John Harris confuses Virginia Woolf’s admittedly vicious diary entry about disabled people with her firmly held beliefs in referring to her “grim ideas” and associating her with contemporary eugenics (Again and again, we are shocked by the treatment of learning-disabled people. Yet we never learn from the past, 20 July). Under the Mental Deficiency Act 1913, mentioned by Harris, Woolf could easily have been categorised as an “imbecile” during her several breakdowns, and hallucinations occasioned by family deaths and sexual abuse by her half-brothers.
Woolf’s experiences of medical professionals who forced her to gain weight and forbade reading and writing (which made her life meaningful), and of private asylums, left her in no doubt of this possibility, which she illustrates so brilliantly in Mrs Dalloway.
The diary entry is surely a defence mechanism and projection – caricaturing others’ features to displace her personal fears.
Maggie Humm
Vice-chair, Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain