“The Hours” Pulitzer Prize novel by Michael Cunningham: Describes Virginia Woolf’s multiple personality, but does not name it

“She [Virginia Woolf] can feel it inside her, an all but indescribable second self, or rather a parallel purer self. If she were religious, she would call it the soul. It is more than the sum of her intellect and her emotions, more than the sum of her experiences…It is an inner faculty…and when she is very fortunate she is able to write directly through that faculty. Writing in that state is the most profound satisfaction she knows, but her access to it comes and goes without warning. She may pick up her pen…and find that she’s merely herself, a woman in a housecoat holding a pen, afraid and uncertain, only mildly competent, with no idea about where to begin or what to write (1, pp. 34-35).

Comment: Virginia Woolf, based on the real, historical novelist, is one of the characters in this novel. In an earlier scene, she committed suicide, as she did in real life.

The above passage describes Virginia Woolf as having an alternate personality to do her writing, but until Michael Cunningham explicitly mentions multiple personality, I can’t give him credit for understanding it.

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Added same day: The rest of the novel did not hold my attention.

1. Michael Cunningham. The Hours. New York, Picador USA, 1998.