In the Library
On Being Ill
Virginia Woolf, 1926
- Form
- Form Essay
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 20 minutes
- Chapters
- Chapters 1
- Length
- Length 5k words
£1.99
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It becomes strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love, battle, and jealousy among the prime themes of literature.
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If you like this, try
The Magic Mountain
Thomas Mann
Hans Castorp goes up to a sanatorium for three weeks and stays seven years, discovering what Woolf argues: illness changes how time, the body and ideas feel.
£1.99
The Death of Ivan Ilyich
Leo Tolstoy
Ivan Ilyich does the same thing, but from inside a body dying by inches, watching everyone around his sickbed perform a politeness illness cannot afford.
£1.99
The Yellow Wallpaper
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Gilman does the same thing, but as fiction, trapping a woman in the sickroom Woolf only visits, where the bed becomes a cell rather than a vantage point.
£1.99
About the book
Consider, Woolf begins, what wastes and deserts of the soul a slight attack of influenza brings to view. Then consider that illness has never taken its place beside love and battle and jealousy among the great subjects of literature. Her explanation is the most exhilarating complaint in English prose: language runs dry. The merest schoolgirl in love has Shakespeare to speak her mind for her, while a sufferer trying to describe a pain in the head to a doctor has nothing, because English, which can carry the tragedy of Lear, has no words for the shiver. So Woolf goes into that undiscovered country herself. Laid flat, you desert the army of the upright, and the sky, which you have never looked at properly, turns out to have been going on overhead the whole time. Sympathy is exposed as a polite fiction. It is very funny, and then it is not funny at all, and it leaves you knowing that beneath the upright business of being well you are a creature lying down, alone in a body nobody else can enter.