Experiencing Woolf

My name is Kristen DeLancey, and I am a student working on the Woolf, Creativity and Madness project as part of the STRIDE program at Smith College. This past summer, when I first decided to work with Michele, I did not yet have a full understanding of what my job would be, and what I might learn. The only real background I had in entering into this collaboration was an interest in psychology and a love of Virginia Woolf. Yet even in those areas that connected me to the project, I was not at all experienced—I had only read one of Woolf’s novels, and had never taken a psychology class at all. Moreover, I had hardly any idea of what work I might be asked to contribute. But as I sit here writing this today, a little over five months after I began work on the project, I marvel at how much I have learned, and how much closer it has brought me to the work and mind of Virginia Woolf.

During my first meeting with Michele, I began to fully understand how different this would be from most professor-student research projects. First of all, there would be no lab coats, relatively little data, and absolutely no test tubes. Our “data” would come from books and articles— biographies of Woolf’s life by scholars like Hermione Lee and Julia Briggs, examinations of bipolar disorder and creativity by psychologists today, and of course, Woolf’s own writings. Perhaps one of the most interesting parts of my work is being able to compare these different sources and find clues from Woolf’s world of the past and relate them to discoveries in the field of modern psychology. These studies become a lens through which to view Woolf’s life and work, allowing us to begin to understand the connections between her disorder and the remarkable manifestations of creativity in her writing.

My work is not completely rooted in research—more recently, I have helped take on website publicity, searching for other professors and scholars who share an interest in the kind of work I have taken part in. This process has resulted in a spreadsheet filled with the names of those we hope will appreciate the questions the website explores, and benefit from the information we have provided.

Though I may have known little about bipolar disorder, and even Virginia Woolf only a few months ago, today I have such a great appreciation for the life she lived and the work she was able to do, despite or because of her illness. I hope that others will see this passion in the website, and participate in this fascinating debate within psychology today.