Ravenous Identity: Eating and Eating Distress in the Life and Work of Virginia Woolf [Hardcover]

Allie Glenny (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 15, 2000

Leonard Woolf has described how, when Virginia Woolf’s distress was at its most acute, "for weeks almost at every meal one had to sit, often for an hour or more, trying to induce her to eat a few mouthfuls." Even when she was relatively relaxed about food, he said, "It was extraordinarily difficult to get her to eat enough to keep her strong and well." In Ravenous Identity, Allie Glenny examines the way in which food and eating are symbolically expressed and explored in both Woolf’s life and her work. Woolf’s writing shows an abiding interest in food, from the sharps and sweets of lunch in the men’s college vs. the bitter taste of the greens served for dinner in the women’s college in A Room of One’s Own, to Neville’s physical and ontological sensations digesting dinner, the butter oozing through Bernard’s crumpet, and Susan plunging her hands into the bread dough in The Waves. Drawing upon Glenny’s personal experience of anorexia, Ravenous Identity is a feminist consideration of Virginia Woolf’s widely unrecognized use of and relationship to food as a complex artistic metaphor.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

In this debut book, Glenny (Ph.D., English literature), a former anorexic, attributes the "omnipresence" of food in the writing of Virginia Woolf to her "premature weaning" (at ten weeks), the early death of her mother, and, most significantly, sexual abuse by her half-brother. While this densely written study breaks new ground in Woolf scholarship, Glenny goes too far by becoming an apologist for anorexia. Instead of simply showing how important food was as a metaphor for Woolf, Glenny makes disturbing comments such as "anorexia can, at its most positive, function as a bell-jar in which personal and political change is fermented." She also suggests that anorexia provides women an "effective emergency measure" in which to gain a sense of self, particularly in response to childhood abuse. Clearly, Woolf was able to quiet her demons temporarily, but her 1941 suicide attests to her ultimate status as a victim. Recommended for larger academic collections.
-Diane Gardner Premo, Rochester P.L., NY
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

"Glenny's is a nuanced view of a very complicated issue. Her book is bound to be a nurturing experience for many readers, male and female, who share the obsession with food that links her with Woolf." --Jane Marcus, Women's Review of Books

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan; 1st edition (January 15, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312213336
• ISBN-13: 978-0312213336
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.8 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,144,183 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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