On Being Ill. Virginia Woolf

On Being Ill



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On Being Ill Virginia Woolf ebook pdf
Publisher: Paris Press
Language: English
Page: 64
ISBN: 1930464061, 9781930464063

From

The first sentence of this essay, which was originally published in T. S. Eliot's New Criterion, in 1926, includes references to both the consolations of angels and the indignities of the dentist's chair, and this almost gleeful waywardness is characteristic of what's to come. By turns lyrical, self-mocking, and outlandish, Woolf's meditation on the perils and privileges of the sickbed lampoons the loneliness that makes one "glad of a kick from a housemaid" and extolls the merits of bad literature for the unwell. As Hermione Lee points out in her excellent introduction, the author only hints here at the mental and physical illnesses that plagued her throughout her life, but one's knowledge of them gives the references to "waters of annihilation" and "deserts of the soul" an added resonance. And yet the consolations of creation are also considered. When Woolf imagines beauty in a frozen-over garden, even after the death of the sun—"There, thrusting its head up undaunted in the starlight, the rose will flower, the crocus will burn"—it seems less a triumph of nature than of art.
Copyright © 2005

From

Woolf's essays, most famously A Room of One's Own, have been as liberating and nourishing as a freshening wind or drought-ending rain, and so the resurrection of this forgotten work on illness is a boon indeed. Written between two of Woolf's greatest novels, Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, this is Woolf at her spangled best. Seemingly a cascade of gossamer thoughts, her prose is in fact as tightly knit, strongly patterned, impervious, and purposeful as a fisherman's sweater. Woolf wonders why illness, which is as much a part of life as love and greed, is not a common theme in literature, then reveals its import in lyrical yet ironic descriptions of illness' slow-motion parallel world, where the afflicted have time to watch the sky or carefully observe a rose. Illness is an altered state, says Woolf, who suffered from myriad chronic conditions, one that grants significant revelations. Insightfully and eloquently introduced by renowned Woolf biographer Hermione Lee, this scintillating and important addition to the Woolf canon is graced by Vanessa Bell's cover for the 1930 Hogarth Press edition. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved



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