virginia woolf essay on illness

Virginia Woolf on Being Ill as a Portal to Self-Understanding

By maria popova.

“The body provides something for the spirit to look after and use,” computing pioneer Alan Turing wrote as he contemplated the binary code of body and spirit in the spring of his twenty-first year, having just lost the love of his life to tuberculosis. Nothing garbles that code more violently than illness — from the temporary terrors of food poisoning to the existential tumult of a terminal diagnosis — our entire mental and emotional being is hijacked by the demands of a malcontented body as dis-ease, in the most literal sense, fills sinew and spirit alike. These rude reminders of our atomic fragility are perhaps the most discomfiting yet most common human experience — it is difficult, if at all possible, to find a person unaffected by illness, for we have all been or will be ill, and have all loved or will love someone afflicted by illness.

No one has articulated the peculiar vexations of illness, nor addressed the psychic transcendence accessible amid the terrors of the body, more thoughtfully than Virginia Woolf (January 25, 1882–March 28, 1941) in her 1926 essay “On Being Ill,” later included in the indispensable posthumous collection of her Selected Essays ( public library ).

Half a century before Susan Sontag’s landmark book Illness as Metaphor , Woolf writes:

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. Novels, one would have thought, would have been devoted to influenza; epic poems to typhoid; odes to pneumonia; lyrics to toothache. But no; with a few exceptions — De Quincey attempted something of the sort in The Opium Eater ; there must be a volume or two about disease scattered through the pages of Proust — literature does its best to maintain that its concern is with the mind; that the body is a sheet of plain glass through which the soul looks straight and clear, and, save for one or two passions such as desire and greed, is null, and negligible and non-existent.

Five years earlier, the ailing Rilke had written in a letter to a young woman : “I am not one of those who neglect the body in order to make of it a sacrificial offering for the soul, since my soul would thoroughly dislike being served in such a fashion.” Woolf, writing in the year of Rilke’s death and well ahead of the modern scientific inquiry into how the life of the body shapes the life of the mind , rebels against the residual Cartesianism of the mind-body divide with her characteristic fusion of wisdom and wry humor, channeled in exquisite prose:

All day, all night the body intervenes; blunts or sharpens, colours or discolours, turns to wax in the warmth of June, hardens to tallow in the murk of February. The creature within can only gaze through the pane — smudged or rosy; it cannot separate off from the body like the sheath of a knife or the pod of a pea for a single instant; it must go through the whole unending procession of changes, heat and cold, comfort and discomfort, hunger and satisfaction, health and illness, until there comes the inevitable catastrophe; the body smashes itself to smithereens, and the soul (it is said) escapes. But of all this daily drama of the body there is no record. People write always of the doings of the mind; the thoughts that come to it; its noble plans; how the mind has civilised the universe. They show it ignoring the body in the philosopher’s turret; or kicking the body, like an old leather football, across leagues of snow and desert in the pursuit of conquest or discovery. Those great wars which the body wages with the mind a slave to it, in the solitude of the bedroom against the assault of fever or the oncome of melancholia, are neglected. Nor is the reason far to seek. To look these things squarely in the face would need the courage of a lion tamer; a robust philosophy; a reason rooted in the bowels of the earth. Short of these, this monster, the body, this miracle, its pain, will soon make us taper into mysticism, or rise, with rapid beats of the wings, into the raptures of transcendentalism.

“Is language the adequate expression of all realities?” Nietzsche had asked when Woolf was just genetic potential in her parents’ DNA. Language, the fully formed human argues as she considers the unreality of illness, has been utterly inadequate in conferring upon this commonest experience the dignity of representation it confers upon just about every other universal human experience:

To hinder the description of illness in literature, there is the poverty of the language. English, which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear, has no words for the shiver and the headache. It has all grown one way.

In a passage Oliver Sacks could have written, Woolf pivots to the humorous, somehow without losing the profundity of the larger point:

Yet it is not only a new language that we need, more primitive, more sensual, more obscene, but a new hierarchy of the passions; love must be deposed in favour of a temperature of 104; jealousy give place to the pangs of sciatica; sleeplessness play the part of villain, and the hero become a white liquid with a sweet taste — that mighty Prince with the moths’ eyes and the feathered feet, one of whose names is Chloral.

And then, just like that, in classic Woolfian fashion, she fangs into the meat of the matter — the way we plunge into the universality of illness, so universal as to border on the banal, until we reach the rock bottom of utter existential aloneness:

That illusion of a world so shaped that it echoes every groan, of human beings so tied together by common needs and fears that a twitch at one wrist jerks another, where however strange your experience other people have had it too, where however far you travel in your own mind someone has been there before you — is all an illusion. We do not know our own souls, let alone the souls of others. Human beings do not go hand in hand the whole stretch of the way. There is a virgin forest in each; a snowfield where even the print of birds’ feet is unknown. Here we go alone, and like it better so. Always to have sympathy, always to be accompanied, always to be understood would be intolerable.

In health, Woolf argues, we maintain the illusion, both psychological and outwardly performative, of being cradled in the arms of civilization and society. Illness jolts us out of it, orphans us from belonging. But it also does something else, something beautiful and transcendent: In piercing the trance of busyness and obligation, it awakens us to the world about us, whose smallest details, neglected by our regular societal conscience, suddenly throb with aliveness and magnetic curiosity. It renders us “able, perhaps for the first time for years, to look round, to look up — to look, for example, at the sky”:

The first impression of that extraordinary spectacle is strangely overcoming. Ordinarily to look at the sky for any length of time is impossible. Pedestrians would be impeded and disconcerted by a public sky-gazer. What snatches we get of it are mutilated by chimneys and churches, serve as a background for man, signify wet weather or fine, daub windows gold, and, filling in the branches, complete the pathos of dishevelled autumnal plane trees in autumnal squares. Now, lying recumbent, staring straight up, the sky is discovered to be something so different from this that really it is a little shocking. This then has been going on all the time without our knowing it! — this incessant making up of shapes and casting them down, this buffeting of clouds together, and drawing vast trains of ships and waggons from North to South, this incessant ringing up and down of curtains of light and shade, this interminable experiment with gold shafts and blue shadows, with veiling the sun and unveiling it, with making rock ramparts and wafting them away…

But in the consolations of this transcendent communion with nature resides the most disquieting fact of existence — the awareness of an unfeeling universe, operating by impartial laws unconcerned with our individual fates:

Divinely beautiful it is also divinely heartless. Immeasurable resources are used for some purpose which has nothing to do with human pleasure or human profit.

It would take Woolf more than a decade to fully formulate, in a most stunning reflection , the paradoxical way in which these heartless laws are the very reason we are called to make beauty and meaning within their unfeeling parameters: “There is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself,” she would write in 1939. Now, in her meditation on illness, she hones the anchor of these ideas:

Poets have found religion in nature; people live in the country to learn virtue from plants. It is in their indifference that they are comforting. That snowfield of the mind, where man has not trodden, is visited by the cloud, kissed by the falling petal, as, in another sphere, it is the great artists, the Miltons and the Popes, who console not by their thought of us but by their forgetfulness. […] It is only the recumbent who know what, after all, Nature is at no pains to conceal — that she in the end will conquer; heat will leave the world; stiff with frost we shall cease to drag ourselves about the fields; ice will lie thick upon factory and engine; the sun will go out.

This sudden awareness of elemental truth renders the ill person a sort of seer, imbued with an almost mystical understanding of existence, beyond any intellectual interpretation. Nearly a century before Patti Smith came to contemplate how illness expands the field of poetic awareness , Woolf writes:

In illness words seem to possess a mystic quality. We grasp what is beyond their surface meaning, gather instinctively this, that, and the other — a sound, a colour, here a stress, there a pause — which the poet, knowing words to be meagre in comparison with ideas, has strewn about his page to evoke, when collected, a state of mind which neither words can express nor the reason explain. Incomprehensibility has an enormous power over us in illness, more legitimately perhaps than the upright will allow. In health meaning has encroached upon sound. Our intelligence domineers over our senses. But in illness, with the police off duty, we creep beneath some obscure poem by Mallarmé or Donne, some phrase in Latin or Greek, and the words give out their scent and distil their flavour, and then, if at last we grasp the meaning, it is all the richer for having come to us sensually first, by way of the palate and the nostrils, like some queer odour.

Complement this portion of Woolf’s thoroughly fantastic Selected Essays with Roald Dahl on how illness emboldens creativity and Alice James — Henry and William James’s brilliant sister, whom Woolf greatly admired — on how to live fully while dying , then revisit Woolf on the art of letters , the relationship between loneliness and creativity , the creative potency of the androgynous mind , and her transcendent account of a total solar eclipse .

— Published May 6, 2019 — https://www.themarginalian.org/2019/05/06/virginia-woolf-on-being-ill/ —

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Interpreter of Maladies: On Virginia Woolf’s Writings About Illness and Disability

Gabrielle bellot explores the complexity of detailing sickness in the age of covid.

At the start of 1915, as the First World War raged around her, Virginia Woolf proudly declared in a letter to one of her friends that she had nothing to fear from the flu. “[I]nfluenza germs have no power over me,” she wrote to Janet Case, who had recently come down with the flu; if Janet permitted it, Woolf continued, she would be happy to visit her in person. It was a remarkably ill-timed statement, for Woolf would fall sick with influenza repeatedly over the next decade, at times being confined to her bed as long as eight days. Many of the infections also left Woolf in excruciating physical pain, which was only exacerbated by the extreme surgical measures, like tooth extractions, she occasionally took to alleviate the agony. And the discomfort was not temporary; her physician, Dr. Fergusson, worried that the many bouts of influenza—in 1916, 1918, 1919, 1922, 1923, and 1925—had done lasting damage to her nervous system and heart.

The latter was of particular relevance to Woolf, as her mother had died of heart failure due to complications from influenza in 1895, when Woolf was thirteen. In the early 1920s, a cardiac specialist went so far as to predict that Woolf would soon also die. “I was probably dying,” Woolf confessed to her sister about the severity of the 1919 infection. That that year’s sickness seemed so dire was unsurprising, given the likelihood that she’d contracted the Spanish Flu, the virus that would create the century’s most devastating pandemic, killing tens of millions across the globe.

Still, despite her macabre history with influenza, Woolf still managed to scoff at the pandemic in its early days. In a diary entry from 1918, she off-handedly recorded a neighbor’s succumbing to influenza along with the weather, as if both were equally mundane and unimportant: “Rain for the first time for weeks today, & a funeral next door; dead of influenza.” A few months later, she remarked sarcastically, upon noting that her writerly friend Lytton Strachey was avoiding London due to the pandemic, that “we are, by the way, in the midst of a plague unmatched since the Black Death, according to the Times, who seem to tremble lest it settle upon Lord Northcliffe, & thus precipitate us into peace.” The sardonic tone suggests that Woolf initially viewed the pandemic as a bit of an overblown joke, the comparisons to the plague histrionic.

While ridicule was a common tool of Woolf’s to sneer at things she disliked, she may have had a deeper reason for wanting to deny the lethality of influenza. In part, she likely wanted to avoid the destiny of her mother, whose death had pushed Woolf to the first of the mental breakdowns that would come to constellate her life’s skies. In Woolf’s words, her “infinitely noble” mother was always an “invisible presence” in her life. “[S]he has haunted me,” she said in a 1927 letter.

If her mother was invisibly with her, so, too, was Death, which she described as a similarly invisible, haunting presence in “The Death of the Moth,” a 1942 essay on mortality, in which Woolf watches a moth slowly expire, its legs flailing as if against an “enemy.” Death is the “enemy” here, “indifferent, impersonal,” a foe unseen who none of us, moths or matriarchs, could hope to win against. If the fatal effects of the First World War were obvious—heaps of the dead, bombed buildings, letters to family members indicating that someone was never returning—the pernicious presence of influenza was quieter, less overt, but no less lethal; it, too, was an unseen adversary, ubiquitous and unassuming all at once.

Woolf, it turned out, had no shortage of invisible companions—her mother, the virus that kept attacking her body—and both were linked, in turn, to Death. Death was always with her, the indigo-eyed companion by her bedside, and if the thought of it gave her pain when she thought she, too, was not long for the world, it also gave her solace, because it meant her mother, for all of the ways that she was unlike her daughter, was always near.

As Woolf knew, illness, like trauma, lingers, even after we think we’ve recovered.

In 1925, Woolf also suffered another nervous breakdown, and it, along with her many experiences of influenza, prompted her to write “On Being Ill” the following year, a startling essay about sickness in literature. The piece becomes memorable from its first sentence, a long, luxuriant meditation that is one of my favorite first sentences in nonfiction. “Considering how common illness is,” Woolf writes,

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.

Here, Woolf achieves two things: she argues that illness has been unfairly dismissed as unworthy of representation in literature, and, before she has even made this argument, she has already proved it by showing the vast range of experiences that illness comprises, the way sickness makes even an otherwise mundane experience seem tinged with Bardic drama, or the rainy-night fire of noir; illness, in other words, contains the grand battles and unmapped tundras and emotions bright-dark as Picasso’s harlequins present in so many books labeled “important,” yet it rarely appears as a main theme.

