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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For the love of books

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 .

FEATURED IMAGE VIA WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

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

In this Book

• Virginia; Stephen Woolf
• Published by: Wesleyan University Press

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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On Being Ill with Virginia Woolf

Kendra Winchester

Kendra Winchester is a Contributing Editor for Book Riot where she writes about audiobooks and disability literature. She is also the Founder of Read Appalachia , which celebrates Appalachian literature and writing. Previously, Kendra co-founded and served as Executive Director for Reading Women , a podcast that gained an international following over its six-season run. In her off hours, you can find her writing on her Substack, Winchester Ave , and posting photos of her Corgis on Instagram and Twitter @kdwinchester.

View All posts by Kendra Winchester

I don’t often talk about spending most of my time on the couch in my living room. I watch people’s faces when I say words like “bedridden” and “semi-homebound.” Their expressions flicker in confusion as they try to wrap their minds around the fact that this very “normal”-seeming person could be THAT sick. “But you look great!” they say. “At least you don’t look as sick as so-and-so,” they add as if I should be proud of this accomplishment. Even this unintentional form of ableism is exhausting.

The truth is that I spend most of my time attached to a heating pad and surrounded by papers and books scattered across my behemoth-like couch. In a fog of chronic pain, my days are filled with calculations about how long I can hold myself upright in my podcast chair or how often I can get up to refill the host of beverages that have multiplied on my side table.

Chronically ill and disabled people have our own cultures and traditions that impact the art that we create. This includes writing. I was in grad school when I first discovered Virginia Woolf’s essay “ On Being Ill .” In these few pages, Woolf wondered, “Considering how common illness is, how tremendous the spiritual change that it brings . . . it has become strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love, battle, and jealousy among the prime themes of literature.” As I read Woolf’s comparison of the depth of transformation that an illness of the body can have upon the mind, I felt as if I was being seen for the first time. Woolf threw pity to the wind, embracing chronic illness just like any other part of the hero’s journey. While reading this essay, I realized that, for better or worse, illness changes you, and that is a story worth telling.

In The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating , Elisabeth Tova Bailey describes her bed as “an island within the desolate sea of my room.” But she doesn’t stop there. “Yet I knew that there were other people homebound from illness or injury, scattered here or there throughout rural towns and cities around the world. And as I lay there, I felt a connection to all of them. We, too, were a colony of hermits.” 

Sure, this life often feels isolating and lonely, but Bailey’s words remind me that I’m not alone. When I started making bookish content online, I found that there were thousands of other chronically ill people on the internet who spent their time sick at home, just like I did. But now, with the advantages of the internet, we use technology to find new ways to connect, share ideas, and create art together.

This collective but separate community is especially true for chronically ill and disabled creatives who have long been writing from beds and couches. In their book Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice , Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha says, “Writing from bed is a time-honored disabled way of being an activist and cultural worker. It’s one the mainstream doesn’t often acknowledge but whose lineage stretches from Frida Kahlo painting in bed to Grace Lee Boggs writing in her wheelchair at ninety-eight. . . . Disability justice allowed me to understand that me writing from my sickbed wasn’t me being weak or uncool or not a real writer but a time-honored crip creative practice.”

As my condition has progressed, I’ve grown to embrace more “crip creative practices,” letting my body guide how and when I write. I’ve learned to accept that I will need accommodations to produce even the simplest paragraph. But I’m still here, following the example of disabled writers before me.  

I started this article on a sunny afternoon, but now the sun has set, and the room has gone dark. The soft glow of the lamps creates dancing shadows across the floor. One of the Corgis snores next to me, her little feet twitching as she chases tennis balls in her dreams. While my perspective from this vantage point might have seemed simple at first, my fellow disabled creatives remind me that my view from the couch is worth sharing.

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8 “On Being Ill”

• Published: February 2002
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This chapter examines Virginia Woolf's essay on illness titled “On Being Ill”. It explains that Woolf wrote this essay when she was unable to work on her planned autobiographical novel because of her illness and it was published in .S. Eliot's New Criterion in January 1926. This essay covered experience of psychosis and the relation between body and mind and provides insights into Woolf's own complex response to manic-depressive illness that haunted her for much of her life.

