On Being Ill

“A really important piece of writing, beautifully executed. Woolf asks a profound question: why don’t we have a greater literature of illness? I think she’s put her finger on a real issue that, in 1922, literature needed to more closely address the transitions in experience that being ill can effect. And maybe the problem is because there are so many different ways of being ill.” Read more...

The best books on Medicine and Literature

Gavin Francis, Travel Writer

“One of the things that is amazing about her—and I can’t really think of anyone who does it quite so well—is the way she writes about the body, and the relationship between the life of the body and the life of the mind. She was often ill, and not just mentally ill, but also physically ill. She had terrible phases of rapid heartbeat, she would get appalling headaches and migraines, she had tremendous problems with eating. There was a whole gallery of symptoms that had to do with being very vulnerable. She writes about these. There are astonishing descriptions in her first novel, The Voyage Out, of a woman with a mortal illness.” Read more...

The Best Virginia Woolf Books

Hermione Lee, Biographer