ERIS gems- On Being Ill

Virginia Woolf's reflections on sickness, fiction, and the chilling indifference of the natural world.



“Always to have sympathy, always to be accompanied, always to be understood would be intolerable.”

Virginia Woolf’s essay begins by lamenting the surprise neglect of ill-health as a potential literary subject. What then unfolds is a dazzlingly written series of reflections on sickness, fiction, and the chilling indifference of the natural world. Above all a testament to the fundamental solitariness of the human soul, this is an indispensable work by the preeminent stylist of twentieth-century English literature.