Illness, Woolf says, is relegated to brief references rather than deep explorations, if it appears at all. “Those great wars which the body wages with the mind a slave to it,” she writes, “in the solitude of the bedroom against the assault of fever or the oncome of melancholia, are neglected. Nor,” she continues, “is the reason far to seek”: it takes bravery and vulnerability, “the courage of a lion tamer,” to defy social mores and write honestly about one’s illness, and, to Woolf, few writers possessed this courage to offend by putting their struggles on full display.

Moreover, Woolf noted that English writers seemed disinclined to write about the body at all, as if it were improper, immoral. Woolf sought a literature that allowed us to write candidly about our body’s experiences. And illness, she proposed, had a startling ability to renew our awareness of the worlds inside and outside of us. In “Art as Technique” (1918), the Russian critic Viktor Shklovsky famously defined the literary technique of defamiliarization, which was to make a familiar thing seem new and strange; sickness, for Woolf, was the great defamiliarizer, causing us to see mundane things, like the sky or a flower, with the awe of a first-timer, because in sickness simple things can suddenly seem incredible once more.

This, in turn, leads us to explore our own selves more deeply, drifting through our Escherian staircases, our orca-dotted seas. In this way, illness becomes a bridge to writing about both ourselves and the world around us more sharply. Illness is itself novelistic, epic, lyric, if we allow ourselves to express its contours.

As a child, I caught countless colds and flus, learning to dread the tickle in my throat preceding a sore throat; later, I was in bed with dengue fever for a week I remember as a haze. I developed a mild case of Covid-19 shortly after New York’s shutdown, losing my sense of smell for a few days. What looms largest in me, though, are the memories of anxiety and depression, the memories of a version of me I wish I could exorcise, but cannot, because they are, like my shadow, inextricable.

Writing openly about sickness is almost always scary—all the more so if you have anxiety, which can make you feel anxious writing about anxiety. And if you’re a trans woman of color, like me, you begin to fear revealing too much about your struggles with mental illness, in particular, even comparatively light cases like my own, because you know that many people will simply take your revelations as proof that people like you are disturbed dangers to wholesome, “normal” white folks like themselves. It is common, after all, for critics of trans people to deny the reality of our experiences or the urgency of transitions by claiming we are “mentally ill,” suggesting that we are too deluded to understand anything about ourselves.

To write about your illness—bodily or mental, because each amplifies the other—is to risk having your experience weaponized against you.

But I do it anyway, because it is more freeing than not.

I have heard the crackle of anxiety for most of my life, dull, soft, then unexpectedly loud, like the crackle of a drag on a clove cigarette in a pink evening. I have heard its jazzy electricity, a soft discordant constant like the buzz of an old diner’s neon sign but with sudden spikes in volume, sudden whorls and whirls. Most of the time, I can live with it, even forget its noise, but it is always there, a constant undercurrent in the background of the self, threatening to rise like Hokusai’s wave and take me with it,  and every so often it does, reducing me to a crying wreck, to a howl lonely and loathing as the bellows of the sea-beast in Bradbury’s “Fog Horn,” to shame at your weakness, and this is when it becomes so easy to step into the soft grey quicksand of depression, to sink into that emptying space where you stop feeling at all, and begin to want to end it all, because you fear you are worth as little as you feel when the grey has sapped you of your colors. I know it well, know how the grey once made me want to swallow poison, once got me to go to a train station to step in front of a C train to end my life, made me for years casually hear kill yourself while doing dishes or reading.

I control it all better now. I rarely sink into depression’s stone pools, and my anxiety is a softer hum. But the fear of them lingers. I still feel nervous sharing that I deal with either, because even if you exist just fine 98 percent of the time, all it takes is that other 2 percent to make someone look at you different, back away with an awkward smile, and begin to treat you like someone they cannot be themselves around anymore, if they want to be around you much at all.

Have an outburst when life is genuinely stressful, and you are pathologized; cry in front someone because you, too, are haunted by the ghost of your mother, who is still alive but has never loved you the same since you came out as trans, and you fear being pathologized. You become your struggles, become a mind-body problem that cannot be solved.

I am still learning, like Woolf, how to reveal.

One of the few books that did center illness, in Woolf’s estimation, was Thomas de Quincey’s famously hallucinatory classic, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821). De Quincey was also aware of how rarely the English, in particular, allowed themselves to talk about illness, and so he prefaced his book with a wry note to readers about the English dismissing narratives about the sick as nothing less than immoral. He begins by apologizing for

breaking through that delicate and honourable reserve which, for the most part, restrains us from the public exposure of our own errors and infirmities.  Nothing, indeed, is more revolting to English feelings than the spectacle of a human being obtruding on our notice his moral ulcers or scars. . .

To write about one’s addictions and pains—one’s illness, in another word—was “revolting,” an obtrusive “spectacle”; de Quincey, like Woolf, sought to do away with that puritanical line of thinking. And, as he notes later in the preface, it was also hypocritical, given the large numbers of English people who took opium in secret, but would rail with the Manichaean fury of a preacher against anyone actually writing openly about drug use and addiction.

De Quincey’s sentences capture some of the surrealism of taking laudanum, and Woolf’s essay, similarly, has a beautiful, deliberate style. “On Being Ill” is a slow burn, its sentences long, languid, and curlicued like dreaming’s rivers, and it is difficult not to feel drawn in by its lushness. Woolf’s essay is not straightforward, and critics of medical literature have taken her to task for this in the few times her essay has received attention, arguing that her points are weakened by the circuitousness of her style.

But this criticism misses the larger point. Woolf didn’t want to create a simple, straightforward argument; her essay’s style itself is a part of the argument. It captures, in its richest moments, the feelings we may have when bedridden: the disorientations, the sudden fascinations with mundane things, the rock-peppered streams of consciousness. The essay’s imagery is constantly in flux, as if, in a bit of metatextual genius, to capture the hazy, Heraclitean impressions of being sick itself.

Rather than create a direct set of points, Woolf reveled in what Keats famously termed negative capability: uncertainty, the in-between spaces that, for some critics of nonfiction , partly define essays as a genre. An essay can be an essay, in the definition of “essay” that means “an attempt”; an essay functions perfectly well as an attempt to get at an idea, rather than needing to have a clear, linear polemical path. Essays can make clear arguments; they’re also quite free to suggest rather than say explicitly, free to wander the wilds.

Beyond this, Woolf linked style to gender, with different forms of description indicating something about how one sees the world. She defined these categories in characteristic Woolfian fashion in one of her most playful short stories, “The Mark on the Wall,” in which two characters—the narrator implied to be a woman and the other a man—respond to an unidentified mark on the wall quite differently. For the narrator, not knowing what the mark is inspires a series of surreal associations, and she revels in the uncertainty because it is enjoyable to speculate; the man, however, sees the dot and immediately labels it nothing but a snail, bringing the story, and the imaginativeness, to an abrupt end.

For Woolf, this difference mattered. Blunt, abrupt, direct sentences that declare, with certainty, what something is represented “the masculine point of view,” while longer, more imaginative, uncertainty-privileging sentences were “feminine.” The narrator dislikes the speculation-ending masculine point of view, “which soon, one may hope, will be laughed into the dustbin where the phantoms go.” Style, then, is substance, is spirit, is Weltanschauung. “On Being Ill” privileges this roving style, so that you don’t just say, “I have influenza” and leave it there, but show what it feels like.

Woolf’s concerns also animated the critic Elizabeth Outka, whose Viral Modernism (2019), a study of the 1918 pandemic in Modernist literature, came out, appositely, just before our own generation’s pandemic. In a moment of macabre insight, Outka notes that “certain types of mass death become less ‘grievable’… than others, with deaths in the pandemic consistently seen as less important or politically useful. The millions of flu deaths,” she continues, “didn’t (and don’t) count as history in the ways the war casualties did.” Outka’s study seeks to answer a curious question: why the pandemic, despite its staggering scope, so rarely seems to appear in Modernist literature of the period. In reality, the pandemic is  there, in both passing references and even, arguably, in some of the disorienting, fragmentary stylistic choices of the era, which may reflect the hallucinatory experience of severe influenza. Yet it is all too easy to take a course on Modernism with only a passing nod to the pandemic, if you get that at all, while the First World War, which helped amplify the virus’ spread, will always be discussed.

This happens even in discussions of Woolf’s other overtures to illness, like her celebrated novel Mrs Dalloway , which mentions influenza but is rarely spoken of as a pandemic novel. Here, too, the war takes critical precedence: critics have overwhelmingly focused on Septimus, the shell-shocked soldier, as the book’s image of trauma, often ignoring that, in Outka’s words, Clarissa is a “pandemic survivor” who deals with “lingering physical and psychological damage” from influenza. (Septimus, however, may also have been lastingly affected by the virus, Outka speculates, given its prevalence amongst soldiers and his delirium-like symptoms.) Clarissa is described early on as having “her heart affected…by influenza,” like Woolf and her mother; her grand joy at going out to get the flowers herself, the desire that starts the novel, suggests that her sickness prevented her from leaving her home before then, a detail darkly reminiscent of the coronavirus pandemic’s psychological effects on the quarantined.

A part of the problem, Outka says darkly, is a tendency to sweep away illness as less noteworthy than, say, a war, and this desire is tied to gendered norms of what is casually considered “important,” whereby war, a stereotypically “masculine” activity, takes precedence over almost all else. While I dislike following norms of gender, it’s difficult not to see these tendencies at play in discussions of Woolf’s era. “When we fail to read for illness in general and the 1918 pandemic in particular,” Outka writes in a memorable passage,

we reify how military conflict has come to define history, we deemphasize illness and pandemics in ways that hide their threat, and we take part in in long traditions that align illness with seemingly less valiant, more feminine forms of death.

Thankfully, this is beginning to change, thanks to books whose authors put their struggles with illness front and center, like Sick , Porochista Khakpour revealing memoir of Lyme Disease; The Collected Schizophrenias , Esme Wang’s intense, intimate essays on living with mental illness; My Year of Rest and Relaxation , the by-turns-humorous-and-harrowing novel by Ottessa Moshfegh about intersections between mental illness, privilege, and American society; or Kaveh Akbar’s astonishing poems of addiction, Portrait of the Alcoholic . These books, alongside so many others, place illness of one kind or another at the forefront, allowing readers not just to observe but to feel what it is like to be sick—and there’s something beautiful amidst the poignancy in this vulnerability.

Yet it is still difficult to be taken seriously once you admit—or confess, as de Quincey did—to having to struggle with something, and it is clear that some of that old desire to simply not have us dirty up a narrative with our illnesses. It’s worse, still, for those of us who are nonwhite and trans in America, when our revelations merely reinforce racist and transphobic stereotypes about our stability, our danger to others, or the very validity of our thoughts.

We have come far—but we’re far from where we need to be, all the same, when Woolf’s essay still has the power to seem subversive.

Our pandemic is both similar to and distinct from the one Woolf lived through. The Spanish Flu was horrifically devastating, its death toll amplified significantly by soldiers from the First World War bringing the virus with them as they traveled. The coronavirus is also destructive (though unquestionably less so), but we have better medical tools to deal with it now, and its death toll will almost certainly be lower, though no official toll can grasp how many have truly died, in Woolf’s day or ours, because the reach and ramifications of a pandemic are almost always wider than we can comprehend.

This pandemic will end—possibly even sooner than we may think—but it will not end all at once. Instead, as in Camus’ The Plague , the effects that this period has had on us will linger, even if we don’t fully realize how deeply we’ve been affected. Although we will be able to return to something like normalcy one day, due to a scientific miracle of speed in vaccine production that we must never take for granted, we won’t return to exactly what we were before; we will have changed, because this pandemic has changed all of us, even those who claim there is no pandemic at all. Some of the changes, to ourselves and societies, may be good, helping to show the work for equal access to healthcare and financial aid that urgently needs to be done.

Other changes, however, may even seed future pandemics, like the non-immunocompromised people who claim they will never stop wearing a mask or let their kids go anywhere unmasked even after vaccination, a practice that would obviously harm their immune systems in the long run. Egos on social media, stoked already by sanctimonious bragging tweets about, say, how many masks they own, may simply enlarge further as they brag about, say, not taking a coronavirus vaccine, a position that—if the vaccines are shown to work—will amount to anti-intellectualism for “likes” that lengthens the span and death toll of this pandemic, or the next.

Regardless of all this, whenever the pandemic is over, we must practice a deeper form of self-care—be it through celebration or separation for a little longer—than we’ve ever done before to begin to really heal. As Woolf knew all too well, illness is itself a kind of invisible presence in our lives even when we think we’ve recovered.

