Voices of Hope and Despair: A Narrative-Dialogical Inquiry into the Diaries, Letters, and Suicide Notes of Virginia Woolf

Abstract

Reading the last diary entries and letters of British author Virginia Woolf (1882–1941), who committed suicide, we were intrigued and puzzled by her melancholic thoughts, on one hand, and her planning for the future, on the other. Even though the study of written residues (diaries, letters, and suicide notes) can provide useful insights into persons’ experience before death, existing research findings concerning positive/negative mood before dying often appear contradictory. In the present study, we used the conceptualization of polyphonic/multivoiced self as our theoretical lens. We studied all diary entries written in the last two months of Virginia Woolf’s life and up to four days before her suicide. We conducted a thematic narrative analysis in which themes—each seen as sustained by a different voice—were traced across diary entries. The strength of voices was monitored based on the space each covered in the narrative. Findings were triangulated with letters and suicide notes. We monitored a struggle between at least two opposite inner voices, the voice of “despair” and the voice of “hope.” Following a period of balance between voices, the voice of hope covered more space in the entry before last, but the voice of despair gained ground in the last entry. The idea that suicidal patients may be struggling with opposite inner voices until the end has interesting implications for prevention therapy and for the process of meaning making for suicide survivors.