\n<\/p>\n
John Harris confuses Virginia Woolf\u2019s admittedly vicious diary entry about disabled people with her firmly held beliefs in referring to her \u201cgrim ideas\u201d 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 \u201cimbecile\u201d during her several breakdowns, and hallucinations occasioned by family deaths and sexual abuse by her half-brothers.<\/p>\n
Woolf\u2019s 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 <\/em>Mrs Dalloway.<\/p>\n The diary entry is surely a defence mechanism and projection \u2013\u00a0caricaturing others\u2019 features to\u00a0displace her personal fears. Have an opinion on anything you\u2019ve read in the Guardian today? Please <\/em><\/strong>email<\/em><\/strong> us your letter and it will be considered for publication in our <\/em><\/strong>letters<\/em><\/strong> section.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" John Harris confuses Virginia Woolf\u2019s admittedly vicious diary entry about disabled people with her firmly held beliefs in referring to her \u201cgrim ideas\u201d 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<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":12609,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[6236,3973,6239,1067,6238,1345,6240,6237],"class_list":{"0":"post-12608","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-social-issues","8":"tag-deeper","9":"tag-diary","10":"tag-entry","11":"tag-reading","12":"tag-vicious","13":"tag-virginia","14":"tag-woolf","15":"tag-woolfs"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12608","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12608"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12608\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/12609"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12608"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12608"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12608"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
Maggie Humm<\/strong>
Vice-chair, <\/em>Virginia Woolf Society of\u00a0Great Britain<\/em><\/p>\n