"English, which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear has no words for the shiver or the headache. . .The merest schoolgirl when she falls in love has Shakespeare or Keats to speak her mind for her, but let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry."
--Virginia Woolf (page 380)

I imagine that this quotation must allude to mental distress as well as physical pain--at least that is how it seemed to me.  It is known that Virginia Woolf suffered from depression, and although her words are fluent on paper, it is hard to imagine her speaking about her own mental illness.  Given how taboo the topic of depression is today, the condition itself must have been even more isolating in centuries past.  So many of the women writers we've studied have mentioned madness in relation to writing. It would be hard to believe that the two do not correlate.