war.

And she thought it was hopeless.

She often thought her own work was hopeless.

She sank into a tremendous depression about that.

There was a real sense of imminent invasion.

They knew that because Leonard was Jewish

and they were both radicals and socialists

and had written against Nazism,

they knew very well that they would be on,

as indeed they were, on Hitler's blacklist.

So they had discussed suicide very rationally

in the event of invasion.

- [Narrator] But though L says he has petrol in the garage

for suicide should Hitler win, we go on.

It's the vastness and the smallness

that makes this possible.

- I hadn't realized the impact

that the war, that stage of the war had on her.

I mean this strain of the feeling,

the bombs, going to be invaded and all that.

I mean, she and Leonard had decided to blow themselves up

in their garage if Hitler invaded England, quite literally.

- And I think all these different things

created a situation for her,

which she couldn't see a way out of.

So I think that her suicide

on a cold day in March in 1941

was a decision,

not something that she did without mental control.

- I hadn't realized that she felt

that she was going to go mad again.

So that this, although we were living close by at the time,

and I saw her a few days before it happened

and I realized that she was under the weather.

And she made this sort of tremendous demand for love

that she was in habit of making, rather.

I mean, she would, particularly,

I think just because I was an undemonstrative child,

she would quite often say, but Angelica, don't you love me?

Don't you adore me? Do you know you hate me?

You don't like me at all.

This sort of way of going on.

But she did it particularly on that day.

And of course, I mean, as I remember it,

I was particularly cold and undemonstrative on that day.

(somber music) (water trickling)

And then the next thing I heard,

a telephone call to say that

she had drowned herself.

(somber music) (water trickling)