On Being Ill With Notes from Sick Rooms by Julia Stephen

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.