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Virginia Woolf: writing death and illness into the national story of post-first world war Britain

Lecturer at School of English, Communication and Philosophy, Cardiff University

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Jess Cotton does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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Illness, unlike war, as English academic and writer Elizabeth Outka brilliantly demonstrates in her book Viral Modernism (2019), is a story that easily slips out of cultural and historical memory.

In illness, the modernist writer Virginia Woolf observed, “We cease to be soldiers in the army of the upright; we become deserters.” Woolf, writing in the wake of the first world war, saw the threat that the Spanish flu of 1919 posed to the stories of national triumph. Influenza moves in invisible and unpredictable ways. It renders everyone potentially vulnerable.

This interest in illness was personal. Woolf came down with several bouts of influenza between 1916 and 1925 and needed to confine herself to bed for stretches of time.

She documents the experience of the Spanish flu in her diary in 1918, noting, as an aside, how “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 may seize upon Lord Northcliffe and thus precipitate us into peace.”

Her tone is mocking. She would later appreciate the seriousness the threat of influenza posed. But here she suggests that what illness promises to bring is the end of the profit of war that fuels the nationalist sentiments churned out by the newspapers owned by Lord Northcliffe’s vast empire of popular journalism.

Reading Woolf’s work, particularly her 1925 novel Mrs Dalloway, on the 80th anniversary of her death and in the midst of our own pandemic, we see how she tried to rewrite death and illness back into the national story of post-first world war glory and strength.

Sidelining death

I’m a lecturer in English at Cardiff University, and teaching literature in a sparsely filled lecture theatre during the pandemic has been a discombobulating experience. Mrs Dalloway provided an entry point to make sense of the business of studying and thinking while a new national emergency unfolded around us. The protagonist of Mrs Dalloway is a survivor of the Spanish flu of 1919 and the sense of life that permeates the text emerges from her experience of rediscovering the pleasures of life. We meet Mrs Dalloway as she weaves her way through London, experiencing the quiet intensity of life one morning in June.

Read more: Virginia Woolf on the magic of going to the cinema

The novel’s famous opening line – “Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself” – has taken on new resonance this year as the pandemic has made all our worlds much smaller. Clarissa wants to buy the flowers herself because she is delighted to go out – as we might appreciate – having spent so long indoors.

In class, the students and I thought about what it meant to see Clarissa as a character who has lived through a pandemic and come out the other side. Clarissa’s commitment to life, after a long confinement, is hopeful, though it comes at a cost.

At the centre of Clarissa’s party, which the novel builds to, comes the news that Septimus Smith, a young war veteran, has killed himself. In Woolf’s original plans for her novel, Septimus did not appear and Clarissa was to kill herself during the party. In creating Septimus as Clarissa’s double, Woolf is able to move death to the sidelines – as we all would like to.

Woolf revolutionises character by radically tunnelling inwards – giving us not a description of a character, but a map of their psychic life. We experience the protagonist intimately from within – through their stream of consciousness – but peripheral characters also proliferate in the modernist novel.

Woolf recognises how easy it is to cast characters to the sidelines of life. This is, after all, how national fictions work, by making space for protagonists at the expense of those who are pushed further out of view. In the case of post-war Britain, space was made for the glory of war but not for the the Spanish flu.

Collective memory

Mrs Dalloway is a text that shows how memory and mourning work to uphold the values of the British Empire. Its attention on how emotions circulate between people allows us to understand how national structures of feeling are created through newspapers and through the orchestration of symbolic identifications.

“In all the hat shops and tailors’ shops strangers looked at each other,” Woolf writes, “and thought of the dead; of the flag of Empire.” Woolf is interested in showing something that is hard to pinpoint: how national communities are created and sustained; how the war’s dead continue to underpin an inexorable sense of Britishness.