How we speak of pandemics matters, too. Woolf used militaristic imagery in “On Being Ill”; sickness was a grand “war.” This is how so many in power have described our relationship with the coronavirus: a battle to be won. But this is wrong. The coronavirus is simply another entity (almost an organism, though viruses aren’t quite alive) we live in relation to, and that our species has always lived in relation to since we happened to evolve, on our pale blue planetary dot. Viruses do not likewise “see” us as enemies; we are simply means of propagation, the coronavirus no different in this sense from any other. And viruses far outnumber humans—and all other organisms—on Earth.

But this isn’t cause for alarm; it’s always been this way. We do not win against viruses; we live with them always at the door of our worlds. If we kick one out into the obsidian of the past, lovely; others will always be there, prolific as the microbes we carry around inside us every day. Pandemics will likely never stop occurring—and this is scary, yes, but it doesn’t have to outright petrify us, because this is merely the social contract of life, the natural contract, we sign when we are born. It’s easy to forget how fragile we are, how extraordinary it is that humankind has survived as long as it has. But we have, through plagues and pandemics, and will continue to, somehow, because that’s what we do—and that’s kind of incredible, really.

When we stop thinking about defeating viruses like enemies, we can better appreciate our tenuous place on this planet and learn to cherish the brief time we have, in sickness and health alike. Woolf understood well the smallness and precariousness of humankind in the grand scheme of things, but she kept going, anyway, so that she could write—the thing she loved—even with the agony of mental and physical illnesses as her backdrop, for as long as she could muster the urge to keep living. As much as we can, we will survive by doing the same, focusing on what and who we love, no matter how near Death, our invisible companion, seems.

Gabrielle Bellot

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Beyond Words: A Look At Virginia Woolf’s ‘On Being Ill’

In continued observance of Chronic Disease Awareness Month, let’s discuss one of Virginia Woolf’s most thought-provoking, insightful essays: “On Being Ill.”

Virginia Woolf is particularly famed in the literary world for her pioneering of the stream-of-consciousness narrative. Indeed, she had an incomparable talent for translating the organic flow of thought onto the page. It comes as no surprise, therefore, that she tackled one distinct theme that frustratingly tends to go beyond words: illness.

Woolf was no stranger to life’s ups and downs of well-being. She struggled long-term with her mental health, recurrent migraines, and successive bouts of influenza. The latter was the impetus behind Woolf’s profound essay, “On Being Ill,” which she penned in 1925 at age 42.

The essay was first published in early 1926 in T.S. Eliot’s The Criterion . Then, years later, it was published again in Woolf’s own Hogarth Press as a standalone piece. The first edition cover, designed by her sister, Vanessa, can be seen below.

Illness As A Literary Theme

The principal object of Woolf’s essay addresses the need for illness to stand as a core literary theme. Her opening sentence notes the very universal takeaway of “how common illness is,” thus inquiring into why the literary world explores it so little.

It becomes strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love, battle, and jealousy among the prime themes of literature. Novels, one would have thought, would have been devoted to influenza; epic poems to typhoid; odes to pneumonia, lyrics to toothache Virginia Woolf, “On Being Ill”

Lucidly, when it comes to the human condition, illness is an inescapable reality for all individuals at some point. We’ve all had a particularly horrible flu season, stomachache, injury, etc. Not to mention the tumultuous, ongoing navigation of a global pandemic (Woolf, herself, lived through the 1918 pandemic).

From Woolf’s standpoint, the perpetual avoidance of addressing illness, despite its universality, is tied to the vulnerability it induces in us. In the essay, Woolf relays that there is this “childish outspokenness in illness.” It temporarily removes us from our accustomed state of agency in the world and over our own lives.

As someone who has been shakily traversing life with a chronic illness for three years, I must concur that illness condenses oneself to the moment in a very harsh but internally revealing way. According to Woolf, this vulnerability accompanying illness is not something to run and hide from but something to lean into. Why? Because it engenders a very unique state of mind, where our external circumstances slow down, where life gets quiet. In short, it’s a state that leaves us solely alone with ourselves.

This is the situation Woolf herself was in when she wrote “On Being Ill,” confined to her bed and tuned in to her mind in a visceral way. Clearly, it was a state in which she thought most profoundly and succeeded in bringing the resonant truths of human experience to light.

Mind and Body

With pen in hand, writers walk a line between tuning out the world and being hyperaware of everything around them. Virginia Woolf’s essay testifies to this balance in an extraordinary way.

All of Woolf’s stream-of-consciousness prose reveals an astute observance of the world around her. At the same time, she indulges this insular quality of the mind, this peaceable solitude. Most important to her commentary on illness is the recognition that mind and body are far from separate. The way our body feels (or, rather, suffers) affects our mind. We don’t perceive and process our maladies distantly and objectively. Therefore, per Woolf’s argument, literature should recognize that connection rather than try and emphasize this false sort of dualism.

Literature does its best to maintain that its concern is with the mind; that the body is a sheet of plain glass through which the soul looks straight and clear, and, save for one or two passions such as desire and greed, is null, negligible, and non-existent. On the contrary, the very opposite is true. All day, all night the body intervenes; blunts or sharpens, colours or discolours, turns to wax in the warmth of June, hardens to tallow in the murk of February. But of all this daily drama of the body there is no record. Virginia Woolf, “On Being Ill.”

The missing literary record of these swings between “health and illness,” which constitute life as we know it, was something Woolf wanted to draw attention to. In many ways, she was the perfect voice to do so, given her personal health experiences and her resounding talent for capturing the nature of thought in her stream-of-consciousness style.

Illness and Language

Undoubtedly, within Woolf’s essay, there is a challenge to be found. She recognizes that one part of the literary hindrance in earnestly writing about illness is that “there is the poverty of the language.” It is invariably difficult to describe our pain in a way that feels satisfactory. Complete. In many ways, it is something we can never fully communicate and share with another person. Therein lies the trouble, but also a call to revitalize how we think about illness and evolve “a new language” of the body and mind that best translates the complexity of “being ill.”

To conclude, if there’s one line from Woolf’s essay that particularly stuck out to me in navigating my own health struggles, it would be that “In illness, words seem to possess a mystic quality.” I have long felt, when my health was at its worst, that words were my lifeline. Language serves as my tether to the moment and the ultimate gateway to understanding and expressing myself.

Writers like Woolf emphasize the importance of undertaking the literary challenge of unabashedly addressing and exploring topics that, too often, go beyond words. In many ways, that is the main roadblock of the human experience – the inability to feel fully and completely understood. However, Woolf gives us the inspiration to tackle that roadblock by leaning into the interlocking dynamic of mind and body, which holds a magnitude of inner truths vital to the literary canon.

Finally, for more reading recommendations spotlighting chronic disease awareness, click here .

To read about my personal experience on the mind/body connection when managing a chronic illness, please click here .

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• On Being Ill: with Notes from Sick Rooms by Julia Stephen

In this Book

• Virginia; Stephen Woolf
• Published by: Wesleyan University Press
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Table of Contents

• Half-Title Page, Title Page, Copyright
• Publisher's Note
• Jan Freeman
• On Being Ill
• Introduction
• Hermione Lee
• pp. xi-xxxvi
• Virginia Woolf
• Notes from Sick Rooms
• Mark Hussey
• Julia Stephen
• Rita Charon
• pp. 109-116
• About this Edition
• pp. 117-118
• Biographies
• pp. 119-124

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In this essay Virginia Woolf examines the spiritual change that a minor feverish illness such as flu can bring, enhancing our perception of the world while normal society goes on without us. “Directly the bed is called for we cease to be soldiers in the army of the upright; we become deserters. Mrs Jones catches her train. Mr Smith mends his motor. Men thatch the roof, the dogs bark.” Meanwhile the recumbent can study nature, indifferent but comforting, finding new beauty in “the …

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2017 Essays

Revaluing Illness: Virginia Woolf’s “On Being Ill”

Lau, Travis

"Synapsis: A Health Humanities Journal" was founded in 2017 by Arden Hegele, a literary scholar, and Rishi Goyal, a physician. Its mission is to develop conversations among diverse people thinking about medical and humanistic ways of knowing ... as a “Department Without Walls” that connects scholars and thinkers from different spheres.

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Writing on mental illness: why Virginia Woolf inspires me

T his article deals with themes of suicide, suicidal ideation, bipolar, anorexia and family death

I n Mrs Dalloway , published just under a century ago, Virginia Woolf famously wrote how “the world wavered and quivered and threatened to burst into flames”. Today, 98 years later, anyone who has struggled with mental illness (particularly anxiety or PTSD) can recognise their perception of the world in this metaphor. Woolf, plagued by a “nervous disorder” throughout her life until she committed suicide at age 59, understood what it meant to live in the throes of “madness” and her struggle was a central theme of her written works — both factual and fictional. To mark the end of Mental Health Awareness Week, I’ll be reflecting on this monumental author and the uphill battle (against illness, tragedy, and society) she fought throughout her life.

Academics and biographers have speculated on what mental illnesses Woolf might have been diagnosed with if she was still alive today. It’s widely agreed she had bipolar disorder, her life being divided into periods of paralysing depression and extreme mania, often accompanied by psychotic episodes. Insomnia, grief, and suicide ideation had all become mundane by the time Woolf reached adulthood. Her biographical essay On Being Ill reflects on how these symptoms have caused her to perceive the world differently, (demonstrated in the surreal nature of her novels), and tenderly reveals the terrible loneliness of lifelong sickness.

Writing wasn’t just an escape from the mental pain Woolf experienced, it also made it possible to process her difficulties. By transforming what she had witnessed into words, Woolf wrote she was able to strip them of the power they had to hurt her .

While Woolf is constantly drawn to death — making several suicide attempts during her lifetime — she is also terrified by her knowledge of it, having lost her most beloved family members as a young girl.

The release of death she idolised (her protagonist is comfortably “curled up at the bottom of the sea” following her death in The Voyage Out ) and the devastating grief with which she lived (we remain with her raw, aching husband) are in constant conflict throughout her books. While Woolf is constantly drawn to death — making several suicide attempts during her lifetime — she is also terrified by her knowledge of it, having lost her most beloved family members as a young girl.

Mrs Dalloway translates the ebbs and flows of the human mind, moving between past, present, and future in a way that conflates them, and weaves together a narrative that follows a stream of consciousness. The structure of her novels was revolutionary for English literature, breaking traditional formulas, and drew on Woolf’s own perception of the world. Rhetorically, Woolf argues against the traditional style of novels written at the time: “Is life like this?”

Her writing style often reflects the hypomanic state she wrote in, a state which causes enhanced vocabulary, inventiveness, and the ability for sustained concentration. Author Marya Hornbacher reflects on the mania of bipolar in her biography, Madness : “I can’t say no, I can’t slow down, I have to keep going or they’ll find out I’m… a fraud”. This urgency to write, or risk falling apart again, is evident behind the writing of both authors.

Her repulsion towards eating, as well as her body’s desperate, biological urges to rebel against her, is obvious in this characterisation of hunger.

A descendant of Woolf has also highlighted her reoccurring bouts of anorexia, documented by her husband: he wrote during one of her breakdowns that “the most difficult and distressing problem was to get Virginia to eat”. Emma Woolf, who published a memoir about her own life with anorexia, said she experienced a “painful moment of recognition” when looking at photographs and writing from her great aunt. Food and consumption crop up repeatedly in Virginia Woolf’s writing, seen with the disgusting beast inside of every man who “gobbles and belches… jibs if I keep him waiting” in The Waves . Her repulsion towards eating, as well as her body’s desperate, biological urges to rebel against her, is obvious in this characterisation of hunger.

In addition to being institutionalised, Woolf was repeatedly prescribed a “rest cure” by her doctor, consisting of a strictly enforced regime of six to eight weeks of bed rest and isolation, without any creative stimulation. As woman whose two greatest loves were to walk and to write, the treatment drove her to frustration every time she underwent it. Her writing strains against the metaphorical corset, criticising how women were restricted by patriarchal society and how Woolf was restricted personally by the men who cared for her. Popularity in her novels was revived during second-wave feminism in the 1960s, examining and analysing Woolf’s writing from a feminist perspective.

Although Woolf was hounded by illness throughout her life, she was able to produce some of the greatest novels and most insightful personal essays ever written. Her legacy has resulted in her becoming a figurehead of both feminist literature and those musing on mental health, in addition to facilitating more interest in her personal life than any other writer. While I don’t agree with the idea that mental anguish is a necessary tool for creatives, it can’t be denied that Woolf’s struggles formed the core of her work and they would be very different if she had lived a happy, carefree life. Woolf reminds us that we are worthy rivals, able to combat our mental illnesses and create in spite of them, as long as we favour the pen over the sword.

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Virginia Woolf’s Mental Illness And Literary Contributions: Unraveling The Connection Between Depression And Artistic Expression

Virginia Woolf was a groundbreaking writer and a prominent figure in the modernist movement. Her novels, essays, and short stories were characterized by their unique style and their exploration of complex themes such as gender, class, and identity. However, Woolf was also known for her struggles with mental illness, particularly depression. In this article, we will explore the connection between Virginia Woolf’s mental illness and her literary contributions, as well as the legacy of her work in relation to mental health.

