For readers who are familiar with the recent scholarly turn to affect studies, or for those who know of Woolf mainly from depictions of her in popular culture (as the brooding and suicidal “Mrs. Woolf” of The Hours, for example), the suggestion that “happiness” is a core value for her as a writer and thinker may seem counterintuitive. It is highly likely that Woolf suffered from some form of bipolar disorder that contributed to a number of psychological breakdowns, and her youth especially was inundated by personal losses and traumas, notably the deaths of her mother, half-sister, father, and brother when Woolf was between the ages of thirteen and twenty-four, and her molestation by two older half-brothers, Gerald and George Duckworth. Given that difficult start to her life, and the well-known ending (her 1941 suicide by drowning in the River Ouse), wouldn't one be more likely to associate Woolf with unhappiness than happiness? Kirsty Martin challenges this notion in a thoughtful essay that situates Woolf's many depictions of fleeting, almost impressionistic happiness within the context of public efforts to bolster “mental well-being” in the U.K. population. Martin's reading, an important corrective to the image of Woolf as a perpetually brooding depressive, considers “happiness” in its vernacular sense – a contented feeling or joyful affect. In what follows, I examine Woolf's imperative to “make happiness” a performative (something one does, rather than something one is) and Aristotelian “end,” something that “is always desirable in itself and never for the sake of something else.” For the sake of clarity, I use the term eudemonia (often translated as “happiness”) to describe the activity or flourishing that Woolf advocates and cultivates in her work. The less familiar Greek term has the advantage of distinguishing happiness (as affect) from flourishing (as performative process). This is an important distinction, for, as Sara Ahmed has argued, the concept of “happiness” as affect has been deployed in a way that pathologizes cultural outsiders – “unhappy queers,” “feminist killjoys,” or “melancholic migrants” – who may have good reason to express unhappiness with social systems that oppress or marginalize them. The ideology of happiness (as affect), in Ahmed's analysis, suppresses social criticism that might lead to improvements in the conditions for the flourishing of members of oppressed groups. To put it another way, happiness, as coercive affect, can impede eudemonia, a way of living and thriving.