On Being Ill: with Notes from Sick Rooms by Julia Stephen

by Virginia Woolf, Hermione Lee (Introduction), Mark Hussey (Introduction), Rita Charon (Afterword)

Overview

With magnificent language, Virginia Woolf explores the ways that illness transforms our perceptions

This new publication of On Being Ill with Notes from Sick Rooms presents Virginia Woolf and her mother Julia Stephen in textual conversation for the first time in literary history. In the poignant and humorous essay On Being Ill, Virginia Woolf observes that though illness is a part of every human being's experience, it is not celebrated as a subject of great literature in the way that love and war are embraced by writers and readers. We must, Woolf says, invent a new language to describe pain. Illness, she observes, enhances our perceptions and reduces self-consciousness; it is "the great confessional." Woolf discusses the taboos associated with illness and she explores how it changes our relationship to the world around us. Notes from Sick Rooms addresses illness from the caregiver's perspective. With clarity, humor, and pathos, Julia Stephen offers concrete and useful information to caregivers today.

Originally published by Paris Press in 2002 as On Being Ill, this paperback edition includes an introduction to Notes from Sick Rooms and to Julia Stephen by Mark Hussey, the founding editor of Woolf Studies Annual, and a poignant afterword by Rita Charon, MD, the founder of the field of Narrative Medicine. Hermione Lee's brilliant introduction to On Being Ill is a superb introduction to Virginia Woolf's life and writing. This book is embraced by the general public, the literary world, and the medical world.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781930464131
Publisher:	Paris Press
Publication date:	11/06/2012
Pages:	160
Product dimensions:	4.90(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) is one of the great literary geniuses of the twentieth century. Her innovative fiction and essays are revered by readers around the globe. She was a central member of the Bloomsbury group and a ground-breaking feminist, publishing book-length essays that continue to change the lives of women today. Her novels include To the Lighthouse, Mrs. Dalloway, The Waves, and Orlando: A Biography. When she was not writing, Virginia Woolf operated Hogarth Press with her husband Leonard Woolf. She typeset the original Hogarth Press publication of On Being Ill. Throughout much of her life, Woolf faced the challenges of illness, yet she continued to create revolutionary works of literature. Julia Stephen (1846-1895), Virginia Woolf's mother, grew up in England among the painters and poets, novelists and philosophers who frequented the homes of her uncle Henry Thoby Prinsep and her aunt Julia Margaret Cameron, the acclaimed photographer. Her first husband, Herbert Duckworth, died in 1870. She married Woolf's father, Leslie Stephen, in 1878. Julia Stephen worked as a vocational nurse throughout her adult life, and published Notes from Sick Rooms in 1883. 

Date of Birth:

January 25, 1882

Date of Death:

March 28, 1941

Place of Birth:

London

Place of Death:

Sussex, England

Education:

Home schooling

Editorial Reviews

In illness words seem to possess a mystic quality,” writes Woolf, and she proves her observation correct in this essay (originally published in 1930), which leaps from observations of clouds to heaven to Shakespeare in stream-of-consciousness prose that, by design, borders on delirium. Her immersion in this mental state rings all the clearer for its contrast, in this edition, with “Notes from Sick Rooms,” an essay written by Woolf’s mother, Julia Stephen in 1883. While Woolf believes illness in literature should be no less stirring than war or love, her mother offers gentle instruction on things like pillows, baths, and the omnipresent scourge of crumbs, in what amounts to a nurse’s how-to guide. Hermione Lee’s introduction provides much appreciated context for Woolf’s essay, though at 34 pages to Woolf’s 28, it seems unnecessarily long-winded. Separating the two original texts is Mark Hussey’s introduction to Stephen’s essay, which notes that Stephens died when Woolf was 13, one potential explanation for the profound isolation Woolf experiences in illness. The book closes with a more personal note from internist Rita Charon, founder and director of Columbia University’s Program of Narrative Medicine. In the conjunction of the two essays, Charon finds “the necessary equilibrium between knowledge and feeling.” The book may have a surplus of commentary, but Woolf and Stephen will certainly change the way readers think of illness. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

"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.... When Woolf imagines beauty in a frozen-over garden, even after the death of the sun... it seems less a triumph of nature than of art."—The New Yorker

"In 2002, Paris Press, the Ashfield, Mass.,nonprofit publisher, rescued a little-known work by Virginia Woolf, On Being Ill. To mark the first decade in print of the Paris Press edition, the press is reissuing On Being Ill in November in paperback for the first time in an expanded edition (to be reviewed in PW's Oct. 15 issue). But the new paperback goes beyond reproducing the 2002 edition. It includes another long out-of-print essay, Notes from Sick Rooms by Woolf's mother, Julia Stephen, which was originally published in 1883 by Smith, Elder & Co. (Charlotte Brontë's publisher). For Paris Press director Jan Freeman, the addition of the new material—which also includes an introduction to Notes from Sick Rooms by Woolf scholar Mark Hussey and an afterword by physician Rita Charon—has transformed the book into a 'conversation in text' between Woolf and her mother (who died when Woolf was 13), patient and nurse. 'There are wonderful parallels between the two texts,' said Freeman. 'You learn about Woolf by reading Notes from Sick Rooms, and you learn about Woolf's mother's life. There's a familiarity in [Woolf's mother's] voice. Woolf didn't become a writer exclusively from the influence of her father.'"—Publishers Weekly

"The distance that yawns between the sick and the healthy—the 'army of the upright'—is the terrain mapped by Virginia Woolf in a marvelously elegant essay, On Being Ill.... On Being Ill speaks to the inseparable nature of psyche and soma, the tormented mind and body as one."—Los Angeles Times

"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.... When Woolf imagines beauty in a frozen-over garden, even after the death of the sun... it seems less a triumph of nature than of art."—The New Yorker

"Perusing this delicate yet powerful little book, we can't help but admire the shapeliness, the eloquence, the stylishness, and the incisiveness of the essay it contains. Nor can we fail to notice the witty paradoxes that animate and lend additional sparkle to this bright display of originality and intelligence.... Only in the final paragraphs of On Being Ill is the reader at last able to see what Woolf has been working toward: an affecting, resonant recapitulation and illustration of the inadequacy and superfluity of language in our efforts to describe human suffering. Which is, perhaps needless to say, also the most paradoxical aspect of the essay—the verbal pyrotechnics, the scintillating clarity and richness of the phrases and sentences in which Woolf tells us about the poverty and limitations of language."—Francine Prose, Bookforum

From the Publisher

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.

The New Yorker