How did Virginia Woolf’s mental illness affect her writing?

Virginia Woolf began experiencing symptoms of mental illness as early as her teenage years, and her struggles with depression and anxiety continued throughout her life. In her writing, Woolf often conveyed feelings of isolation, despair, and a sense of disconnect from reality. For example, in her novel “Mrs. Dalloway,” the protagonist Clarissa experiences a sense of emptiness and a fear of madness, similar to Woolf’s own struggles.

However, Woolf’s mental illness also had a profound impact on her writing style. She experimented with stream-of-consciousness narration, which allowed her to convey the deeply personal and often chaotic thoughts and emotions of her characters. This technique is evident in her novel “To the Lighthouse,” which is considered one of her most innovative works.

Despite the challenges she faced, Woolf’s mental illness also served as a source of inspiration and creativity. As she once wrote, “I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realizes an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don’t have complete emotions about the present, only about the past…”

What is the link between depression and creativity?

The relationship between depression and creativity has been the subject of much debate and research. While there is no conclusive evidence to suggest that depression is a prerequisite for artistic expression, many artists and writers have spoken about the ways in which their mental health struggles have informed their work.

A study published in the Journal of Affective Disorders found that individuals with depression showed heightened creativity in tasks such as problem-solving and brainstorming. This may be due to the fact that depression can lead to a more introspective and reflective state of mind, which in turn can fuel creative thinking.

How did Woolf address mental illness in her work?

Throughout her writing, Virginia Woolf explored the complex and often stigmatized topic of mental illness. In her novel “Mrs. Dalloway,” for example, she portrays the character of Septimus Smith, a World War I veteran who is suffering from shell shock. Through Septimus’s experiences, Woolf portrays the devastating effects of mental illness and the societal pressures that prevent individuals from seeking help.

Woolf’s essay “On Being Ill” also addresses the topic of illness, both physical and mental. In the essay, she argues that illness should not be dismissed as a trivial or insignificant experience, but rather recognized as a powerful force that shapes our lives and our perceptions of the world.

What is the legacy of Virginia Woolf’s literary contributions in relation to mental illness?

Virginia Woolf’s literary contributions have had a lasting impact on the way we understand mental illness and its portrayal in literature. Her use of innovative narrative techniques and her candid exploration of mental health struggles paved the way for other writers to address this topic in their work.

In addition, Woolf’s legacy has inspired a new generation of scholars and activists to advocate for more nuanced and compassionate approaches to mental health. As she once wrote, “So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say.”

• “Creativity and mood disorders: A systematic review”

Christophe Garon

June 19, 2023

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Rash Reading: Rethinking Virginia Woolf's On Being Ill

• PMID: 31402342
• DOI: 10.1353/lm.2019.0001

Virginia Woolf's On Being Ill (1926) is the first published essay in English on illness in literature. Historically neglected, in recent years rising popular and academic interest in the intersection of illness and the arts has led to a rediscovery of sorts, exemplified by its republication by Paris Press in 2002 and 2012. And yet, in spite of this surge in attention, contemporary writers and scholars routinely undervalue the scope of Woolf's argument about illness and its literary representation. By placing On Being Ill within a wider context of writing and reading illness in the modern and contemporary period, my study opens up hitherto unexplored dimensions of the essay, arguing for a more expansive understanding of the critical and creative interventions it seeks to make, and a new appreciation of its relevance to present day debates around the meaning and value of illness in literature.

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On Being Ill

January 26, 2013 by Roy Johnson

poetic meditations on illness and consciousness

On Being Ill (recently re-issued) is a timely reminder that not only was Virginia Woolf a great novelist and writer of short stories, she was also an essayist of amazing stylishness and wit. Her models were the classical essayists of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century – Addison, Steele, Hazlitt, and Lamb – all of whom she had read during her literary apprenticeship, which took place in the library of her father, Sir Leslie Stephen .

On Being Ill starts from the simple but interesting observation that although illness is a common, almost universal experience, it is surprisingly absent from literature as a topic of interest. This is rather like her similar observation about the absence of women in the annals of literature which led to her epoch-making study A Room of One’s Own . From this starting point she then spins out an extraordinary display of reflections on a series of related topics including solitude, reading, and language. And, as Hermione Lee observes in her excellent introduction to this edition, she also throws in ‘dentists, American literature, electricity, an organ grinder and a giant tortoise’ plus lots, lots more.

Much of her reflections are conveyed in long, rococo sentences in which disparate elements are yoked together by her associative thought processes and her majestic command of English. Musing on the fact that illness renders people horizontal, giving them the unusual opportunity to look up into the sky, she observes:

Now, lying recumbent, staring straight up, the sky is discovered to be something so different from this that really it is a little shocking. This then has been going on all the time without our knowing it!—this incessant making up of shapes and casting them down, this buffeting of clouds together, and drawing vast trains of ships and wagons from North to South, this incessant ringing up and down of curtains of light and shade, this interminable experiment with gold shafts and blue shadows, with veiling the sun and unveiling it, with making rock ramparts and wafting them away—this endless activity, with the waste of Heaven knows how many million horse power of energy, has been left to work its will year in year out. The fact seems to call for comment and indeed for censure. Ought not some one to write to The Times ? Use should be made of it. One should not let this gigantic cinema play perpetually to an empty house.

The style is deliberately playful, the attitude arch, and yet those two references, to ‘horse power’ and ‘cinema’ show how acutely aware she was of the technology and media which were shaping the twentieth century.

The essay is accompanied in this very attractive new edition by Notes from Sick Rooms , written by her mother Julia Stephen in 1883. The juxtaposition of the two texts is very telling. It is usually assumed that the major literary influence on Virginia was her father, the biographer (and explorer and editor). But you can certainly see where the daughter inherited the fancifulness and lightness of touch in her mother’s essay on the annoying effect of crumbs in the bed of a sick person.

Among the number of small evils which haunt illness, the greatest, in the misery it can cause, though the smallest in size, is crumbs. The origin of most things has been decided on, but the origin of crumbs in bed has never excited sufficient attention among the scientific world, though it is a problem which has tormented many a weary sufferer.

The inflation (‘evil’) and comic hyperbole were alive and well in her daughter’s work, written forty-three years later.

The essay even has an interesting history. It was first published by T.S.Eliot in his magazine The Criterion in 1926, alongside contributions from Aldous Huxley, Gertrude Stein, Jean Cocteau, and D.H.Lawrence’s The Woman Who Rode Away . Then it was republished as a single volume by the Hogarth Press in 1930. This new edition reproduces the original with its idiosyncratic capitalisation, and is nicely illustrated with chapter dividers and inside covers by Vanessa Bell. Both essays have scholarly introductions, and the book even has an afterword on the relationship between narrative and medicine.

© Roy Johnson 2013

Virginia Woolf, On Being Ill . Massachusetts: Paris Press, 2012, pp.122, ISBN: 1930464134

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Virginia Woolf Was More Than Just a Women’s Writer

She was a great observer of everyday life..

Virginia Woolf, in one of the more lively and often-seen photos of her from the 1930s.

HIP / Art Resource, NY

Virginia Woolf, that great lover of language, would surely be amused to know that, some seven decades after her death, she endures most vividly in popular culture as a pun—within the title of Edward Albee’s celebrated drama,  Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?  In Albee’s play, a troubled college professor and his equally pained wife taunt each other by singing “Who’s Afraid of the Big, Bad Wolf?,” substituting the iconic British writer’s name for that of the fairy-tale villain.

The Woolf reference seems to have no larger meaning, but, perhaps inadvertently, it gives a note of authenticity to the play’s campus setting. Woolf’s experimental novels are much discussed within academia, and her pioneering feminism has given her a special place in women’s studies programs across the country.

It’s a reputation that runs the risk of pigeonholing Woolf as a “women’s writer” and, as a frequent subject of literary theory, the author of books meant to be studied rather than enjoyed. But, in her prose, Woolf is one of the great pleasure-givers of modern literature, and her appeal transcends gender. Just ask Michael Cunningham, author of  The Hours , the popular and critically acclaimed novel inspired by Woolf’s classic fictional work,  Mrs. Dalloway .

“I read  Mrs. Dalloway  for the first time when I was a sophomore in high school,” Cunningham told readers of the  Guardian  newspaper in 2011. “I was a bit of a slacker, not at all the sort of kid who’d pick up a book like that on my own (it was not, I assure you, part of the curriculum at my slacker-ish school in Los Angeles). I read it in a desperate attempt to impress a girl who was reading it at the time. I hoped, for strictly amorous purposes, to appear more literate than I was.”

Cunningham didn’t really understand all of the themes of  Dalloway  when he first read it, and he didn’t, alas, get the girl who had inspired him to pick up Woolf’s novel. But he fell in love with Woolf’s style. “I could see, even as an untutored and rather lazy child, the density and symmetry and muscularity of Woolf’s sentences,” Cunningham recalled. “I thought, wow, she was doing with language something like what Jimi Hendrix does with a guitar. By which I meant she walked a line between chaos and order, she riffed, and just when it seemed that a sentence was veering off into randomness, she brought it back and united it with the melody.”

Woolf’s example helped drive Cunningham to become a writer himself. His novel  The Hours  essentially retells  Dalloway  as a story within a story, alternating between a variation of Woolf’s original narrative and a fictional speculation on Woolf herself. Cunningham’s 1998 novel won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, then was adapted into a 2002 film of the same name, starring Nicole Kidman as Woolf.

“I feel certain she’d have disliked the book—she was a ferocious critic,” Cunningham said of Woolf, who died in 1941. “She’d probably have had reservations about the film as well, though I like to think that it would have pleased her to see herself played by a beautiful Hollywood movie star.”

Kidman created a buzz for the movie by donning a false nose to mute her matinee-perfect face, evoking Woolf as a woman whom family friend Nigel Nicolson once described as “always beautiful but never pretty.”

Woolf, a seminal figure in feminist thought, would probably not have been surprised that a big-screen treatment of her life would spark so much talk about how she  looked  rather than what she  did . But she was also keenly intent on grounding her literary themes within the world of sensation and physicality, so maybe there’s some value, while considering her ideas, in also remembering what it was like to see and hear her.

We know her best in profile. Many pictures of Woolf show her glancing off to the side, like the figure on a coin. The most notable exception is a 1939 photograph by Gisele Freund in which Woolf peers directly into the camera. Woolf hated the photograph—perhaps because, on some level, she knew how deftly Freund had captured her subject. “I loathe being hoisted about on top of a stick for anyone to stare at,” lamented Woolf, who complained that Freund had broken her promise not to circulate the picture.

The most striking aspect of the photo is the intensity of Woolf’s gaze. In both her conversation and her writing, Woolf had a genius for not only looking at a subject, but looking  through  it, teasing out inferences and implications at multiple levels. It’s perhaps why the sea figures so prominently in her fiction, as a metaphor for a world in which the bright currents we see at the surface of reality reveal, upon closer inspection, a depth that goes downward for miles.

Take, for example, Woolf’s widely anthologized essay, “The Death of the Moth,” in which she notices a moth’s last moments of life, then records the experience as a window into the fragility of all existence. “The insignificant little creature now knew death,” Woolf reports.

As I looked at the dead moth, this minute wayside triumph of so great a force over so mean an antagonist filled me with wonder. . . . The moth having righted himself now lay most decently and uncomplainingly composed. Oh yes, he seemed to say, death is stronger than I am.

Woolf takes an equally miniaturist tack in “The Mark on the Wall,” a sketch in which the narrator studies a mark on the wall ultimately revealed as a snail. Although the premise sounds militantly boring—the literary equivalent of watching paint dry—the mark on the wall works as a locus of concentration, like a hypnotist’s watch, allowing the narrator to consider everything from Shakespeare to World War I. In its subtle tracking of how the mind free-associates and its ample use of interior monolog, the sketch serves as a keynote of sorts for the modernist literary movement that Woolf worked so tirelessly to advance.

Woolf’s penetrating sensibility took some getting used to, since she expected those around her to look at the world just as unblinkingly. She didn’t seem to have much patience for small talk. Renowned scholar Hermione Lee wrote an exhaustive 1997 biography of Woolf, yet confesses some anxiety about the prospect, were it possible, of greeting Woolf in person. “I think I would have been afraid of meeting her,” Lee wrote. “I am afraid of not being intelligent enough for her.”

Nicolson, the son of Woolf’s close friend and onetime lover, Vita Sackville-West, had fond memories of hunting butterflies with Woolf when he was a boy—an outing that allowed Woolf to indulge a pastime she’d enjoyed in childhood. “Virginia could tolerate children for short periods, but fled from babies,” he recalled. Nicolson also remembered Woolf’s distaste for bland generalities, even when uttered by youngsters. She once asked the young Nicolson for a detailed report on his morning, including the quality of the sun that had awakened him, and whether he had first put on his right or left sock while dressing.

