Virginia Woolf. Would she have survived today?

She, too, led a life full of ups and downs.

Virginia was the daughter of a famous man. She grew up in a house where Thomas Hardy and Henry James were regular visitors. Back then, London’s intellectual elite gathered in their own salon.

But Virginia wasn’t allowed to go to school. Her brothers studied at Cambridge. She had private tutors. That’s how it was back then for girls, even in the best families. Especially in the best families.

The higher the social standing of the family, the tighter the corset for the daughters. Virginia never forgot that experience. Instead, she read her way through her father’s private library: Leslie Stephen, writer, historian, and editor of a monumental biographical encyclopedia. Early on, she expressed a desire to become a writer. At a time when that was not a profession for women. At most, a hobby.

• At 13, she lost her mother. This was followed by her first nervous breakdown.
• At 15, her half-sister Stella, who had taken on the role of mother, died.
• At 22, her father.
• At 24, her brother Thoby—from typhus—at the age of 26.

Four people in eleven years. Each loss tore her deeper.

Her era had no language for what was happening to her. They called it a nervous breakdown. They prescribed rest. They temporarily forbade her from writing. Of all things. The one thing that kept her going.

And yet: she wrote.

She moved with her siblings to Bloomsbury and became part of a circle that challenged stuffy England—in art, in thought, in the way of life. In 1917, she and her husband Leonard founded a publishing house, the Hogarth Press. The two set the first books by hand, letter by letter, in their own dining room. She wrote novels that changed literature forever. Celebrated in her lifetime, internationally renowned, today one of the most important authors of the modern era.

Her most famous work: *Mrs. Dalloway*. The book I’m holding in my hands in the photo.

A single day in the life of a London hostess. On the outside: buying flowers, preparing for an evening party. On the inside: a storm of memories, doubts, and fears. And running parallel to this is the story of a man returning from war, whose inner world is falling apart while high society engages in small talk.

Two people who never meet—and yet carry the same thing within them.

Woolf wrote about this book, saying she wanted to show life and death side by side, the world of those who conform and the world of those who fall outside it. She knew what she was writing about. From both sides.

And then there is her essay, “A Room of One’s Own,” from 1929. It is still quoted today when the question arises of what women need to think freely. Her answer back then: their own money and a room of their own. Nothing more. And that is precisely what women lacked. It was not talent they lacked. They always had that. Rather, it was the conditions to make use of it.

In 1941, she walked into the River Ouse. She was a good swimmer, so she put a stone in her coat pocket.

Her farewell letter to Leonard begins: “My dearest, I certainly feel that I am going mad again.”

And it ends: “I do not believe that two people could have been happier than we have been.” Both are in one letter. Both are true.

Virginia Woolf was mentally ill. Could she have survived today—with our knowledge, with our help?

That is what I cannot stop thinking about.