Virginia Martin Nash, John Nash’s mother, is described as an “outgoing and energetic” woman who is “less rigid” than her husband, John Nash Sr., and is the caring, capable matriarch of the Nash family. Throughout A Beautiful Mind, Virginia provides for John Nash, her only son, helping to care for him between his hospitalizations for schizophrenia and providing funds to bail him out of trouble. “A born teacher,” Virginia helps to encourage Nash’s early talents as a young student, though she also struggles to come to terms with Nash’s erratic behavior as an adult. She dies in 1969, throwing her family into further disarray.
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Virginia Martin Nash Character Timeline in A Beautiful Mind
The timeline below shows where the character Virginia Martin Nash appears in A Beautiful Mind. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 1: Bluefield
Nash’s parents marry in Bluefield, West Virginia, in September 1925. Nash’s father is a Texas native who had a troubled childhood: his...
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Chapter 35 – In the Eye of the Storm
...At first, she tells no one that Nash is behaving irrationally; later, she confides in Virginia Nash and two psychiatrists, who each advise different courses of treatment—medication or shock therapy. In...
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Chapter 38 – Citoyen du Monde
...letters to his former colleagues. Alicia and Nash are quickly running out of money: eventually, Virginia Nash wires funds to Paris to finance Nash’s deportation, and Nash is escorted to the...
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Chapter 40 – Tower of Silence
At the end of January 1961, Virginia Nash and Martha arrive in Princeton. They travel to the Trenton State Hospital, where Nash...
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Chapter 41 – An Interlude of Enforced Rationality
...Nash insists that he isn’t ill and therefore doesn’t need hospitalization. As a result, Martha, Virginia, and Alicia decided that Nash would again have to be committed to a hospital in...
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Chapter 44 – A Man All Alone in a Strange World
...state; without medication, he would have become a shell of his former self. In 1969, Virginia Nash dies. Eleanor obtains a court order to force Nash to continue child-support payments, which...
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