Madness, Gender, and Genius: Reading Virginia Woolf’s Suicide Note Through the Lens of Feminist Criticism

Abstract

This essay reads Virginia Woolf's suicide note from a feminist critical perspective, tracing the intersections of genius, gender, and madness in her last gesture of writing. Entirely a personal goodbye, Woolf's note is also a reflection of the profound tensions between her womanhood, authorship, and madness during early twentieth-century England. By placing the note in the context of Woolf's wider work—specifically her representations of female subjectivity, domestic entrapment, and mental instability—the study contends that the letter represents both the burden of patriarchal expectations and the innovative genius that fought back against them. The critique highlights how Woolf's deliberately chosen words complicate the conventional association of madness with weakness, instead situating her final work as a testament to the weight and genius of a woman writer navigating the boundaries set by society and her own mind. Finally, then, this paper proposes that Woolf's suicide note, if read critically, is not merely a document of despair but is also a feminist text revealing the fraught relationship between gender, creativity, and the cultural stigmatization of mental illness.