From Virginia Woolf’s horrifying views on eugenics to James Strachey’s seminal translations of Freud, the Bloomsbury set didn’t only experience mental illness, they shaped how society thinks about it
‘As an experience,” Virginia Woolf wrote in 1930, “madness is terrific and not to be sniffed at … In its lava, I still find most of the things I write about.”
Woolf’s 1941 suicide by drowning in the River Ouse, her pockets weighted with stones, is usually framed as evidence of her tortured genius. But a new exhibition at Charleston in Lewes radically excavates this narrative while challenging ideas about mental illness.
Curator Hazel McMichael describes the Bloomsbury group as a “case study for looking at a mad community”. She explains: “We wanted to look at how aspects of psychiatry and psychoanalysis were echoed in the group’s everyday lives and art.”
Aligning with the “mad pride” movement of the 1990s, the exhibition reclaims the word “mad” as a point of pride and political identity, much like “queer” or “crip”. McMichael’s aim is not to deny the tragedy of Woolf’s suicide, which followed at least two other attempts, but to ask: mad according to who?
Woolf’s mental health issues were not anomalous in her circle, but her treatment – mainly private care at home – meant she could continue working. Meanwhile her peer, the artist Helen Coombe, studied at the Royal Academy and enjoyed early success, but her career dissolved on her admittance to the Retreat, an asylum in York where she spent the last 26 years of her life. Coombe was the wife of the critic and (much lesser) painter Roger Fry. In 1910, Fry curated the seminal exhibition Manet and the Post-Impressionists at Grafton Galleries, London, which was roundly accused by critics of being “the output of a lunatic asylum”.
Charleston displays paintings from that exhibition alongside rarely seen examples of Coombe’s work, including exquisite designs for stained glass and a drawing of a female Narcissus (a recurring, psychoanalytically informed motif in the show). In 1883, Coombe petitioned the RA to allow women to study partially draped figures. When Vanessa Bell, Woolf’s sister, began her studies there in 1901, she directly benefitted from Coombe’s activism. Bell’s prolific output is the subject of a forthcoming exhibition at Tate Britain, alongside Duncan Grant, her friend, lover and co-owner of Charleston, the Bloomsbury group’s countryside base. You can’t help but think: what might have become of Coombe without institutionalisation?
Photographs of the Retreat show light-filled rooms and displays of patients’ handicrafts. In correspondence with Coombe’s doctor, Fry pushed for the integration of colour and art in the treatment of patients. It’s a far cry from an 1897 image of the crowded women’s dining hall at St Pancras Workhouse, where Bell’s servant Mary Elizabeth Wilson ended up following a period of severe mental disturbance. We know of Wilson because of Bell’s comedic account of her life – “Mad Mary” – which Bell read aloud to the inner echelons of the Bloomsbury group in 1921 at the Memoir Club. Woolf’s diaries also refer to Wilson’s “servant’s hysteria”.
Wilson’s presence adds welcome nuance to the ever popular Bloomsbury story, which often celebrates the group’s revolutionary spirit without acknowledging the privilege that facilitated it: access to “a room of one’s own” and magnificent homes such as Charleston. But Wilson’s story remains secondhand. “Madness is often an invisible phenomenon,” McMichael says, “haunting objects in ways that are difficult to pin down”.
Contemporary responses brilliantly plug these gaps. An installation by the Mad Heritage Collective, a group with experience of mental illness and neurodivergence who co-produced the exhibition, features a text composed of cut-up extracts of Bell’s “Mad Mary” essay. Louisa Fairclough’s sound piece, The World Went Out of Tune With Itself, viscerally recreates the artist’s seven-year experience of psychosis. Discordant electronica made, Fairclough explains, “from within madness”, is layered with notes recalling obsessive, paranoid thought patterns.
While the tortured genius narrative casts Woolf as exceptional, mental illness recurred in her family. Among hundreds of family photos of Woolf’s siblings, only two survive of her half-sister, Laura Stephen. A hazy photograph of a girl, head downturned to obscure her features, evokes a haunting absence when displayed alongside handsome oil paintings of Woolf and other celebrated relations.
Another photograph was taken on Laura’s admittance to Earlswood Asylum in 1893, aged 22. McMichael notes: “Patients were photographed in formal attire, which appeared to dignify them, but the doctors in charge used patient portraits to document facial features for racial classifications.”
Laura was diagnosed with hereditary “imbecility” because her grandmother had attempted suicide. But her Earlswood case notes describe her repeating the words “bed”, “boys” and “family”, suggesting a link to the sexual abuse we know Woolf and Vanessa Bell suffered at the hands of their older half-brothers.
The notion of inherited madness prompted complex conversations among the research groups at Charleston. McMichael notes that while many “found solace in the potential genetic roots of neurodivergence, others wanted to focus on how pathologised ways of thinking, feeling and acting are responses to a maddening world”.
The subject also evokes the Bloomsbury group’s often overlooked history of eugenic attitudes, which the show addresses head-on. The economist John Maynard Keynes, a frequent Charleston guest, was vice-president of the Eugenics Society. “Only healthy seed must be sown!” blares a 1930s Society poster. Woolf wrote horrifyingly in 1915 of encountering an “ineffective shuffling idiotic” group of learning-disabled adults who she declared should “certainly be killed”.
The Bloomsbury group didn’t just experience mental illness, they were at the forefront of changing ideas around it in Britain. Adrian and Karin Stephen, Woolf’s brother and his wife, were prominent psychoanalysts. The Hogarth Press, founded by Woolf and her husband Leonard, published Freud’s Complete Psychological Works under James Strachey’s editorship.
Strachey – a sometime lover of Maynard Keynes – made the consequential decision to use the Latin “ego” and “id” for Freud’s German “das Ich” (I) and “das Ees” (it). This, says McMichael, “transformed self-explanatory language into clinical jargon, shaping the way we think about consciousness.”
The group’s extraordinary output was also impacted by therapeutic encounters. TS Eliot started writing The Waste Land in 1921 following a breakdown, and while undergoing treatment from Roger Vittoz in Lausanne. Diagrams illustrate Vittoz’s technique of “brain control”, which focused on sensory experience, simple repeated movements and exercises. The academic Matthew Gold’s revelatory work argues that the fragmentary, rhythmic echoing in The Waste Land (birdsong is “twit twit jug jug”) were a product of Vittoz’s methods as well as existential dissolution.
Whatever the medical profession has us believe, psychiatric labels reflect social attitudes. Homosexuality, for example, was classed a “mental disorder” for the majority of the 20th century. In keeping with Charleston’s spirit, Mad Bloomsbury leaves space to celebrate transgression from norms. Duncan Grant’s naked Spanish Dancer costume was worn with wig, heels and painted face at a typically fabulous looking Charleston party. Grant’s painted jigsaw of a rosy, spanked bottom also features, alongside tender 1970s portraits of young queer friends Grant found late in life through Brighton’s Gay Liberation Front.
The exhibition’s quieter moments speak to non-medical methods of managing distress. McMichael says: “We talked of how fundamental animals and nature are to being able to function in our day-to-day lives.” Grant’s portraits of beloved pets join Vanessa Bell’s sketches of a woman and her dog, made for the cover of Woolf’s 1933 novel Flush, which was inspired by the spaniel Vita Sackville-West gifted Woolf. The writer’s cross-stitched tapestry handbag nods to Woolf’s comment in a 1912 letter to Leonard: “knitting is the save of life.”
In exploring the Bloomsbury group’s relationships to mental health, the exhibition expands our understanding not only of a fascinating milieu, but of the mind and its diverse workings.
