But he was also an outstanding alpine pioneer, her sister Vanessa was a talented painter, and one of her brothers an early psychoanalyst. Virginia Woolf had a bipolar affective illness, and a long family history of affective illness on both the maternal and paternal sides. The doubtful relationship between her attacks and her creative periods has already been alluded to, and she became completely unproductive in terms of writing when unwell, although she was convinced that the ideas for most of her books, sometimes written years later, came to her during a prolonged manic illness. It would be possible to argue that her great years of productivity followed from the most serious and life-endangering breakdowns of 1912 to 1915. The mystical quality of some of her writing and some of the less typical of her symptoms have sometimes raised the suspicion of schizophrenia.
Schizophrenia is typically a chronic illness, affecting thinking, originality and drive.
The fact that it is so rare in practising authors, adds strength to the diagnosis of affective illness in Virginia Woolf.