This is such a brilliant, elliptical essay. Endlessly quotable and bigger in its whole than its parts, as ever. Her nonfiction (and to a slightly lesser extent, her fiction) is so frequently and so brilliantly about labor, which is not something she is particularly recognized for. ( )

While it is stated that there is humor in this essay, I found it to more profound than humorous. Woolf stresses the interplay of language and illness: there are no words to adequately describe illness, then she flips everything around and shares how when one is ill, one cannot comprehend prose and long stories, but rather is more able to understand poetry. ( )

In illness words seem to possess a mystic quality.

This short Woolf essay discusses the strange and often unsettling state of illness, one that Woolf asserts has been poorly represented in literature. Woolf's primary concern here is with the effects that illness has on how we take in the world, and how illness can change our relationships with the people around us. She also talks about reading while sick, and how "illness makes us disinclined for the lone campaign that prose exacts," recommending that sick people turn to poetry instead. The end of the essay seems to go off the rails a bit, and I found Hermione Lee's interpretation of its significance, found in the introduction, to be of value.

The attractive Paris Press edition makes a splendid effort to replicate the original Hogarth Press publication, presenting the reader with a very readable typeface and roomy margins. The text is accompanied by Lee's aforementioned introduction, which stretches out longer than the essay itself. Lee places the essay in its historical context of Woolf's life, analyzes Woolf's themes and techniques, and even includes a bit of gossip about T.S. Eliot and his differences with the Woolfs. ( )

Always good to read this book again each year. Virginia Woolf remains so brilliant and T.S. Eliot such a bore. I reference this because of his stupid diss of her submission per his request. Makes one hate editors in general.

This is a book for all seasons. A brilliant piece of writing by one of my favorite female writers. I wrote a review of the essay here:

http://mewlhouse.hubpages.com/hub/The-Challenging-Illness-of-Virginia-Woolf ( )

"Considering how common illness is, how tremendous the spiritual change that it brings, how astonishing, when the lights of health go down, the undiscovered countries that are then disclosed, what wastes and deserts of the soul a slight attack of influenza brings to view, what precipices and lawns sprinkled with bright flowers a little rise of temperature reveals, what ancient and obdurate oaks are uprooted in us by the act of sickness, how we go down into the pit of death and feel the waters of annihilation close above our heads and wake thinking to find ourselves in the presence of the angels and the harpers when we have a tooth out and come to the surface in the dentist's arm-chair and confuse his "Rinse the mouth - rinse the mouth" with the greeting of the Deity stooping from the floor of Heaven to welcome us - when we think of this, as we are so frequently forced to think of it, it becomes strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love and battle and jealousy among the prime themes of literature.

Virginia Woolf, 1930
Paris Press, 2002

Oh, what a mighty change in the course of wind. ( )