“It was a lesson in observation, but it was also a hint,” he wrote many years later. “‘Unless you catch ideas on the wing and nail them down, you will soon cease to have any.’ It was advice that I was to remember all my life.”

Thanks to a commentary Woolf did for the BBC, we don’t have to guess what she sounded like. In the 1937 recording, widely available online, Woolf reflects on how the English language pollinates and blooms into new forms. “Royal words mate with commoners,” she tells listeners in a subversive reference to the recent abdication of King Edward VIII, who had forfeited his throne to marry American Wallis Simpson. Woolf’s voice is plummy and patrician, like an English version of Eleanor Roosevelt. Not surprising, perhaps, given Woolf’s origin in one of England’s most prominent families.

She was born Adeline Virginia Stephen on January 25, 1882, the daughter of Sir Leslie Stephen, a celebrated essayist, editor, and public intellectual, and Julia Prinsep Duckworth Stephen. Julia was, according to Woolf biographer Panthea Reid, “revered for her beauty and wit, her self-sacrifice in nursing the ill, and her bravery in facing early widowhood.” Here’s how Woolf scholar Mark Hussey describes the blended household of Virginia’s childhood:

Her parents, Leslie and Julia Stephen, both previously widowed, began their marriage in 1878 with four young children: Laura (1870–1945), the daughter of Leslie Stephen and his first wife, Harriet Thackery (1840–1875); and George (1868–1934), Gerald (1870–1937), and Stella Duckworth (1869–1897), the children of Julia Prinsep (1846–1895) and Herbert Duckworth (1833–1870).

Together, Leslie and Julia had four more children: Virginia, Vanessa (1879–1961), and brothers Thoby (1880–1906) and Adrian (1883–1948). They all lived at 22 Hyde Park Gate in London.

Although Virginia’s brothers and half-brothers got university educations, Woolf was taught mostly at home—a slight that informed her thinking about how society treated women. Woolf’s family background, though, brought her within the highest circles of British cultural life.

“Woolf’s parents knew many of the intellectual luminaries of the late Victorian era well,” Hussey notes, “counting among their close friends novelists such as George Meredith, Thomas Hardy, and Henry James. Woolf’s great-aunt Julia Margaret Cameron was a pioneering photographer who made portraits of the poets Alfred Tennyson and Robert Browning, of the naturalist Charles Darwin, and of the philosopher and historian Thomas Carlyle, among many others.”

Woolf also had free range over her father’s mammoth library and made the most of it. Reading was her passion—and an act, like any passion, to be engaged actively, not sampled passively. In an essay about her father, Woolf recalled his habit of reciting poetry as he walked or climbed the stairs, and the lesson she took from it seems inescapable. Early on, she learned to pair literature with vitality and movement, and that sensibility runs throughout her lively critical essays, gathered in numerous volumes, including her seminal 1925 collection,  The Common Reader . The title takes its cue from Woolf’s appeal to the kind of reader who, like her, was essentially self-educated rather than a professional scholar.

In a 1931 essay, “The Love of Reading,” Woolf describes what it’s like to encounter a literary masterpiece:

The great writers thus often require us to make heroic efforts in order to read them rightly. They bend us and break us. To go from Defoe to Jane Austen, from Hardy to Peacock, from Trollope to Meredith, from Richardson to Rudyard Kipling is to be wrenched and distorted, to be thrown violently this way and that.

As Woolf saw it, reading was a mythic act, not simply a cozy fireside pastime. John Sparrow, reviewing Woolf’s work in the  Spectator , connected her view of reading with her broader literary life: “She writes vividly because she reads vividly.”

The Stephen family’s summers in coastal Cornwall also shaped Woolf indelibly, exposing her to the ocean as a source of literary inspiration—and creating memories she would fictionalize for her acclaimed novel,  To the Lighthouse .

Darker experiences shadowed Woolf’s youth. In writings not widely known until after her death, she described being sexually abused by her older stepbrothers, George and Gerald Duckworth. Scholars have often discussed how this trauma might have complicated her mental health, which challenged her through much of her life. She had periodic nervous breakdowns, and depression ultimately claimed her life.

“Virginia was a manic-depressive, but at that time the illness had not yet been identified and so could not be treated,” notes biographer Reid. “For her, a normal mood of excitement or depression would become inexplicably magnified so that she could no longer find her sane, balanced self.”

The writing desk became her refuge. “The only way I keep afloat is by working,” Woolf confessed. “Directly I stop working I feel that I am sinking down, down.”

Woolf’s mother died in 1895, and her father died in 1904. After her father’s death, Virginia and the other Stephen siblings, now grown, moved to London’s Bloomsbury neighborhood. “It was a district of London,” noted Nicolson, “that in spite of the elegance of its Georgian squares was considered . . . to be faintly decadent, the resort of raffish divorcées and indolent students, loose in its morals and behavior.”

Bloomsbury’s bohemian sensibility suited Woolf, who joined with other intellectuals in her newfound community to form the Bloomsbury Group, an informal social circle that included Woolf’s sister Vanessa, an artist; Vanessa’s husband, the art critic Clive Bell; artist Roger Fry; economist John Maynard Keynes; and writers Lytton Strachey and E. M. Forster. Through Bloomsbury, Virginia also met writer Leonard Woolf, and they married in 1912.

The Bloomsbury Group had no clear philosophy, although its members shared an enthusiasm for leftish politics and a general willingness to experiment with new kinds of visual and literary art.

The Voyage Out , Woolf’s debut novel published in 1915, follows a fairly conventional form, but its plot—a female protagonist exploring her inner life through an epic voyage—suggested that what women saw and felt and heard and experienced was worthy of fiction, independent of their connection to men. In a series of lectures published in 1929 as  A Room of One’s Own , Woolf pointed to the special challenges that women faced in finding the basic necessities for writing—a small income and a quiet place to think.  A Room of One’s Own  is a formative feminist document, but critic Robert Kanigel argues that men are cheating themselves if they don’t embrace the book, too. “Woolf’s is not a Spartan, clippity-clop style such as the one Ernest Hemingway was perfecting in Paris at about the same time,” Kanigel observes. “This is leisurely, ruminative, with long paragraphs that march up and down the page, long trains of thought, and rich digressions almost hypnotic in their effect. And once trapped within the sweet, sticky filament of her web of words, one is left with no wish whatever to be set free.”

During the Woolfs’ marriage, Virginia had flirtations with women and an affair with Sackville-West, a fellow author in her social circle. Even so, Leonard and Virginia remained close, buying a small printing press and starting a publishing house, Hogarth Press, in 1917. Leonard thought it might be a soothing diversion for Virginia—perhaps the first and only case of anyone entering book publishing to advance their sanity.

If Virginia Woolf had never published a single word of her own, her role in Hogarth would have secured her a place in literary history. Thanks to the Woolfs’ tiny press, the world got its first look at the early work of Katherine Mansfield, T. S. Eliot, and Forster. The press also published Virginia’s work, of course, including novels of increasingly daring scope. In  To the Lighthouse , a family summers along the coast, the lighthouse on the horizon suggesting an assuringly fixed universe. But, as the novel unfolds over a decade, we see the subtle working of time and how it shapes the perceptions of various characters.

A young Eudora Welty picked up  To the Lighthouse  and found her own world changed. “Blessed with luck and innocence, I fell upon the novel that once and forever opened the door of imaginative fiction for me, and read it cold, in all its wonder and magnitude,” Welty recalled.

The Woolfs divided their time between London, a city that Virginia loved and often wrote about, and Monk’s House, a modest country home in Sussex the couple was able to buy as Virginia’s career bloomed. Even as she welcomed literary experiment, Woolf grew wistful about the future of the traditional letter, which she saw being eclipsed by the speed of news-gathering and the telephone. Almost as if to disprove her own point, Woolf wrote as many as six letters a day.

“Virginia Woolf was a compulsive letter writer,” said English critic V. S. Pritchett. “She did not much care for the solitude she needed but lived for news, gossip, and the expectancy of talk.”

Her letters, published in several volumes, shimmer with brilliant detail. In a letter written during World War II, for example, Woolf interrupts her message to Benedict Nicolson to go outside and watch the German bombers flying over her house. “The raiders began emitting long trails of smoke,” she reports. “I wondered if a bomb was going to fall on top of me. . . . Then I dipped into your letter again.”

The war proved too much for her. Distraught by its destruction, sensing another nervous breakdown, and worried about the burden it would impose on Leonard, Virginia stuffed her pockets with stones and drowned herself in the River Ouse near Monk’s House on March 28, 1941.

But Cunningham says it would be a mistake to define Woolf by her death. “She did, of course, have her darker interludes,” he concedes. “But when not sunk in her periodic depressions, [she] was the person one most hoped would come to the party; the one who could speak amusingly on just about any subject; the one who glittered and charmed; who was interested in what other people had to say (though not, I admit, always encouraging about their opinions); who loved the idea of the future and all the wonders it might bring.”

Her influence on subsequent generations of writers has been deep. You can see flashes of her vivid sensitivity in the work of Annie Dillard, a bit of her wry critical eye in the recent essays of Rebecca Solnit. Novelist and essayist Daphne Merkin says that despite her edges, Woolf should be remembered as “luminous and tender and generous, the person you would most like to see coming down the path.” Woolf’s legacy marks Merkin’s work, too, although there’s never been anyone else quite like Virginia Woolf.

“The world of the arts was her native territory; she ranged freely under her own sky, speaking her mother tongue fearlessly,” novelist Katherine Anne Porter said of Woolf. “She was at home in that place as much as anyone ever was.”

Danny Heitman is the editor of Phi Kappa Phi’s Forum magazine and a columnist for the  Advocate newspaper in Louisiana. He writes frequently about arts and culture for national publications, including the Wall Street Journal and the  Christian Science Monitor.

Funding information

NEH has funded numerous projects related to Virginia Woolf, including  four  separate  r esearch  fellowships  since 1995 and  three education seminars for schoolteachers  on Woolf’s major novels. In 2010, Loyola University in Chicago, Illinois, received $175,000 to support  WoolfOnline , which documents the biographical, textual, and publication history of To the Lighthouse.

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Focusing on Virginia Woolf and the Blooomsbury Group

Woolf’s “on being ill”: from instagram to published book.

Tuesday 14 May 2024 by Paula Maggio

Here’s how it came about.

In March of 2020, as lockdowns due to the  COVID-19 pandemic spread around the globe, Ane already had two other projects focused on Woolf under her belt — A Printing Press of One’s Own  and  The Mark on the Wall .

Working from her private letterpress studio at home, Ane started a third. She printed one sentence from “ On Being Ill” on one sheet of paper every day. Her project ran from March 23 to Aug. 29, 2020, and she shared those pages on Instagram . She also shared her thoughts about the project  with  Blogging Woolf .

Through this process, she shaped a diary in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and allowed for research on pandemics by creating an artist book.

The book merges Woolf’s sentences with with my reflections on covid, pandemics, isolation, escaping reality through literature, waiting, time, art, love, protests, feminism, typesetting, printing, family, small stuff, big stuff. – Ane

The publication also contains reflections on teaching during the pandemic in the spring of 2021, along with insights and works by master’s students in graphic design and illustration at The Oslo National Academy of The Arts, using Woolf’s essay as a mirror for their own pandemic experiences.

The digital book edition

With an introduction by Mark Hussey, the book is available as a digital book edition of 150. It is now available through several independent bookshops, which are handling distribution. They include the following:

• Audiatur bokhandel, Norway
• Good Press Glasgow
• Norma T, Norway
• Tekstallmenningen

Copies will also be available at the 33rd Annual International Woolf conference in June.

Support and gratitude

The publication is supported with research funds from The Oslo National Academy of The Arts. Graphic design was done by Tiril Haug Johne and Victoria Meyer.

Ane expresses special thanks to the Oslo National Academy of the Arts Class of 2022: Araiz Mesanza, Embla Sunde Myrva, Kristine Lie Øverland Emil Holmberg Lewe, Ruth Emilie Rustad, Nicolo Groenier, her former professor Alan Mackenzie-Robinson, former president of the International Virginia Woolf Society Dr. Benjamin Hagen, the Woolf community, her husband Truls and her son Pil.

Ane Thon Knutsen in her home printshop with a volume of On Being Ill, her pandemic project originally shared on Instagram.

About Ane Thon Knutsen

Ane is internationally known for her letterpress-focused installations and artists’ books. The associate professor of graphic design at the Oslo Academy of the Arts has won numerous awards for her work. She owns and works from her private letterpress studio in Oslo.

Ane Thon Knutsen at her exhibition “Printed Works: Adaptations of Virginia Woolf” at the 32nd Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf at Florida Gulf Coast University, Jun3 8-11, 2023.

