Customer Reviews

On Being Ill

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On Being Ill is a small masterpiece. This is a unique book--compassionate, intelligent, affirming, and comforting, both for the "healthy" among us, and those who have experienced illness. This is Woolf at her best: brilliant, daring, probing, and Hermione Lee's Introduction is a gem.

Also, for those of us who care about design, the book is a beauty, a work of art in itself.

Put this book among those most dear to you!

In this discerning and somewhat humorous essay, Virginia Woolf remarks on humanity's experiences with illness, whether mental or physical, and on how it is rarely the subject of literature or art. She notes our contradictory nature toward sympathy and offers an opinion about what illness tells us about the natural world. Hermione Lee's fascinating introduction firmly places this remarkable work in the context of Woolf's life and writing. This Paris Press edition recreates the original artwork and typeset of the 1930 printing of "On Being Ill".

From its magnificent cover, to its brilliant and sensitive insights into the psychology of illness--being ill, being near someone who is ill, anticipating being ill or well again--this book is a jewel. I love the way it feels in my hands. I love the way my eyes roam over the pages. I love the way it feels beneath my pillow. I've given it to friends and they have given it to their friends. And I am so pleased that Paris Press--"beautiful and daring feminist books"--has reprinted it as Woolf and Vanessa Bell intended. Precious!

This book is so small, the Introduction, pp. xi-xxxii, by Hermione Lee (April 15, 2002), plus notes to p. xxxiv, (the truly scholarly pages substantiating the material which ought to be considered, now that an entire book, VIRGINIA WOOLF'S ART AND MANIC-DEPRESSIVE ILLNESS by Thomas Caramagno (University of California Press, 1992) covers the topic), have more paragraphs than the main text, which only has nine or ten, unless you count multiple breaks for lines of some poet on p. 20 and Rimbaud at the top of p. 21 as indicating some flight beyond the normal bounds of the paragraph in which "Incomprehensibility has an enormous power over us in illness, more legitimately perhaps than the upright will allow" (p. 21) expresses itself as a single sentence.

The sentences are what astounds. The first sentence is constructed like an erudite train to somewhere: "Considering how ..., how ..., how astonishing ..., what ..., what ..., what ..., how we go down into the pit of death ...--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." (pp. 3-4). This hardly gives a firm foundation for those humorous moment when the primary reaction of anyone who is not in on the joke is: I think I'm going to be sick.