‘The output of a lunatic asylum’: what the Bloomsbury group can tell us about mental health

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 idea

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