On Being Ill (1930)

Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)

On Being Ill

[London]: Printed and published by Leonard & Virginia Woolf at The Hogarth Press, 1930

In this slender book, Woolf asks the reader to consider how strange it is that illness and “how tremendous the spiritual change it brings” is not, along with love and jealousy, one of the “prime themes of literature.” She wrote the essay following a months-long illness that came on suddenly in the summer of 1925, while she was writing To the Lighthouse, and at the time her relationship with Vita Sackville-West was becoming more intimate. It was first published in T.S. Eliot’s literary magazine The New Criterion; he edited the essay but believed it too personal in nature. Although included in Woolf’s posthumous The Moment and Other Essays, the essay otherwise fell out of print. It was neglected by scholars and readers until Paris Press in Massachusetts republished it in 2002.