At their best, as in John Bowlby’s study of Charles Darwin (1990), psychobiographies can be illuminating examinations of personality and its formation. At their worst they are interpretative free-for-alls that reduce people to their diagnoses or childhood traumas, committing the biographical sin of ‘pathography’. Unable to put their subjects on the couch and unwilling to discipline their speculations about unconscious dynamics, psychobiographers can simply end up doing wild history. Freud himself fell into these traps. A fantasy of Leonardo’s that involved a ‘vulture’, which Freud linked to the hermaphroditic Egyptian Goddess Mut and through her to Leonardo’s sexual conflicts, actually involved a mistranslated ‘kite’, a bird without mythological baggage. Freud’s later co-authored psychobiography of Woodrow Wilson was a disastrous exercise in character assassination.

The subject of this book’s investigation is Virginia Woolf. The facts of her life are well known. Born to a literary family in London in 1882 – her father, Sir Leslie Stephen, was a noted author and her mother, Julia Stephen, modelled for the Pre-Raphaelite painters – Virginia’s early years were anguished. The deaths of her mother (1895), half-sister (1897), father (1904), and brother (1910), and many years of sexual abuse by her two half-brotherstriggered a series of depressive breakdowns and suicide attempts. These are now usually attributed to bipolar illness, although the superseded diagnosis of neurasthenia was favoured at the time. Woolf’s episodes punctuated her life while she ran with the Bloomsbury Group and wrote her great modernist novels. In 1941 – traumatised by Nazism and fearing another nervous breakdown – she walked into the River Ouse, her overcoat pockets laden with stones.

Psychobiographers have not been afraid of Virginia Woolf. Her psychiatric complexities, cursed family life, and revealing diaries and letters make her an appealing subject. Existing psychobiographies explore Woolf’s madness and creativity in light of her history of abuse, her losses, her relationship with her mother, her bisexuality, and her use of writing as a defence against guilt, finding clues for their interpretations within her texts.

Maxwell Bennett’s Virginia Woolf and Neuropsychiatry aims to do something different. Bennett is an eminent Australian neuroscientist who was founding director of the University of Sydney’s Brain and Mind Research Institute, where he is now professor of neuroscience. He is sceptical of any claim that psychobiography holds a magical key to unlocking the hidden complexities of the individual, and is convinced that if Freud were alive today he would forswear psychoanalysis for neuropsychiatry. Bennett argues that we can only understand Woolf if we appeal to neuroscience rather than to depth psychology. Much the same argument was made in Thomas C. Carmagno’s The Flight of the Mind: Virginia Woolf’s Art and Manic-Depressive Illness (1992), which proposed that literary scholars ‘will benefit from neuroscience, even if it only softens the biographical tendency to focus on the infantile, the cowardly and the regressive in … our subjects’. Strangely, Carmagno’s plea for ‘neurobiography’ goes uncited in Bennett’s book.

The book arranges ten rather disparate essays into three parts. Part One contains four short essays that examine Woolf’s life and mental illness through the lens of psychiatry and neuroscience. Bennett recounts Woolf’s symptoms and insecurities in her own words, and describes the rest cures and dietary supplements that passed as treatments for them. (Although Woolf consulted with Freud later in life and published his work through the Hogarth Press, she never underwent psychoanalysis.) These interventions were rooted in early twentieth-century understandings of mental illness that failed to recognise an organic footing for neurotic conditions. Psychoanalysis filled the explanatory vacuum surrounding neurosis, and Bennett lays out its model of depression as a complicated psychological reaction to loss and anger towards loved ones, and of hysteria as a consequence of fantasy and repression. In the final essay of Part I, Bennett shows how contemporary neuroscience offers a more encompassing account of Woolf’s symptoms, recognising the conjoint effects of inherited vulnerability, early sexual abuse, and the contemporary stress of wartime on her suicide, all mediated by brain processes.

Part Two is composed of five essays on the neuropsychiatry of depression and suicide. Unlike the first section, which targets the general reader, these essays are explicitly intended for a specialist audience of neurocognoscenti (three essays have been reprinted from professional journals). The writing here – on brain networks and hormonal influences in depression, mechanisms of therapeutic action by anti-depressant medications, and the neuroscience of psychosis – is tersely scientific and illustrated with many excellent graphs and diagrams.

Although this part of the book contains informative surveys of neuropsychiatric knowledge on a range of fascinating phenomena, complete with thirty pages of scientific bibliography, it is probably fair to say that many general readers will skip it. Those who do not will find themselves entangled in a thicket of oligodendrocytes, neuropils, astrocytes, microglia, transcription factors, and the like. Specialist readers will benefit from the magisterial research reviews, which include remarkable work on brain changes following childhood abuse that confound simple dichotomies of nature and nurture, body and mind, and biology and psychology. However, it is a little odd that almost two thirds of a book that is ostensibly about Virginia Woolf is given over to general neuropsychiatry, and that she is mentioned fleetingly on only two of its 126 pages.

Part Three comprises a single essay on evolving concepts of mind, soul, and spirit from ancient Egypt to Descartes. It takes Woolf’s meditations on consciousness and self as its point of departure for what is primarily an exercise in the history of ideas rather than an examination of Woolf’s thought or of neuroscience. All the same, the essay draws the book to a pleasing conclusion and highlights Bennett’s breadth of vision.

The book’s main virtues are its erudition and humanity. Bennett is an authoritative but amiable writer, and he conveys deep sensitivity towards his subject. He expresses a firm conviction that neuroscience has something important to contribute to our understanding of the lived experience of whole persons, not just to the investigation of biological mechanisms in the abstract. It is easy to dismiss neuroscience as a mechanistic and reductionist account of thought and action, but Bennett reminds us that it recognises the complex interplay of genes, brains, and life experiences, and rests on a much more solid foundation of knowledge than some of its alternatives. Whether something is also lost in the turn from psychobiographical explorations of Woolf’s inner world to the application of scientific generalisations to her case is another matter.

The book’s main limitation is structural. The switch from accessible to technical and from general to professional readerships generates some whiplash. All the same, Bennett’s book can be read with profit by anyone with an interest in psychology, psychiatry, or neuroscience, and also by enthusiasts of Virginia Woolf, especially if they are willing to skim the book’s ample midsection.