Woolf's Own Struggle

Woolf wrote about mental illness from the inside. She lived through severe episodes herself, and Septimus's torment, along with the doctors who dismiss him, draws on her own experience of crisis and cold treatment. She drowned herself in the River Ouse in 1941. This does not shrink the novel to autobiography; it lends it authority. Woolf could render consciousness so precisely because she had lived inside it.