On Being Ill

＂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.

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) was one of the boldest and most influential writers of the English Modernist movement. Among her major works are the novels Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and The Waves.