What’s Virginia Woolf Afraid of?

‘Whose Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’ could better be turned about after what I’ve recently read of her in the biography Virginia Woolf by James King, (Hamish Hamilton 1994). ‘What’s Virginia Woolf Afraid of?’ is more fitting. I have reached the point in my reading, roughly one third of the way through the book, where she has married Leonard Woolf, and their passion for each other has very quickly become intellectual only, or maybe that just applies to Virginia’s passion, and his is still physical. But whatever the truth of the matter their marriage is one of companionship, but then I imagine the same to be true of Jane and Paul Bowles. Virginia was certainly afraid of not being a married woman even though she observed that marriage slowed everything down, (because there were two of you having to decide things all the time, I presume), and undoubtedly spontaneity would be reduced when you were bound up with another person in that manner. But anyway, she married Leonard, who was a quite seriously depressed man who did talk of suicide at least once in a letter to someone, he said ‘Depression is becoming I believe, a mania with me, it sweeps upon & over me every eight or ten days, deeper each time. I you hear that I have died of sunstroke, you may be the only person to know that I have chosen that method of annihilation.’ I’d always assumed that Leonard patiently looked after Virginia, I had no idea he had his own mental demons to battle with as well.