start with the sentence, because it's the whole reason she's on this page. in an essay called 'modern fiction' — written in 1919, revised into the common reader in 1925 — virginia woolf wrote: "examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. the mind receives a myriad impressions." a shower of them, all day, from every side.
she was picking a fight with the novel. books, she said, had been telling a lie about consciousness — arranging life as a tidy sequence of events, one thing after another, when the actual experience of having a mind is nothing like that. it's a rush. a memory, a noise from the street, half a worry, a plan, a smell, the worry again. life, she wrote, is not 'a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged'; it's a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.
if you're here, that probably sounds less like literary theory and more like a tuesday. and that's her point. the noise isn't a malfunction. it's the texture of being awake. she didn't try to edit it out of her books — she made it the subject. mrs dalloway (1925) is one june day inside several heads at once. to the lighthouse (1927) does it again across years. she put the stream on the page because that's what a mind actually is.
the room
the second thing she said is the practical one, and it's the one most people know and least people take literally. in 1928 she gave talks to women students at cambridge; in 1929 they became a room of one's own. the argument is not mystical. "a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction." a mind that can be walked in on, that has no income of its own, that is on call for everyone else's needs, can't hold a thought long enough to finish it. she meant a lock on the door. she meant hours nobody can take.
put the two claims together and you have something useful for the noise. the mind is a storm — fine, that's normal, stop treating it as a defect. and: a storm still needs a room. most people fighting their own heads have never asked the second question. where is your locked door? when is the hour that's yours?
the noise is what having a mind is like. what have you done about the room?
her own
her mind was, at times, brutal to her, and she wrote that down as plainly as everything else. her mother died when she was thirteen and the first breakdown followed. her father's death in 1904 brought a worse one, including a suicide attempt. in 1910, 1912 and 1913 she was sent to a nursing home for the standard 'rest cure' — no reading, no writing, forced feeding — which biographers now think did harm. and she recorded onset in her diary in a voice you'll recognise if you've been there: an entry from september 1926, headed simply 'a state of mind', begins "woke up perhaps at 3. oh its beginning it's coming — the horror." she and leonard treated it as an illness that came and went across decades. between times they printed books on the dining-room table — the hogarth press, founded 1917, which went on to publish eliot and the first english freud — and she wrote.
on 28 march 1941, with london under bombing and her old symptoms back, she left a note for leonard that begins "dearest, i feel certain that i am going mad again," and drowned herself in the river ouse near their home in sussex. that's all this page says about it. scholars since have proposed diagnoses; she and her doctors used none of them, so neither does this.
the honest ledger
the 'gig lamps' line is usually quoted with a gap in it, as it is here. one diary line about 'sinking down, down' when she stopped working couldn't be pinned to a date and is left out. and her literary stream of consciousness (a method) is not the same as the voices she described in her worst periods (a symptom) — related in her life, kept separate here.
for the noise, her two questions, in order: can you let the storm be a storm? and then — where's your room?