The two novelists' books reveal how different varieties of hallucination can inspire and threaten creative work
Literary mediums … Crystal ball. Photograph: David Michael Zimmerman/Corbis
In the last note she scribbled to her sister, Vanessa, in March, 1941, Virginia Woolf wrote: "I feel I have gone too far this time to come back again. It is just as it was the first time, I am always hearing voices, and I know I shant get over it now … I have fought against it, but I can't any longer, Virginia."
The next day, she plunged into the River Ouse, her pockets weighted with stones. At 59, Woolf could no longer summon the inner resources to contend with the voices, turned unruly, clamorous and calamitous, that arrived unsolicited, but as if by appointment, each time she finished a novel. In the measured cadence of composition, her racing thoughts, "heard as voices … danced up and down, like a company of gnats, each separate, but all marvellously controlled in an invisible elastic net" (To the Lighthouse).
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The next day, she plunged into the River Ouse, her pockets weighted with stones. At 59, Woolf could no longer summon the inner resources to contend with the voices, turned unruly, clamorous and calamitous, that arrived unsolicited, but as if by appointment, each time she finished a novel. In the measured cadence of composition, her racing thoughts, "heard as voices … danced up and down, like a company of gnats, each separate, but all marvellously controlled in an invisible elastic net" (To the Lighthouse).
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