What mental illness did Virginia Woolf have?

Woolf experienced what would today likely be diagnosed as bipolar disorder — episodes of severe depression alternating with periods of intense creative productivity. She had her first breakdown at thirteen after her mother's death, and the cycle repeated throughout her life, punctuated by hospitalizations and long recoveries.

Her experiences included auditory hallucinations, inability to eat or function, and prolonged states of despair. She was treated using the medical understanding of the era — bed rest, isolation from intellectual work — which often prolonged rather than helped the episodes.

How did mental illness affect her writing?

It informed it completely. Mrs Dalloway contains one of literature's most precise portrayals of breakdown through the character of Septimus Warren Smith. Woolf drew on her own experiences of dissociation, the sense of unreality, the terror of losing grip on self.

She wrote in her diary that some of her most productive creative periods came immediately after or during recovery — as if the dissolution of the self in breakdown cleared away what was habitual and left something more raw and true.

How did she die and what did she leave?

She died by suicide in 1941, walking into the River Ouse near her home in Sussex. She left letters to her husband Leonard and her sister Vanessa. Her note to Leonard said she feared another breakdown was coming and did not want to destroy his life again.

Her death should not be romanticized — it was a tragedy. But her life — the quantity and quality of what she produced, the relationships she sustained, the conversations she had — was extraordinary. She made art and meaning inside conditions that frequently made both seem impossible.