On Being Ill
On Being Ill - Virginia Woolf et al. (English edition)
Virginia Woolf, Deryn Rees-Jones, Lieke Marsman, Lucia Osborne-Crowley, Nadia de Vries, Nafissa Thompson-Spires, Jameisha Prescod, Mieke va
The subtle complexities of Virginia Woolf’s essay ‘On Being Ill’ will no doubt continue to be resonant for a new generation of readers today. Certainly for both Woolf and Plath, the politics of illness are never far away. “Illness,” Woolf writes, “makes us disinclined for the long campaigns that prose extracts.” On Being Ill is a valuable book for everybody who wants to connect with illness through art and literature, and look at it from a different perspective. With the poignant contributions of excellent contemporary writers, and the introduction to Audre Lorde’s cancer journals, which ends this anthology, this book does both. Woolf asks herself in her essay if illness should not receive more attention in literature, taking its place alongside the recurring themes of “love, battle and jealousy”. This book, On Being Ill, does exactly that.
About the Authors
Virginia Woolf wrote the title essay 'On Being Ill' originally in 1926, shortly after a world wide pandemic. In this anthology it was published again, alongside the poignant and excellent contributions by contemprory writers who have been asking themselves similar questions as Woolf did, whilst experiencing pain, sickness and suffering, but also epiphanies, creativitiy and foresight.
Writers from across the United Kingdom, America, and Ireland have conributed each in their own individual style on the topics of illness and literature. Poet Deryn Rees-Jones wrote the preface. Other authors include Lucia Osborne-Crowley, Nafsissa Thompson-Spires, Nadia de Vries, Mieke van Zonneveld, Lieke Marsman and Jameisha Prescod and Sinéad Gleeson. The anthology finishes with Audre Lorde's introduction to her Cancer Journals. The Dutch essays were translated by Sophie Collins.
Press
"It truly comes as no surprise that the publisher Elte Rauch opted to include these particular texts written by contemporary authors, for they provide stellar insight into what suffering from an illness entails, as well as into what it means to be a writer with an illness, topics which both Woolf and Lorde discuss in their works included in the anthology. Not only does the collection tie past with current elaborations on illness, but it was also published in a time of a global health crisis."
- Sanja Gligorić in Anglozine
"This edition serves as a complement to HetMoet's 2020 publication of the first Dutch translation of Virginia Woolf's On Being Ill. In this collaborative volume, authors, translators and illustrators have come together from Great Britain, Ireland, the United States and the Netherlands to represent past, present and future thinking about illness. Noteworthy contributions to this 172-page paperback edition are Deryn Rees-Jones' preface to Woolf's essay from 1926 and the introduction to Audre Lorde's The Cancer Journals of 1980. Against these, the voices of contemporary authors resonate as they contemplate the interactions between sickness and literature. Readers are able to begin the book at the end, or might happily start in the middle, as every contribution is a unique, personal piece that offers poignant observations of the world of illness from within."
- Paula Maggio op Blogging Woolf
"This is a profound, moving, and important collection of essays in conversation with Virginia Woolf's 1926 essay "On Being Ill." It's also beautifully produced by HetMoet."
- Mark Hussey
