To Ottoline Morrell

2 March 1923, 9 Clarence Gate Gdns

I have had more to think of and to decide during the last 10 days than at almost any moment in my life. [...]

Vivien is sleeping a little better, although it is a hard struggle at best. It remains to be seen whether the treatment she has been having is not too drastic for her; it is not at all pleasant and she finds it extremely exhausting.

They have been giving her, as well as the electric treatment, the Plombières treatment [a form of colonic irrigation], which is the most disagreeable of all; she feels in a state of complete exhaustion.

To John Quinn

12 March 1923, 9 Clarence Gate Gdns

I am now in the midst of a terrific crisis. I wish to heaven that I had never taken up the Criterion [literary magazine]. It has been an evergrowing responsibility; it has been a great expense to me and I have not got a penny out of it. There is not enough money to run it and pay me too. [...] I think the work and worry have taken 10 years off my life. I have sunk the whole of my strength for the past 18 months into this confounded paper, when I ought to have been minding my business and doing my own writing. The present situation is this: that I must either give up the bank at once and find some work which would take less of my time [...] or else I must give up the Criterion before my health crashes and I am no longer able to perform my bank work. I am now offered the post of literary editor of the Nation, at £200 a year less than my present salary and with no assurance that the job will last longer than six months, and if I take that I shall have to go straight into new work, which for the first six months will be very difficult and worrying, at a moment when I feel much more like going into a sanatorium. [...] I have not even time to go to a dentist or to have my hair cut, and at the same time I see the Criterion full of most glaring defects which I could only avoid by having still more time for it to devour, and at the same time I am simply unfit to take risks which in any case I should not be justified in taking. [Added in ink] I am worn out, I cannot go on.

To Sydney Schiff

6 April 1923, 9 Clarence Gate Gdns

The time has really come when we must consider nothing but self-preservation: Vivien is an extreme example of a person who has never learned to put herself first. She has always put other people first — and that is one way in which I myself have done her great harm. She has always been burdened [...] with me and my affairs.

To John Middleton Murry

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