Woolf saw that a subjective perspective was required to make sense of how death continues to inflect the mood of a generation. Mourning, as Sigmund Freud also realised at a similar point, is ongoing, illusory work. What is remarkable about her writing is that Woolf draws our attention to how death pushes us beyond what we can know. In this unknowing, we are forced to admit that our lives are more fragile and dependent on the lives of others.

As one of her characters articulates in The Voyage Out (1915):

“It seems so inexplicable,” Evelyn continued. “Death, I mean. Why should she be dead, and not you or I? It was only a fortnight ago that she was here with the rest of us?”

Woolf’s ability to show how hard it is to explain death helps us understand the difficulty of living with its presence. In the face of the loneliness of death, the growing demise of its communal forms, the diminished structures of public mourning, she provides us with a language for death outside of national structures of commemoration.

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The Unsaid: The Silence of Virginia Woolf

By Hisham Matar

This essay is from an introduction to a new Italian translation,  by Anna Nadotti, of “To the Lighthouse,” which will be published later this month by Einaudi.

Here is where the artist Adeline Virginia Stephen was born. She lived in this house, at 22 Hyde Park Gate, in west London, for the first twenty-two years of her life. The whitewashed Victorian façade holds the sunlight brightly when the weather is good. It’s a short walk from here to Yeoman’s Row, and in July, 1902, when she was twenty, she went there to have her portrait taken. She was accompanied, I imagine, by her seventy-year-old father, the noted man of letters Sir Leslie Stephen. I picture them moving side by side: she in the white summer dress worn in the portrait, and he in one of the dark suits he was often cased in, his long, unkempt beard hiding the knot of his black silk necktie. They might have gone around the giant dome of the Royal Albert Hall and into Kensington Gore. Then left on to Princes Consort Road, crossing Exhibition Road, continuing to Princes Gardens, before needling through the quiet back mews till they reach Brompton Road. Second on the right is Yeoman’s Row, where the photographer George Charles Beresford had set up his studio that same year.

It was no doubt an anxious time for Beresford. This was an unexpected turn in his career. After spending four years working as a civil engineer in British India, he had contracted malaria and was forced to return to England. He studied art, and now was hoping to establish himself as a leading photographic portraitist. He would do well. A few days from now, the grand Auguste Rodin would walk through the door and sit facing slightly up, pointing his large temple, with its clump of bulging veins, toward the light. Beresford succeeded in capturing something frivolous and majestic in the French sculptor. The following year, he photographed a somewhat bored and melancholy young Winston Churchill. The year after that, Joseph Conrad sat looking into his lens, unable to altogether conceal his quiet, exile’s anxiety. Between 1902 and 1932, Beresford photographed some of the most noted artists, politicians, intellectuals and socialites of the time. Many of the negatives are now held at the National Portrait Gallery.

What Beresford couldn’t have known that day was that his twenty-year-old sitter, Sir Leslie Stephen’s fourth daughter, was destined to become a writer without whom the pantheon of literature would be incomplete. And certainly it couldn’t have occurred to her, least of all to her father, in the fifteen or twenty minutes it would have taken them to walk from Hyde Park Gate to Yeoman’s Row, that one of the photographs Beresford was to take that afternoon was going to become the most iconic likeness of the artist we would later come to know as Virginia Woolf.

In all the four portraits Beresford took, he had the author sitting and looking away from the camera. He was obviously inspired by the Pre-Raphaelites. Or perhaps, what with the strong and abundant hair tied loosely in a bun, and the jaw running in an uninterrupted arc from the careful chin to the over-attentive ear, it was his sitter’s profile that brought to mind those Victorian painters. It’s the first of these pictures—I suspect it was the first because it lacks the self-consciousness of the other three—that was to be the most successful. In it she is looking away more naturally than in the others, as if a private thought had caught her attention. There is determination in the neck. The open shell of the ear is unusually large, tensing the rim. It hints at the great danger of listening, as if acknowledging that ears cannot choose not to hear what is directed at them. More than most, she would have known the danger of that, the lasting stain of language. She seems to be concerned with this, trying to accept the vulnerability. Her cheek, occupying the central space in the photograph, seems full with utterance. Those shut lips are concealing an ocean of words. What Beresford managed to capture, and what eludes him in the following three portraits, is depth and its promise; an instinctive devotion to reality, to what Woolf was to later call “the white light of truth.”

