Literary Witches - of Virginia Woolf, and a brief dissertation

Ms. Woolf's observation--mmm, query I should say--hints at the subject of my current novel project.  Of course this is assuming novels have subjects, which I very much doubt.

When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even of a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet, of some mute and inglorious Jane Austen, some Emily Bronte who dashed her brains out on the moor or mopped and mowed about the highways crazed with the torture that her gift had put her to. Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.

                            ― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own

Citizens of the Highbrow Commonwealth will of course raise the right (or left) eyebrow of circumspection.  Virginia Woolf! She is hardly one of us--we who eschew depression and certainly disapprove the imp of self-destruction in our authors. Yet nevertheless, she represents an instructive authoress whose enchanting warps and woofs can't fail to impress upon our imaginations, if not our prose styles (see for example Tally-Ho, Cornelius! Chapter 47,461: “The Lamentations of the Lost Corsairs”). It is not for me to intrude upon Ms. Woolf's private struggles, which ran deep through her psyche, but I would be remiss if I failed to suggest that an "Anglican" point-of-view, as  it were--which ironically incorporated her free thinking views, but more importantly remained unchecked (or was left unguided) by a tincture of Calvinist understanding as to the vagaries of the course of Providence (and with sensible modernist and Armenian qualifications thoroughly wringing out this crazy formation)--I say, such a world view can encourage symptoms of neurasthenia, or something like it (see for example Michael Knox Beran's tireless documentation of the phenomenon in his book WASPs, which describes the travails of upper-crust American Episcopalians in the 19th and 20th centuries). To return. Of course, it would be stupid to distance ourselves from other aspects of Anglicanism that do so much to assure the continuity of a communion with the Godhead.  What to do? Consider, there are things we can depend upon from God, but there are also things that we MUST do for ourselves; a good example is assuming responsibility for oneself through piecing together economic stability. Indeed, putting together that stability crowns the spiritual experience of earning independence.  Ms. Woolf had such independence from her birth. She did not have to scratch and crawl her way to it.  Had she gathered those inevitable scars and callouses, her depression possibly wouldn't have conquered her; such anyway is my conjecture. I might add, too, a bit of wisdom from John Milton.  After Adam and Eve fall from God's grace, they consider suicide.  Adam correctly and wisely dismisses the proposition, perfectly observing that if God was capable of driving (or duping) them to their Fall, then what might he have in store for them were they to kill themselves and so further deepen their alienation from his plan; and even though that plan might seem somewhat dodgy, if not fully absurd.  Meanwhile, I take it their love for each other (and as difficult as that was) served as ample encouragement, moreover serving to consolidate their spiritual identities into something God could fully love, His Son could rescue, and furthermore represent something that the angels could marvel at with much spiritual animation, intellectual speculation, pure emotional amazement, and song.