Actually, it seems so many of the biographies of these literary women that I have read retroactively diagnose their subjects with bipolar disorder (they don’t specify which diagnosis on the current “spectrum”), and theorize that medications (usually outdated in the older biographies, or weakly corraled as “lithium”) would have been a balm for these women, mirroring the overdiagnosis of the disorder in contemporary practice, as well as twinning the way “bipolar” has seemingly become the new female malady du jour for the self-destructive or fucked-up girl/woman.
