Still, despite her macabre history with influenza, Woolf still managed to scoff at the pandemic in its early days. That that year’s sickness seemed so dire was unsurprising, given the likelihood that she’d contracted the Spanish Flu, the virus that would create the century’s most devastating pandemic, killing tens of millions across the globe. “I was probably dying,” Woolf confessed to her sister about the severity of the 1919 infection. In the early 1920s, a cardiac specialist went so far as to predict that Woolf would soon also die. The latter was of particular relevance to Woolf, as her mother had died of heart failure due to complications from influenza in 1895, when Woolf was thirteen. Fergusson, worried that the many bouts of influenza-in 1916, 1918, 1919, 1922, 1923, and 1925-had done lasting damage to her nervous system and heart. And the discomfort was not temporary her physician, Dr.

Many of the infections also left Woolf in excruciating physical pain, which was only exacerbated by the extreme surgical measures, like tooth extractions, she occasionally took to alleviate the agony.

It was a remarkably ill-timed statement, for Woolf would fall sick with influenza repeatedly over the next decade, at times being confined to her bed as long as eight days. “nfluenza germs have no power over me,” she wrote to Janet Case, who had recently come down with the flu if Janet permitted it, Woolf continued, she would be happy to visit her in person. At the start of 1915, as the First World War raged around her, Virginia Woolf proudly declared in a letter to one of her friends that she had nothing to fear from the flu.

Valovi by Virginia Woolf