In her magnificent biography of Virginia Woolf, author Hermione Lee notes that the fear of incomprehensibility links madness and writing.

You seem nice, but I’m going to say good night now. It was nice meeting you. You’re very pretty, but the truth is I’m just so tired of women in thrall to the patriarchy, you know?

She, too, will show him—her physician husband—her move into madness a rejection of his assessment. You don’t think I’m mad? Well, I’ll show you. It is not enough—not for the narrator, not for Septimus—to tell the story of their madness; they must act it out.

They needed me to get better and instead I got better at being sick. I got better at being a mental patient. I got better at planning my death and better at speaking to psychiatrists.

That was when I learned that words are no good; that words don’t ever fit even what they are trying to say.

This is not a romantic or nostalgic view of the early nineties; it wasn’t better or worse—but it was something else.

Now I read the helplessness at the heart of the story—a learned helplessness—that I knew too well. The desire to be told who you are, what you need.

For Shakespeare, madness was one with excess; lovers and madmen both have access to a truth only allowed by unreason—their seething brains, their shaping fantasies.

Home from the war, the rigidity and formality of British life appear absurd. Septimus’s madness is an untethering—he is both unable to feel and yet too porous; he has a growing sense that the world is sending him messages.