Doctors’ Orders

Ruth Bernard Yeazell

  • ‘All that summer she was mad’: Virginia Woolf and Her Doctors by Stephen Trombley
    Junction, 338 pp, £12.50, November 1981, ISBN 0 86245 039 X

In the summer following the death of Leslie Stephen in 1904, his daughter Virginia lay in bed, listening to the birds singing in Greek and imagining King Edward lurking naked in the azaleas, shouting obscenities; that same summer she apparently attempted to kill herself by leaping out of the window. ‘I have never spent such a wretched 8 months in my life,’ she wrote to a friend when the crisis had passed.

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