Recommendations from our site
“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...
Hermione Lee, Biographer
Our most recommended books
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Essays of E.B. White
by E.B. White -
Studies in the History of the Renaissance
by Walter Pater -
A Sad Heart At The Supermarket
by Randall Jarrell -
The Hands of the Living God: An Account of a Psychoanalytic Treatment
by Marion Milner -
The Common Reader
by Virginia Woolf -
Selected Essays, Poems, and Other Writings
by George Eliot