She also debuted her installation, “ Printed Words: Adaptations of Virginia Woolf ,” at University Archives and Special Collections at the Florida Gulf Coast University library during the 32nd Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf: Virginia  Woolf and Ecologies, June 8-11, 2023.

In “Printed Works,” the self-taught typesetter who has exhibited other letterpress projects and installations related to Woolf, adapted a selection of Virginia Woolf’s self-published short stories. The exhibit focused on Woolf’s poetic short stories “Blue” and “Green.” The printed pages were collected and are being stored in book form in FGCU Bradshaw Library’s Archives and Special Collections.

More coming up

In addition, Ane will display another installation, Woolf’s “Kew Gardens,” May 16 – June 11 for the 33rd International Virginia Woolf Conference. The adaptation of Woolf’s short story consists of 1,514 letterpress-printed sheets of kozo.

According to Ane, it is an “organic book allowing you to walk through the pages, like insects in a flowerbed.”

  View this post on Instagram   A post shared by Ane Thon Knutsen (@anethonknutsen)

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Virginia Woolf, but Make It a Polyphonic, Sensory Ballet

American Ballet Theater brings Wayne McGregor’s “Woolf Works,” which evokes elements of three novels and the writer’s biography, to New York.

By Joshua Barone

In a rehearsal room at American Ballet Theater’s studios earlier this month, Alessandra Ferri and Roman Zhurbin paused during a pas de deux, waiting to take their next steps. “Where’s Big Ben?” Ferri asked. “We need to hear the bells.”

She was referring to a sound cue, a field recording of the famous bell at the Palace of Westminster in London. It tolls throughout Virginia Woolf’s novel “Mrs Dalloway,” coldly marking and making clear the passage of time.

Big Ben plays a similar role in the first part of “Woolf Works,” Wayne McGregor’s full-length ballet that evokes elements of Woolf’s biography and the essence of three novels, including “Mrs. Dalloway.” Having premiered at the Royal Ballet in 2015 to strong reviews, it arrives in New York on Tuesday , as part of Ballet Theater’s Metropolitan Opera House season.

The company’s Met season is known for its story ballets, canonical fare like “ Swan Lake ” and “ Romeo and Juliet .” While contemporary works are also programmed, like Christopher Wheeldon’s “ Like Water for Chocolate ,” which returns in July, “Woolf Works” is something different: a loosely narrative attempt to capture not just the plots of three novels, but also the polyphony and sensory experiences of Woolf’s writing.

“This piece tells a story in a really modern way,” said Susan Jaffe, the company’s artistic director. “Every time I watch it, I am just thrilled.”

Devon Teuscher, who danced the role of Virginia Woolf when “Woolf Works” had its first Ballet Theater run, in California this spring, said it was also nice for a new work to counter the traditional “man-woman love story” of so many classic ballets. “We’re seeing,” she added, a “queer, beautiful story about a woman.”

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• Intellectual Affairs

The Philosophy of Rapture

Scott McLemee reviews Christopher Hamilton’s Rapture .

By  Scott McLemee

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Columbia University Press

It may spare potential readers of Christopher Hamilton’s book Rapture ( Columbia University Press ) some confusion to take note of the subject headings for it in the Library of Congress catalog . The first, “Rapture (Christian eschatology),” refers to one of the better-known apocalyptic scenarios, in which the faithful are suddenly transported to heaven before the world succumbs to mayhem on a scale much larger than usual.

The author (a professor of philosophy at King’s College London) mentions belief in “the rapture” just once in the book, in passing—and that is to make clear it is not what he has in mind and will not be discussing the matter at all. Another subject heading given for Hamilton’s book is “Religious awakening—Christianity.” This seems broader, perhaps, but is no less perfectly irrelevant.

At times it proves necessary to read more than the title of a book to have any idea what it is about, and I am afraid this is one of those occasions.

Hamilton is forthright enough about the nature of his topic. “To be enraptured,” he writes early on, “is to be taken out of oneself, lost in an experience, a sight, or whatever, and yet to be returned to oneself unburdened, with a sense of freedom.” No theology is implied. Someone who has passed through a rapturous state might find mystical or devotional language appropriate when trying to talk about it. But most of the figures Hamilton writes about—for example, Friedrich Nietzsche, Werner Herzog, Virginia Woolf and Philippe Petit, who walked across a tightrope stretched between the World Trade Center buildings in 1974—got along without such language.

The author himself identifies with the “broadly humanist” stance that George Orwell stakes out in his essay on Tolstoy and Shakespeare .

“On balance,” Orwell says, “life is suffering, and only the very young or the very foolish imagine otherwise … The [religious] aim is always to get away from the painful struggle of earthly life and find eternal peace in some kind of Heaven or Nirvana. The humanist attitude is that the struggle must continue and that death is the price of life.”

And yet rapture is not precluded. We may be wired for it. Hamilton mentions the sexual embrace as rapture at its most fully absorbing, though not its precondition. The experience of recovering from a period of illness—of finding oneself able and eager to do familiar things once again—can also be rapturous: “I suddenly become attentive to the small things in life,” he writes, “to their irreplaceable value, and then I grasp that these are things that are a source of value in life generally.”

This can feel like a revelation, for as long as it lasts, which is never long enough. (The miraculousness of ordinary existence tends to disappear once it resumes at regular pace.) Rapture is exhilarating, but it reaches deeper into the individual’s experience of the world than a mood can. It is a bolt of lightning that flashes in the murk of everyday life, revealing what is otherwise lost to overfamiliarity.

An artist of great gifts (and the acrobat on a terrifyingly high wire qualifies) seems better suited to grasping and communicating the experience of rapture than most of us—philosophers included, in Hamilton’s judgment. A note of disappointment and exasperation with his discipline runs throughout his essays.

“Philosophy,” he writes, “is in many ways very bad at nourishing the imagination, accepting flights of fancy, of fantasy.” This leaves the profession devitalized, he complains, incapable of conceiving either the philosopher or the layperson as “a whole human being with all that this entails by way of hope, fear, longing, fantasy, blood, sweat, and tears, with a largely obscure and confusing inner life, recalcitrant to improvement and stubborn in its obsessions and desires.”

For Hamilton, the obvious exceptions are Nietzsche and Simone Weil: Their openness to rapture—as a personal experience, but also as a challenge in comprehending the world—makes them artists almost as much as philosophers. Weil in particular is a challenging figure for Hamilton’s project, given the secular and humanist sensibility emphasized above. Weil’s tortuous spiritual path—from Jewish socialist to Catholic not-quite convert, with extremes of self-denial in solidarity with the oppressed—was marked by mystical experiences of compassion, suffering and the love of beauty. (I’ve written more on her here .)

Weil understood her own raptures in theological terms that Hamilton takes seriously without embracing them as his own. (He also avoids psychologizing her beliefs and behavior, which is difficult temptation for the nonbeliever to resist.) The author models his approach on the inventor of the essay as a literary form, Michel de Montaigne, who combined wide-ranging sympathy for the variousness of human life with skeptical irony about our powers of rationalizing our assumptions.

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It makes sense, then, that Hamilton challenges his own predominantly secular outlook with the example of someone whose understanding of the world pushed in a radically opposed direction. Rapture, whatever its metaphysical provenance, “can be a disruptive force,” he writes, “because it is expressive of a certain energy for life. The experience of rapture is that of a hunger for experience, a hunger that can be, even if it need not always be, imperious and demanding.”

The author’s expressed purpose is to open the reader to the possibility of rapture, not as an escape from the world, but to live more fully while here. The book will find readers—by word of mouth, perhaps, since the library catalog won’t be of much help.

Scott McLemee is Inside Higher Ed ’s “Intellectual Affairs” columnist. He was a contributing editor at Lingua Franca magazine and a senior writer at The Chronicle of Higher Education before joining Inside Higher Ed in 2005.

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Virginia Woolf: The Complete Works: The Timeless Novels, Biographies, Short Stories, Essays, and Personal Writings - A Literary Treasure Trove Kindle Edition

• Print length 16235 pages
• Language English
• Sticky notes On Kindle Scribe
• Publisher Bluefire Books
• Publication date July 4, 2023
• File size 21089 KB
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Product details

• ASIN ‏ : ‎ B0CB4LC4KQ
• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Bluefire Books (July 4, 2023)
• Publication date ‏ : ‎ July 4, 2023
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• File size ‏ : ‎ 21089 KB
• Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
• Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
• Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
• Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
• Print length ‏ : ‎ 16235 pages
• #400 in Letters & Correspondence
• #744 in Literary Letters
• #791 in Authorship

About the author

Virginia woolf.

Virginia Woolf is now recognized as a major twentieth-century author, a great novelist and essayist and a key figure in literary history as a feminist and a modernist. Born in 1882, she was the daughter of the editor and critic Leslie Stephen, and suffered a traumatic adolescence after the deaths of her mother, in 1895, and her step-sister Stella, in 1897, leaving her subject to breakdowns for the rest of her life. Her father died in 1904 and two years later her favourite brother Thoby died suddenly of typhoid.

With her sister, the painter Vanessa Bell, she was drawn into the company of writers and artists such as Lytton Strachey and Roger Fry, later known as the Bloomsbury Group. Among them she met Leonard Woolf, whom she married in 1912, and together they founded the Hogarth Press in 1917, which was to publish the work of T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster and Katherine Mansfield as well as the earliest translations of Freud. Woolf lived an energetic life among friends and family, reviewing and writing, and dividing her time between London and the Sussex Downs. In 1941, fearing another attack of mental illness, she drowned herself.

Her first novel, The Voyage Out, appeared in 1915, and she then worked through the transitional Night and Day (1919) to the highly experimental and impressionistic Jacob's Room (1922). From then on her fiction became a series of brilliant and extraordinarily varied experiments, each one searching for a fresh way of presenting the relationship between individual lives and the forces of society and history. She was particularly concerned with women's experience, not only in her novels but also in her essays and her two books of feminist polemic, A Room of One's Own (1929) and Three Guineas (1938).

Her major novels include Mrs Dalloway (1925), the historical fantasy Orlando (1928), written for Vita Sackville-West, the extraordinarily poetic vision of The Waves (1931), the family saga of The Years (1937), and Between the Acts (1941). All these are published by Penguin, as are her Diaries, Volumes I-V, and selections from her essays and short stories.

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Ferris Jabr writes about science, but he always comes back to Virginia Woolf

How nonfiction, science fiction, horror, and the essays of woolf all contribute to jabr’s own writing.

In his new book, “ Becoming Earth: How Our Planet Came to Life ,” journalist Ferris Jabr uses current science to make a case for what is, in fact, an ancient view: Earth and its inhabitants, from microbes to humans, are an interconnected, dynamic system. Jabr is a contributing writer to The New York Times Magazine and Scientific American and has written for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Harper’s, among other publications. He lives in Portland, Ore., with his partner. He will discuss his book with Deborah Blum at 7 p.m. on July 16 at Porter Square Books in Cambridge.

BOOKS: What are you reading?

JABR: I’ve been reading some amazing nonfiction books. One is Clayton Page Aldern’s “ The Weight of Nature ,” an original exploration of how climate change affects our cognition and mental health. Then there is Zoe Schlanger’s “ The Light Eaters ,” which explores the world of plant communication, intelligence, and behavior. She does an amazing job of bringing that world to life, and Ben Goldfarb’s “ Crossings ” is a brilliant meditation on how roads have changed the natural world profoundly. I’m also making my way through Rachel Carson’s “ Sea Trilogy ,” which was rereleased a couple of years ago.

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BOOKS: What is the last book that changed your thinking about something?

JABR: There’s a science fiction novel I’ve been recommending to everybody, Ray Nayler’s “ The Mountain in the Sea .” It’s about the discovery of a self-aware, language-capable species of octopus. I hadn’t thought through what would happen if we stumbled on an advanced, nonhuman species on earth as opposed to another planet.

BOOKS: Do you regularly read science fiction?

JABR: You’d think I would devour it but literary fiction and classic fiction were my first true loves and have remained my strongest interests. I’m selective in my science fiction reading. For me the most interesting work is in speculative fiction, like Benjamin Labatut’s “ When We Cease to Understand the World .” It draws on real scientific figures but becomes more and more fictional. I’m fascinated by works that cross genres like Eliot Weinberger’s “ An Elemental Thing .” He writes these poetic linked essays based on facts but they don’t read like nonfiction.

BOOKS: Do you read horror?

JABR: I love horror. Last Halloween, I challenged myself to find books and short stories that would scare me. Shirley Jackson’s “ The Haunting of Hill House ” was truly one of the most terrifying books. There is a bizarre, short book by Algernon Blackwood, “ The Willows ,” which involves people exploring an area filled with trees where bizarre things happen.

BOOKS: What draws you to horror?

JABR: There’s that adrenaline rush, but you know you are safe. I’m not attracted to real physical danger, but the challenge of scaring someone purely through language is fascinating to me.

BOOKS: Couldn’t you just scare yourself by reading a climate change book?

