Reading Deeper Into Virginia Woolf’s Vicious Diary Entry | Letters

John Harris confuses Virginia Woolf’s admittedly vicious diary introduction astir abnormal group pinch her firmly held beliefs successful referring to her “grim ideas” and associating her pinch modern eugenics (Again and again, we are shocked by nan curen of learning-disabled people. Yet we ne'er study from nan past, 20 July). Under nan Mental Deficiency Act 1913, mentioned by Harris, Woolf could easy person been categorised arsenic an “imbecile” during her respective breakdowns, and hallucinations occasioned by family deaths and intersexual maltreatment by her half-brothers.

Woolf’s experiences of aesculapian professionals who forced her to summation weight and forbade reference and penning (which made her life meaningful), and of backstage asylums, near her successful nary uncertainty of this possibility, which she illustrates truthful brilliantly in Mrs Dalloway.

The diary introduction is surely a defence system and projection – caricaturing others’ features to displace her individual fears.
Maggie Humm
Vice-chair, Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain