[5] Virginia Woolf described receiving "piles of dirty copy books written in a scrawl without any spelling, but I was taken aback to find, as I thought, some real merit... it may be a kind of infantile phosphorescence....
She was married in 1938 to the geneticist James Meadows Rendel, who was the grandson of Lytton Strachey's sister Dorothy Bussy, and the nephew of the Bloomsbury Group writer Frances Partridge.
[13] However, struggling with the demands of motherhood and increasingly discouraged by rejections from the BBC, she gradually withdrew from her writing career, as revealed in her correspondence with her friend, champion and mother of six Naomi Richardson.
After a mental breakdown in November 1954, she was placed in an asylum – Holloway Sanatorium near Virginia Water, Surrey – where she stayed for seven years, eventually discharging herself in September 1961.
[3] Spells in Brighton and Dover were followed by a move to Nottingham, where she lived for the last 20 years of her life under an assumed name, Sophie or Sophia Curly, initially homeless and afterwards in a series of single-room council flats.
There she was intermittently visited by her children – Jane Susan Robertson, Polly Mary Virginia Woods, and Sandy Meadows Rendel – and grandchildren.