JABR: Definitely. Someone called David Wallace-Wells’s “ The Uninhabitable Earth ” the most terrifying book they ever read.

BOOKS: Do you read more nonfiction or fiction?

JABR: Most of my nonfiction reading is for work. For fiction I listen to audio books. By the end of the day, I’ve spent so much time reading for work I can’t drag my eyes across another page or screen but I can cozy up and let someone tell me a story. I have listened to George Saunders’s “ Lincoln in the Bardo ” more times than I can count because I think it’s the pinnacle of audio literature. More than 100 actors read the book.

BOOKS: What did you read for your book that you would recommend?

JABR : I read Peter Brannon’s “ The Ends of the World ” multiple times. He is one of our best writers when it comes to earth history and earth science. Andrew Dessler’s “ Introduction to Modern Climate Change ” is an accessible, slim book about climate change. I also reread Virginia Woolf, my favorite author in any genre.

BOOKS : Why did you read Woolf for your book?

JABR : Her prose juices my own creative energy. I discovered a startlingly resonant passage she wrote in “ Moments of Being ,” a posthumous collection of autobiographical writing. She was staring at some flowers when she realized that there was this shining ring that enclosed the flower and the earth and connected them, that the flower was part flower and part earth. That is so much what my book is about, that life is an extension of the planet, it doesn’t just sit atop Earth.

Follow us on Facebook or Twitter @GlobeBiblio. Amy Sutherland is the author, most recently, of “ Rescuing Penny Jane ” and she can be reached at [email protected] .

At 61, ballerina Alessandra Ferri is giving her pointe shoes one last — maybe? — glorious whirl

When Alessandra Ferri, one of the world's most celebrated dramatic ballerinas, takes the stage Friday at the Metropolitan Opera House to channel Virginia Woolf, logic dictates it will be her last dance appearance

NEW YORK -- When Alessandra Ferri, one of the most celebrated dramatic ballerinas of this or any time, takes the stage Friday at the Metropolitan Opera House to channel Virginia Woolf, logic dictates it will be her last dance appearance.

It’s not merely that she’s now 61 — albeit dancing exquisitely — and sharing a stage with dancers one-third her age. It's also that she’s about to embark on an exciting new chapter as artistic director of the Vienna State Ballet, and plans to devote herself “200%” to the task.

But back to that logic thing: It hasn’t played much of a role in Ferri’s rather astounding career.

After all, she’s retired before — in 2007, from American Ballet Theater — with fanfare and glittery confetti and countless bouquets. Logic would have dictated she stay retired, but there she was in 2015, creating the Woolf role in Wayne McGregor’s “Woolf Works,” which she’s reprising this week with ABT. And there she was in 2016 dancing Juliet, her signature role, at ABT for a night, somehow making a lovesick teenager believable at age 53.

So it’s understandable if Ferri will not, even now, say “never again.”

“I’m not going to think about it!” the dancer said laughingly (but firmly) in an interview last week, taking a break between rehearsals. ”I mean, I do THINK this is it, because I know what’s coming next.” But life, she adds, can be very surprising.

Like that time she ran into choreographer Martha Clarke on the street, six years after retiring, feeling “like I was missing what I loved.” That led to a dance-theater piece called “Cheri” at New York’s Signature Theater, opposite soulful ABT principal Herman Cornejo (who rejoins her onstage this week.)

In the audience one day was choreographer Wayne McGregor, of the Royal Ballet in London, where Ferri began her career. He’d arrived with a major proposal about a new ballet he was mounting. “Will you please be my Virginia?” he asked.

“There’s always a little voice inside me who recognizes when I have to do something,” Ferri says. But still, she had to ask McGregor: “Wayne, are you really aware of how old I am?”

“And he said yes, that he needed a dancer who can embody (Woolf's) soul, her essence,” Ferri says. “So I thought, okay. We can lead each other in this."

In an interview, McGregor expressed wonder at how Ferri, a petite dancer, can project ripples of emotion across a vast opera house in such an effortless way.

“What’s amazing about the world’s greatest performers, of which Alessandra is one, is that they bring the audience to them, they don't need to project OUT,” McGregor said. “Alessandra is tiny, right? But there’s this ability, this magnetism, to be able to bring the audience to her.”

Both dancer and choreographer also note how rare it is for classical ballet, a world of fluttering swans and dainty princesses, to feature a fully fleshed-out female character of a certain age.

“Alessandra is about the age of Virginia Woolf was when she died,” McGregor notes (the writer took her own life, walking into a river at age 59.) “We're so accustomed to seeing or thinking about dance as a young person’s game. We’re not used to seeing the power and expressivity of older bodies, inhabiting roles that reflect much more clearly our living in a contemporary world.” Ferri can do that, he says, and people respond.

“Alessandra is still dancing so beautifully,” adds ABT artistic director Susan Jaffe, herself a former ABT principal of the same generation. “As well as her incredible dramatic ability — she knows how to make the moment so alive, so electric and so authentic. In a way, the movements become sort of an extended gesture of what she's doing emotionally.”

That phenomenon was clear at a recent studio rehearsal. Many young dancers there had never met Ferri in person. As she practiced the death scene, surrounded, lifted and carried by dancers representing waves, all eyes were on Ferri’s Virginia and the tortured yet determined look in her eyes. At the end of her duet with Cornejo, she lay down in watery death. The room erupted in applause.

Applause also, of course, rang through the opera house on Tuesday at Ferri’s first of two performances, with ballet regulars keenly aware that this might be the last time they see her in pointe shoes.

Ferri says one of the reasons she loves her role is that she's able to bring her lengthy past with her.

“I can be myself, at 60, with a path.” she says. “A path full of wonderful moments, joyful moments, sad moments, angry moments, frightening moments. I can bring all of that to this role.”

The audience sees it clearly. One thing it does not see: the incredible effort that goes into making it all look, well, effortless.

McGregor compares Ferri’s physical determination to that of elite athletes.

“You know how you see incredible athletes all of a sudden able to swim the channel in their 60s?” the choreographer asks. “It takes so much training. That is Alessandra, the amount of work she has to do to make it so effortless is way, way more than being able to rely on your body when you’re young."

This is also, now, why Ferri says she is ready to move on. Life running a ballet company, which she begins in 2025, will not allow for hours at the barre.

“I have a lot of energy,” she says. “But I will need it for the dancers. I really want to be there for them.”

Ferri wasn’t always ready. She was approached to run a company years ago, when she first retired. “It wasn’t the right time. This time I was approached, and I went (snaps fingers). I knew back then I wasn’t ready to dedicate myself to others 200%. Now I am.”

But still, rather like the Rolling Stones, Ferri will not say definitively that it’s the last time we see her dance. (Except for Juliet — that role is in the past.)

“I don’t know, because life, as I say, is full of surprises,” she says. “And sometimes — often — it’s turned out in a way that I didn’t expect, you know? So, who knows?”

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Reading Against the Novel

July 18, 2024 issue

James Fitzjames Stephen; woodburytype by Samuel Lock and George Whitfield, 1882

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Selected Writings of James Fitzjames Stephen: On the Novel and Journalism

One is so used to hearing of the virtues of storytelling and the transformative power of fiction that it comes as a surprise to open a collection of essays entitled On the Novel and Journalism and read: “For art of any kind I have never cared…For literature, as such, I care hardly at all.” Why, one wonders, is the eminent critic Christopher Ricks offering us such a lavishly annotated edition of this man’s work?

James Fitzjames Stephen was born in 1829 into a family of distinguished English lawyers, historians, and reformers. His grandfather was a leading figure in the antislavery movement, and his father drafted the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, which outlawed slavery in most of the British Empire. His younger brother, Leslie Stephen, was an eminent humanist and critic and the father of Virginia Woolf. James Fitzjames’s career, however, was primarily in law. Called to the bar in 1854, he published A General View of the Criminal Law of England in 1863; during his two and a half years in India he was responsible for the Indian Evidence Act (1872), which, among other reforms, eliminated inequalities of caste and religion when it came to standards of evidence. After returning to England he sought to have the principles of his Indian legislation included in English law and was made a high court judge in 1879. Oxford University Press is currently preparing an eleven-volume selection of his writings, of which this is the sixth.

So the essays in On the Novel and Journalism are not written from the perspective of someone whose main focus was literature or journalism. Rather, Stephen was deeply involved in the contemporary life of England as it emerged in courts of law, precisely the life that novels and newspapers were describing. Between the ages of twenty-six and thirty-eight, while he was working as a lawyer, Stephen wrote hundreds of book reviews and essays, mostly but not exclusively for the newly established Saturday Review . Perhaps unsurprisingly, the first in this volume is entitled “The Relation of Novels to Life” (1855).

At once it’s clear that the young Stephen read widely. Scott, Stowe, Defoe, Fielding, Smollett, Carlyle, Dickens, Thackeray, Austen, Bulwer-Lytton, and Gaskell are all cited, but also Eugène Sue and George Sand. Stephen read French and in other essays discusses Balzac, Stendhal, Flaubert, Hugo, Prévost, Dumas, and Rousseau. It’s equally clear that he enjoys his reading, appreciating and swiftly characterizing each author’s stylistic achievements. “Mr Dickens…constantly gives expression, almost personality, to inanimate objects. He invests the most ordinary affairs of life with a certain charm and poetry.” The novels of “Miss Austen…convey an impression of reality altogether extraordinary”; she “culls out and pieces together a succession of small incidents, so contrived as to develop, step by step, the characters of the persons represented.”

Nevertheless Stephen is always reading, as it were, against the text, like a prosecuting attorney scrutinizing a defendant’s testimony. “Each incident,” he continues of Austen, “taken by itself, is so exquisitely natural, and so carefully introduced, that it requires considerable attention to detect the improbability of the story,” something he then proceeds forensically to do, but as if admiring the challenge Austen had set him. Likewise the prominence Dickens gives to detail is at once admired for its creativity but declared “entirely factitious,” one of the many ways in which novels distort reality. Other distortions are the suppression of vast areas of experience (particularly work life), the undue prominence given to romantic love (“of course, every one is in love in a novel”), the alteration of historical facts, the overdefinition of character, the romanticization of crime and vice, and the evidently contrived plots.

Do such distortions matter? Stephen’s approach always has the reader, indeed society, as much in mind as the text. By the mid-1850s the novel had become the dominant form of entertainment. Prices had fallen, sales were up. “The majority of those who read for amusement, read novels…. In one shape or another they enter into the education of us all.” Young adults in particular looked to novels for “commentaries upon the life which is just opening up before [them].” Stephen grants that the novel “enlarges our experience” by providing materials that prompt “self-examination.” People cannot read Thackeray, he elaborates, “without acquiring a consciousness of a multitude of small vanities and hypocrisies which would otherwise have escaped their attention.”

However, “novels operate most strongly,” Stephen goes on, “by producing emotion.” Indeed they do this more effectively, at least as far as the general reading public is concerned, than works of history or documentary accounts. He mentions Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Dickens’s “luscious death-bed scenes.” “Habitual emotion,” he agrees, “whatever may be the exciting cause, produces some moral effects.” But this does not mean we can draw a straight analogy between the transformative consequences of, say, seeing a man “flogged to death” or attending a young person wasting away with illness and reading about such events in a novel. Aside from the different intensity of impressions arising from reading and firsthand experience, one would want to distinguish, Stephen reflects, between “a person who went to see a man die because he liked it” and “one who saw such a sight because he could not help it.” Novel readers, he implies, are regularly choosing, indeed paying for their pathos. And authors are all too willing to supply it. Dickens “gloats over [Little Nell’s] death as if it delighted him…touches, tastes, smells, and handles [it] as if it was some savoury dainty which could not be too fully appreciated.” Readers are complicit. Reality is more solemn. Stephen would have been aware that his grandfather’s life had been profoundly changed when, in Barbados, he witnessed the trial of two slaves unjustly sentenced to death by burning.

Granted that the importance of novels “must be considered very great,” and that this largely depends on their supposed representation of reality, the issue of responsibility looms. But the novelist, Stephen observes, is hard to pin down. If held to task “he can always plead that he is writing a novel, and not a political treatise.” In short, it is never clear what kind of seriousness the reader is to expect. This state of affairs is exacerbated by what Stephen identifies as a recent trend: authors “using novels to ventilate opinions.” Not that “opinions and states of mind” are not legitimate subjects of representation, but there are “dangers of partiality, of dishonesty, of false morality on the part of authors.” In particular, many novels push “social or political argumenta ad misericordiam ”; that is, they arouse pity to sway debates that should be decided on evidence and logic. Gaskell’s Mary Barton is cited: the well-known miseries of Manchester’s poor, Stephen agrees, are certainly a “fact worth representing,” but “that fact has little or nothing to do with either the cause or the remedy of their wretchedness.” The novel is “excellent,” but its “utter uselessness, politically speaking,” must be acknowledged.

