It arrives in the form of a headache while Terence reads from a passage in Milton’s Comus. In this passage Sabrina, a virginal water nymph, is called upon to save a lady from Comus, thereby preserving the lady’s virtue. Earlier in Comus Sabrina herself was saved when she jumped into the water to escape the wrath of her jealous stepmother, Gwendolyn, and was transformed into a water nymph. As Terence reads, Rachel’s head begins to throb, and she retires. It is almost as if she has received a secret message from the passage — to save herself as Sabrina did by escaping into water, into the darkness. But what exactly would Rachel be saving herself from? The banal married life that she has just contemplated at the tea? Terence’s apparent need, despite his avowed feminism, to possess and know all of her? Her adoptive mother Helen’s anger and jealousy? Sex? Or is Rachel escaping from a more generalized terror of love and marriage? There is no clear answer, but it is a mistake to claim that the text does not provide any possibilities.

After going to bed Rachel has strange flashes before her eyes and begins to suffer delusions.

Rachel again shut her eyes, and found herself walking through a tunnel under the Thames, where there were little deformed women sitting in archways playing cards, while the bricks of which the wall was made oozed with damp (p. 322).

This nightmare parallels her nightmare early in the novel after Richard kissed her; only this time it is deformed women, not men, in the tunnel. But what does this strange scene mean? It doesn’t appear to represent any one thing as much as it is an amalgam of Rachel’s crippling anxiety about marriage and her fear of losing her self Her strange visions while she is sick — such as seeing a woman cut off a man’s head as Hewet goes to kiss her — are both associations with past events (a cook cutting off a chicken’s head) and primal projections of her uncensored urges. Interestingly, Rachel’s symptoms bear some resemblance to Woolf’s own symptoms when she suffered a breakdown, including flashing black spots, a racing pulse, and then escalating delusions and distortions of reality.

As Rachel’s condition worsens, Terence, St. John, and Helen divide tasks to care for her around the clock; eventually they all begin to suffer from the strain; “the separate feelings of pleasure, interest, and pain, which combine to make up the ordinary day, were merged in one long-drawn sensation of sordid misery and profound boredom” (p. 326). Terence suffers most of all, alternating between a resigned nihilism and a pervading dread of what may come.

In her illness Rachel tries to decipher the images that flash in front of her, convinced that her delusions have some larger meaning: “The sights were all concerned in some plot, some adventure, some escape. The nature of what they were doing changed incessantly, although there was always a reason behind it, which she must endeavour to grasp” (p. 331). Rachel does not appear to be a woman fighting for her life, but instead a woman retreating to the place where feelings and anxiety cannot reach her — the symbolic sea.

She fell into a deep pool of sticky water, which eventually closed over her head. She saw nothing and heard nothing but a faint booming sound, which was the sound of the sea rolling over her head. While all her tormentors thought that she was dead, she was not dead, but curled up at the bottom of the sea (p. 331).

Although Rachel appears to feel safe and cocooned in her symbolic sea, she is in fact teetering on the verge of death. Ultimately she does die, of course, but is this an actual choice — opting for death over marriage — or does Rachel simply become overwhelmed by her illness and lose her will to live? Woolf gives no real explanation for Rachel’s final descent into death. Instead she shifts the narrative focus and the reader’s empathy onto Terence. As Rachel dies we are anchored in Terence’s point of view and his struggle to absorb and, in a sense, justify his loss.

She had ceased to breathe. So much the better — this was death. It was nothing; it was to cease to breathe. It was happiness, it was perfect happiness. They had now what they had always wanted to have, the union which had been impossible while they lived. Unconscious whether he thought the words or spoke them aloud, he said, “No two people have ever been so happy as we have been. No one has ever loved as we have loved” (p. 343).

Once Rachel dies it would seem that the novel is over, but Woolf continues the story through the next day at the hotel. Why does she do this? Perhaps to place Rachel’s death in perspective, reminding us through Miss Allan and Evelyn that women have choices beyond marriage. But Woolf also uses the last chapter to establish who really suffers in death: not those who pass on but those who must endure, those who are forced to find a way to reconnect to life as Woolf herself had had to do time and again after the deaths in her family. When Miss Allan hears of Rachel’s death, she sits in a chair and ponders her own existence: “She felt very old this morning, and useless too, as if her life had been a failure, as if it had been hard and laborious to no purpose.