One cannot help but read in the portrait signs of the conflicting forces the author was to contend with for the remainder of her life: the discrepancy between the reality of men and women; the need as an artist to be veiled yet available, attentive to her individual potential yet resistant to public prescriptions and constraints; and one’s exposure to history and madness. Seen from our time, the photograph is a classical representation of the artist at the dawn of the twentieth century—the century of two world wars—where death and horror threatened to obliterate art and poetry. Here is the fragile, androgynous figure of a great novelist silently and only obliquely aware of the arsenal of her gifts and the demands of her time. It is as if Beresford had shone a light into a psychological space rather than onto a body. His lens is looking down into the depth, from which a light bounces back. It brings to mind a sentence about Mrs. Ramsay, one of many extraordinary sentences in “To the Lighthouse”:

It could not last, she knew, but at the moment her eyes were so clear that they seemed to go round the table unveiling each of these people, and their thoughts and their feelings, without effort like a light stealing under water so that its ripples and the reeds in it and the minnows balancing themselves, and the sudden silent trout are all lit up hanging, trembling.

In “To the Lighthouse,” Woolf’s fifth novel, she mastered a sort of sentence that she had been edging toward, a sentence we can now call her own: a freely progressing, long, fractured series of observations and insights, unburdened and unhurried by the need to tell the “story,” yet moving with the unrelenting progression of a scalpel. It steals away, like “a light stealing under water,” revealing not merely information but the cadence and temper of inner lives, and how they resonate against the images and sensations of the physical world. It has a precise power that is disinterested in overpowering reality. The momentum sweeps you away till that last word, “trembling,” and the echo it sends back. That earlier “at the moment” hinges it to the subjective, freeing it from any claim of authority. Yet the result is superbly authoritative. The acoustic quality of Woolf’s prose in “To the Lighthouse” reverberates, and therefore her sentences are not easy to drop or leave behind. They mark indelibly.

The book tells of a family, very much like Woolf’s own, vacationing at their summer home by the sea in the Scottish Hebrides. Mr. Ramsay is a London professor, much admired; and Mrs. Ramsay is beautiful but no longer young. Along with their eight children and servants, the Ramsays are joined by a number of guests: friends and several young devotees of the professor. Among the guests is Lily Briscoe, a painter. She conceives of color as “the light of a butterfly’s wing lying upon the arches of a cathedral.” Trying to explain her painterly intentions to the widower and botanist William Bankes, she says, “A light here required a shadow there,” a statement that could apply to every human enterprise. It is echoed later, when Mrs. Ramsay notes, “Wherever they put the light (and James could not sleep without a light) there was always a shadow somewhere.” James is “her youngest, her cherished” six-year-old son. Reading to him, Mrs. Ramsay notices that “it was getting late. The light in the garden told her that; and the whitening of the flowers and something grey in the leaves conspired together, to rouse in her a feeling of anxiety.” Later, when Lily Briscoe suspects what Mrs. Ramsay was thinking—that Lily would marry Mr. Banks—the painter feels exposed and, observing the others, perceives that “for one moment, there was a sense of things having been blown apart, of space, of irresponsibility as the ball soared high, and they followed it and lost it and saw the one star and the draped branches. In the failing light they all looked sharp-edged and ethereal and divided by great distances.” Light is a reoccurring motif in the book. It flutters and is impermanent. Concealing and revealing. It is the unpredictable and forever changing temperament of the physical world. Light, in “To the Lighthouse,” is what history is to human life. Indeed, the entire novel is like a flash of lightening that momentarily floods the forest. Instead of disbanding the dark, it leaves an unforgettable recognition of it.