Ricks presents the essays selected in chronological order of their publication, which has the advantage of showing the development and deepening of Stephen’s criticisms. A few lines of background are provided for most pieces, along with precious notes and glosses. It is astonishing, for example, to realize how often this man who cared hardly at all for literature (“as such”) uses turns of phrase that echo a wide range of literary texts from the past. In making us aware of this, Ricks inevitably alters our response to Stephen’s arguments: he cannot simply be dismissed as a philistine; indeed, the last articles in the book offer fierce criticism of Matthew Arnold for his claim that Britain was a nation of philistines.

The second essay, “Woods v . Russell” (1856), turns to journalism. During the Crimean War, Nicholas Woods was the correspondent for The Morning Herald and William Russell the correspondent for The Times . Both had contributed to the view that the British campaign in the Crimea resembled an “army of lions commanded by asses.” This had won them notoriety and popularity. Stephen takes advantage of the publication of collections of the two men’s war dispatches to analyze the evidence they offered for their criticisms. Meticulously cross-referencing their accounts, he shows how frequently they contradict each other over the most elementary facts, while on other occasions one man has clearly plagiarized the other. As with the novel, Stephen complains, newspapers enjoy great political influence, without demonstrating the sort of responsibility and impartiality that might legitimize it: “Statements of the most vehement kind are made upon any or no authority” and presented in a “showy, noisy, clever, and picturesque” style that in one case has a dead dog being described as a “decayed specimen of canine mortality.”

“A newspaper,” Stephen reminds us in a later essay, “is essentially and pre-eminently a mercantile speculation.” The power it boasts to intervene in cases of injustice is limited by its need to sustain the interest of its readers. Journalists, like novelists, labor under an obligation to be entertaining. They play to “the impatience which every one feels of being governed in a prosaic way,” thus reinforcing opinions readers already have. In a more general piece, “The History of British Journalism,” he suggests that it is “of the utmost importance that the comments of journalists should be checked,” not merely to avoid “the circulation of erroneous opinions” but to provide those in authority with the information required to govern properly (always Stephen’s central concern). Unfortunately, seriousness doesn’t pay. He quotes a report showing that none of the more reliable dailies are among the nation’s most profitable papers.

The article “Newspaper English” describes how journalists of “slight education, a fluent pen, and…natural shrewdness, [are] sent off…to describe a [naval] review at Spithead on Monday…a fête at the Crystal Palace on Wednesday, an agricultural meeting on Thursday…and an execution on Saturday,” in the “profoundest ignorance” of the things they are reporting on. To hide their inadequacy they deploy a spurious, pseudotechnical vocabulary:

One of the indispensable requisites of this style of writing is a lax phraseology—something which commits the person who uses it to as few facts, and therefore lays him open to as few contradictions, as possible.

Though apparently harmless and even, looked at one way, “a great art,” such an approach, Stephen laments, eventually “induces vagueness and inaccuracy of thought,” which then turns up in public life. He quotes a jury verdict that he suspects was contaminated by such newspaperspeak. On the other hand, when setting himself the task of examining the supposedly scabrous Sunday papers (targeted, Ricks reminds us, by the Lord’s Day Observance Society), Stephen finds them the victim of “unjust prejudice.” He is impressed by their concision and decorum. Those who publish criticisms of them on Monday, he observes, clearly wrote their articles on Sunday.

Stephen is not without his lighter side. A discussion of the technical jargon flaunted in the many popular nautical novels of the time is hilarious: “When, for example, we read that ‘[a ship] was topping the heavy seas as they rose with a long floating cleave, that carried her counter fairly free of the after-run’…&c.&c., we feel as if we were listening to a magical incantation,” a state of mind that then excuses our “easy acquiescence in improbabilities.” An article entitled “Groans of the Britons” reviews the kinds of complaints that letter writers address to the “sympathizing bosom” of their newspapers, usually The Times , declaring them

the most curious illustrations of the intense and disinterested affection which an Englishman feels for himself. That he, the heir of all the ages [a quotation from Tennyson]…should be uncomfortable, strikes him not so much in the light of a personal wrong as in that of a blot on the face of creation.

A fascinating article examining book sales at railway stations marvels at the three hundred passengers who bought the huge volumes of Thomas Macaulay’s History of England , sometimes from boys crying them “up and down the platform,” and wonders why religious books are mostly bought in Wales, often in surprising numbers: 20,000 copies of The Life of Captain Hedley Vicars , an evangelical killed in the Crimean War, “went off in a single day.”

Nevertheless, as the articles accumulate and Stephen’s anthropological eye dissects a wide range of reading experiences, one overriding theme emerges. “If we consider the infinitely elaborate apparatus which we have constructed to satisfy our appetite for amusement,” he concludes the essay on railway newsstands, “we shall be filled with a kind of awe.” Yet the more entertainment is provided, the more it becomes confused with politics. A fiction writer, Stephen reflects, “is almost always a person of more than average sensibility, and these qualities are almost certain to put their possessor more or less in opposition to the established state of things.” Hence novelists collude with newspapers to exaggerate “the failure, the prejudices, and the stupidity of the executive,” in part because this is a popular stance to assume. (“The course which [journalists] take,” Stephen insists, “is, and always will be, determined by the public.”)

But just as one wouldn’t want to instill in readers a “blind admiration” of “the institutions under which they live,” to encourage them to be “discontented with and disaffected to” those institutions “cannot but be a serious evil.” “The rule of truth is the only safe rule.” But can novels be trusted to observe it, given the allowances always made for “the necessities of the story”? (Stephen recalls how Charlotte Brontë regretted having exaggerated the cruelty of the school described in Jane Eyre , thus causing considerable distress to its charitable founders.) “The question at issue,” he finally makes explicit in an article of 1858, is: “Are novels proper vehicles for direct political and social discussions, or is amusement their legitimate object?” The test case for exploring this question could only be the novelist who more than any other enjoyed “unbounded and enthusiastic popularity”: Dickens.

Again and again Stephen seeks to refine his objections to Dickens and, through Dickens, “the cultus of the middle classes” who buy his books. The writer’s “exquisite skill” in sustaining a “flow of spirit and drollery” is never denied, but there is a difference, Stephen insists, between “the skill in the production of literary effects, and skill in the verification and employment of alleged evidence.” If the government is to be so repeatedly brought to the dock, then evidence, or at least a fair representation, is required. Dickens, though, is one of those novelists who “caricature instead of representing the world.” Nor does his popularity altogether depend on his genius, but rather on “the exquisite adaptation of his own turn of mind to the peculiar state of feeling which still prevails in some classes.” Both share a “spirit of revolt against all established rules,” this largely in reaction, Stephen concedes, to the quantities of “cant [that] had been in fashion about the wisdom of our ancestors, the glorious constitution…and other such topics.” (Ricks provides, as an example, Sydney Smith’s deliriously patriotic “Noodle’s Oration” of 1824.)

Essentially, Dickens is accused of milking this irreverent spirit for all it’s worth, each new novel highlighting this or that abuse of power, of which, Stephen claims, the writer has only “his first notions…from the discussions which accompany its removal.” Dickens’s method is to “take a melancholy subject, and rub the reader’s nose in it,” proceeding with a combination of “banter and sentiment”; shallow feelings are deployed in the absence of proper argument to the point that feeling becomes an end in itself, together with a general complacency about “doing good.”

Ricks includes Dickens’s lengthy response to one of these attacks. The novelist picks up on two mistaken assumptions Stephen has made in his criticism and mocks him mercilessly, reiterating his own contempt for government but without seriously addressing the issues Stephen raises. Stephen remains undeterred. With a training in adversarial legal process, he seems to appreciate such spats, regretting, in a later essay on Matthew Arnold, that Arnold’s response to criticisms was “too goodnatured”: “There is no pleasure in hitting a man who will not hit you back again; who says meekly that it is not his nature to ‘dispute on behalf of any opinion…very obstinately.’” Writing about Macaulay, he remarks that “the systematic vigour of his expressions must force his opponents, if they have any power of mind at all, into an attempt to invest their objections to them with something like equal clearness.” He appears, that is, to have a genuine confidence that polemic will lead, if not to truth, then at least in the right direction.

In any event, however heated the battle with Dickens became, there was no question of an attack ad personam . In 1858 Dickens separated from his wife of many years, the mother of their ten children, banishing her from the family home and publishing an ill-advised and defensive letter about their split in The Times . Stephen does not take advantage, even in an essay of 1863 on “common forms” in novels, in which the convenient death of David Copperfield’s foolish first wife, followed by a wiser second marriage, is offered as an example of a now-hackneyed plot formula: “You get an affecting deathbed, two courtships…wounded affection…all by the help of a process which enables the hero to have his cake and eat his cake.” “It is, indeed, a pity,” he ironizes, perhaps looking forward to modern academe, “that technical names should not be invented” for such tropes, “so that their peculiarities might be announced in the advertisements.”

Even when not writing about Dickens, Stephen’s aversion to the Dickensian ethos is implicit. Thackeray’s Barry Lyndon is admired for the convincing complexity of its characters and the absence of caricature, sentimentality, or moralizing: “The book has a moral, if the reader knows how to look for it; but it is kept in its proper place, and is suggested by the facts, instead of suggesting them.” Likewise Balzac’s characters are enjoyed for “the extraordinary good faith with which they are drawn,” without “melodramatic starts and fantastic tricks of expression,” while the author is commended for having apparently “studied with considerable depth and acuteness, and with a genuine wish to understand their working, many of the institutions amongst which he found himself placed.” If, when writing about vice and immorality, Balzac does so in the same spirit, he is entitled to the defense “J’écris pour les hommes, non pour les jeunes filles.” An English novel, on the other hand, Stephen regrets, being “in some respect like a sermon,” was addressed to such a wide public that “a large proportion of the most important social and moral subjects must of necessity be tabooed.”

This was one issue on which Dickens very much agreed. In a letter written during his long marital crisis he complained that public “morality” in England prevented a writer from tackling “any of the experiences, trials, perplexities, and confusions inseparable from the making or unmaking of all men!” But taboo subjects were not just a problem for novelists. Stephen remarks:

Most writers are so nervous about the tendencies of their books, and the social penalties of unorthodox opinion are so severe…that philosophy, criticism and science itself too often speak amongst us in ambiguous whispers what ought to be proclaimed from the house tops.

How familiar this last observation sounds. “There are few more instructive branches of literary inquiry,” Stephen begins an article on the essays of Addison and Steele, published 150 years before his time, “than the comparison of the different amusements of different generations.” The wit and elegance of these essayists, he notes, that “feeling of repose and security with regard to all the most important subjects,” are unimaginable in the 1850s, since “the substratum of belief which enabled them [to write as they did] no longer exists.” A modern writer no longer asks of “any line of conduct…whether it is right or wrong, true or false, wise or foolish, but whether it can be so represented as to enlist the reader’s sympathies.”

Reading this collection we are inevitably drawn to compare Stephen’s time with our own, another 150 years on. Indeed, comparison and contrast are the very nature of our riveted engagement with the book: we feel wonderment for a time when the novel dominated public discourse, fascination for the way Stephen can make assumptions that would be taboo today, and for the fact that novelists could not write about things then that are now described ad nauseam. On the one hand, one wishes to rush to defend Dickens (Ricks provides us with Ruskin’s remark that “Dickens’s caricature, though often gross, is never mistaken”); on the other hand, one has to acknowledge that the politicization of the novel (not to mention movies and TV series) that Stephen deplores is now so widely accepted and applauded that it would seem folly even to try to argue against it, unless perhaps by republishing the persuasive essays of a critic from the past.

It would not be difficult to build all kinds of defenses for the novel that Stephen ignores: for example, that each author’s particular perspective on life introduces us to a different world of feeling, which itself is part of reality; that the novels of the past offer us a taste of the ethos of the time, against which we can understand our own time better; or, as Ricks concludes, that the novel, “like all the arts,” exists to pose the questions “ What is truth? and What truth is there in this? ” But by responding in this way we simply acknowledge what Ricks calls “the valuable invitation that can be extended by a principled calling-in-question.”

Yet the interest of this collection goes far beyond any specific polemic, and if anything the invitation it extends is to think afresh not so much about the novel and journalism but about the entire phenomenon of heated cultural debate. The issues Stephen discusses remain sufficiently pertinent to stimulate our attention, but perhaps because the specific controversies are so distant, we find we can enjoy both sides of the argument and see how much its antagonists had in common, in the way they lay out their cases and in the principles they appeal to. The very eagerness to contest what the other thinks is a manifestation of lively community. Shrewdly framed by Ricks’s introduction and notes, On the Novel and Journalism proves unexpectedly heartening: the much-maligned Victorians offer good company; we need not feel we are alone in our present “culture wars.” Setting Stephen down, I even imagined that 150 years hence someone might read a collection of the writings of some protagonist of our own ill-tempered debates and conclude that we had a great deal more in common than we supposed.

Agreeing to Our Harm

“Ami Police”: A Story

More Than Just Acknowledgments

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