Throughout the past few decades Virginia Woolf’s so-called madness and suicide have highly influenced the public and critical reception of her life and work and have framed—in the various senses of that word—Virginia Woolf as a figure of the madwoman in the river. But what of Woolf’s feminist reception? How do feminist critics engage with that specific construct of Woolf? What do they do with it? And do they undo it? At the junction of Woolf studies, feminist studies, and reception studies, I explore in this essay how feminist critics have tackled, subverted, or evaded the issue of Woolf’s madness and suicide, and wonder what kind of feminist ethics and/or politics of reception could be crafted to demystify the figure of the madwoman in the river.