Word: belled
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...which seemed to have menaced Leonard's emotional balance. They fulfilled certain of her needs for maternal admiration and stability of which her mother's early death deprived her. Most important of these was Virginia's affair of the heart with Vita Sackville-West, wife of Harold Nicholson. Bell thankfully cannot conclude that their intimacy involved physical love, though Virginia's reputation as an "aging Sapphist' no doubt derives from her deep attachments to select females. In another relationship with a rival female author. Katharine Mansfield, however. Virginia exposed the malice and narcissism native to her character, qualities she shared...
Bloomsbury was the matrix of the labyrinthine personal inter-relations which embroiled Virginia throughout her lifetime. The affections were so complicated that Lytton Strachey, whose 'buggery' as Bell puts it, was well-known, proposed to Virginia in 1909. Though Virginia greatly longed for marriage, she gently cased Strachey out of his offer. From the Bloomsbury salad days also dated Virginia's flirtation with Clive Bell, the husband of her sister Vanessa. Rivalry was always latent between the sisters, and Vanessa's marital happiness was in some sense unbearable to Virginia. Reacting with typically confused feelings of delight and jealousy. Virginia...
...Virginia made what Bell simply calls "the wisest decision in her life." She accepted Leonard Woolf's marriage proposal. For his wife, Leonard surrendered an extremely successful career in Ceylonese colonial administration, and she, in turn, overcame her fears of intimacy for Leonard. Much in the same manner as George Lewes upheld George Eliot so was Leonard indispensable in his wife's career. Without his steady, competent encouragement, she would not have become a major celebrity, and without Virginia to care for, Leonard might have commanded much more of the limelight...
According to Bell, the symptoms Virginia exhibited in her mad states were manic-depressive. Any student of A Writer's Diary knows of her precarious mental stability, but most, commentators have hesitated to define her sickness in medical terms. Michelangelo, Samuel Butler, Honore Balzac, and Robert Schumann share with Woolf manic-depressive disorders not unfamiliar to professional creative egos. Interestingly, Bell notes that his subject was never psychoanalyzed, though he doubts such treatment could have lured...
...horrifying image recurrently surfaced in her mind during introductory work on a novel, or at the end of a piece. Bell notices that "the fin rising on a wide bland sea," was both a signal of disaster and an admonition that new ideas for another novel were quickening within her subconscious. Virginia's creative ordeal involved such personal expense that Leonard in 1936 was certain if he had not lied to her that The Years was her greatest book, she would have committed suicide...