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Rating: 
Summary: The boredom of hell
Review: I never did figure it out or finish it. It might be a fine book but it bored me to sleep every night for weeks until I just tossed it on the shelf for good.
Rating:
Summary: Hell is where this psychiatrist belongs
Review: Interesting title, promising subject. But the book is a huge disappointment. If you are looking for a brief biography of Woolf that touches on her bipolar disorder, then this may be what you want. If you want any real discussion of the disorder and a decent analysis of how she developed it and how it manifested itself, go elsewhere. Dally is a psychiatrist who came of age in the 1950s. He is particularly interested in "manic depression" and anorexia nervosa, and he found both in Woolf. He used her extensive diaries to divine what troubled her, and his own background to determine why. Dally has a tendency to trot out theories and present them as facts. From the beginning he describes Woolf's illness as genetic and attributes it to her father's side of the family. His "proof" is a family tree that shows that some members of her father's family suffered from various nervous disorders and he could not find as much evidence of such illness on her mother's side. He offers no proof of the genetic basis but merely proclaims it. In the appendix he notes that the genetic basis has not been proven "but it is only a matter of time". Yet, in his own description of Virginia's childhood, he offers a much more potent and believable basis for her later depressions. Her mother did not want her, essentially rejected her, and always considered her of less value than the males of the family. There was nothing Virginia could do to win her mother's approval, yet she continued to try. As is typical with those with depression, she could not outright reject her mother or blame her for her own pain, and as a result her anger turned inward. This seems a far more plausible reason for her bipolar disorder than some vague genetic predisposition. He also provides absolute treatment prescriptions, as if he were prescribing an antibiotic for a bacterial infection. Manic-depressives need quiet. They need to be kept from becoming excited. They need people around who will support them. They need to be protected from stress. Is this true? Would Virginia have not killed herself if she had never had to face stress, if she were kept in the country, if nobody ever offered her any excitement? Even though she herself craved excitement, social interaction? Would she have truly been better off without the parties, the various stresses of everyday living? I was not at all convinced. Dally's assumptions don't stop with Virginia and Leonard. He proclaims that Virginia's lover, Vita Sackville-West, was incapable of forming long-term intimate bonds. By what means did he make this diagnosis? He never met the woman. He can't possibly know if she was outright "incapable", and he certainly offers no basis for this assertion. I found the book offensive for these reasons. He has reduced a writer of amazing creativity to a creature with a genetic disease, and has offered no substance for his simplistic analysis.
Rating:
Summary: Exactly what Woolf would have expected of a doctor
Review: This is far and away the least insightful, least knowledgeable, least useful book I've ever read about Virginia Woolf. If I ever come across a book by this doctor again, I will shun it like the plague. Here are a few of the many, many ways he went wrong: 1) The "family tree" in the back of the book that supposedly supports his claim that Woolf's mental health issues were genetic is totally incomplete. So far as an informed reader can tell, he only named and "diagnosed" immediate family members of Leslie Stephen and family members who he could identify as having some kind of problem related to Woolf's. Another problem is that he doesn't appear to have presented his evidence for having determined that these people even suffered from the same difficulties one to the other, let alone to Virginia Woolf's manic depression. 2) He constantly undermines the evidence given by women (Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell -- Bell is supposed to have not even known whether or not she had a miscarriage in 1911) while bolstering the evidence given by men. He promotes the causes of George Duckworth and Leslie Stephen, and belittles the evidence that George at least may have committed some serious offenses against his half-sisters. In the spirit of humility and a recognition that he was not there and did not know these people, Dally should at least have indicated that the evidence might be sketchy and presented the evidence for his views as *possible*. His attitude towards women is, at best, outdated. Given that, I don't think he should have undertaken to write about one. 3) Dally "diagnoses" medical conditions of people for whom he has extremely limited information without defining his terms. What is cyclothemia? Well, I could look it up in a book, but what it means to Dally or how he came to his conclusion, I'll never know. 4) Dally uses only published sources for his book. Yes, some of them may have been out of print and quite difficult to find, but that doesn't change the fact that he allowed himself to be limited to published sources. There are a lot of documents (Leonard Woolf's letters, for one) that were not published or were published only in part at the time that Dally's book was written. But many of these resources are readily available at university libraries. How he can presume to diagnose and criticize based on an incomplete record -- well, it's an astonishing act of arrogance, and if he were practicing REAL medicine would probably get him sued. I could say a lot more about Dally's characterizations of Woolf's motivations, his overlooking the importance of various people in her life, his lack of understanding of the period about which he wrote, his utter lack of sympathy for the values of Bloomsbury -- but I don't have enough space. Bottom line -- this book is junk and although it could have been a terrific addition to Woolf scholarship, any half-competent graduate student could have produced something really useful and far more insightful than this exercise in medical chauvinism. It's exactly the sort of thing Virginia Woolf would have expected from a doctor.
Rating:
Summary: Exactly what Woolf would have expected of a doctor
Review: This is far and away the least insightful, least knowledgeable, least useful book I've ever read about Virginia Woolf. If I ever come across a book by this doctor again, I will shun it like the plague. Here are a few of the many, many ways he went wrong: 1) The "family tree" in the back of the book that supposedly supports his claim that Woolf's mental health issues were genetic is totally incomplete. So far as an informed reader can tell, he only named and "diagnosed" immediate family members of Leslie Stephen and family members who he could identify as having some kind of problem related to Woolf's. Another problem is that he doesn't appear to have presented his evidence for having determined that these people even suffered from the same difficulties one to the other, let alone to Virginia Woolf's manic depression. 2) He constantly undermines the evidence given by women (Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell -- Bell is supposed to have not even known whether or not she had a miscarriage in 1911) while bolstering the evidence given by men. He promotes the causes of George Duckworth and Leslie Stephen, and belittles the evidence that George at least may have committed some serious offenses against his half-sisters. In the spirit of humility and a recognition that he was not there and did not know these people, Dally should at least have indicated that the evidence might be sketchy and presented the evidence for his views as *possible*. His attitude towards women is, at best, outdated. Given that, I don't think he should have undertaken to write about one. 3) Dally "diagnoses" medical conditions of people for whom he has extremely limited information without defining his terms. What is cyclothemia? Well, I could look it up in a book, but what it means to Dally or how he came to his conclusion, I'll never know. 4) Dally uses only published sources for his book. Yes, some of them may have been out of print and quite difficult to find, but that doesn't change the fact that he allowed himself to be limited to published sources. There are a lot of documents (Leonard Woolf's letters, for one) that were not published or were published only in part at the time that Dally's book was written. But many of these resources are readily available at university libraries. How he can presume to diagnose and criticize based on an incomplete record -- well, it's an astonishing act of arrogance, and if he were practicing REAL medicine would probably get him sued. I could say a lot more about Dally's characterizations of Woolf's motivations, his overlooking the importance of various people in her life, his lack of understanding of the period about which he wrote, his utter lack of sympathy for the values of Bloomsbury -- but I don't have enough space. Bottom line -- this book is junk and although it could have been a terrific addition to Woolf scholarship, any half-competent graduate student could have produced something really useful and far more insightful than this exercise in medical chauvinism. It's exactly the sort of thing Virginia Woolf would have expected from a doctor.
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