Several flashes preceded the lightening. Woolf’s first book, “The Voyage Out,” published in 1915, when the author was thirty-three, tells of the misunderstandings and mismatched yearnings of a group of Edwardians aboard a ship for South America. It has traces of what will come to interest Woolf in later books, such as the distance that exists between what is thought and what is spoken; the tragic lack of correspondence between intention and expression; and what these reveal about the nature of love. As we are told of Helen, one of the characters aboard the ship: “She tried to console herself with the reflection that one never knows how far other people feel the things they might be supposed to feel.” The consolation is that of truth. In the opening pages, there is a vivid description of the ship pulling away from the coast, dislodging itself from London through the River Thames till it leaks naked into the open sea. It is a fitting image of what Virginia Woolf helped do to the novel, stripping it from convention. One of the characteristics of modernism, in which she played a central role, is the detachment from the subject, the cleaving away from a sense of unitary existence. From this first book, you can see her interest in discontinuities and consciousness. Embedded in it is the melancholic acknowledgment of the impossibility of ever having a complete view. Like the fall of Adam and Eve, modernism is a loss of innocence. It doesn’t accept only that God’s view of things is unattainable; it doesn’t believe such a view exists. It refuses to ignore the rupture.

In 1919, four years after “The Voyage Out,” Woolf published her second novel, “Night and Day.” Again, Edwardian society, class, love, marriage, and the uncertainty of emotional intentions are among the themes developed further in this long novel, which, in length at least, contradicts its author’s later advice that “women’s books should be shorter, more concentrated, than those of men.” Modelled loosely on the author’s family and their circle, the novel tells of the intertwining loves and affections of four main characters: Katharine Hilbery, Mary Datchet, Ralph Denham, and William Rodney. It takes literature’s old interest in the misapprehensions and unrequited sentiments of lovers and turns them into a meditation on the question of whether it is ever possible to know anyone’s true feelings; whether love and marriage can be trusted to mean what we think they mean; and the curious discrepancies between the body and the heart. Although, like “The Voyage Out,” “Night and Day” remains, in its structure, its scenes and dialogues, a conventional narrative, reading it you get the sense of the modern novel jarring against its romantic antecedent. In this exchange between Katharine Hilbery and William Rodney, you can almost hear the author thinking about the subject:

“What is this romance?” she mused.

“Ah, that’s the question. I’ve never come across a definition that satisfied me, though there are some very good ones”—he glanced in the direction of his books.

“It’s not altogether knowing the other person, perhaps—it’s ignorance,” she hazarded.

“Some authorities say it’s a question of distance—romance in literature, that is—”

“Possibly, in the case of art. But in the case of people it may be—” she hesitated.

Katharine Hilbery never finished her sentence. It hangs suspended for eternity. Perhaps to hesitate is the most appropriate modern gesture. Perhaps, in the face of our inequality, in the face of our unknowability, and in the absence of God, everything is infused with doubt.

But here Virginia Woolf is at the border, yet to achieve the required transformation. Her first encounter with James Joyce’s “Ulysses,” which took place at the time of writing “Night and Day,” perturbed her. She reacted to the book even before she’d had a chance to read it. Watching her husband Leonard reading it, she noted in her diary: “[He] is already 30 pages deep. I look, and sip, and shudder.” This animalistic fear, which only a novelist knows, that sets in when sensing some other’s pen edging toward a glorious prey, is a sickness but also an augury. She admitted that she was “bewildered and befogged” by Joyce, who was “about a fortnight younger than I am.” (In fact, he was only a week younger.) She noted that her friend T. S. Eliot, the other protagonist in the modernist revolution, “was for the first time in my knowledge, rapt, enthusiastic,” on reading “Ulysses.” Later, she tried in her diary to protect herself. Turning to a common English reflex, snobbery, she pretended to have arrived at a conclusion about the Irishman’s magnum opus: “I bought the blue paper book, & read it here one summer I think with spasms of wonder, of discovery, & then again with long lapses of intense boredom.” “Genius it has I think; but of the inferior water… . It is underbred, not only in the obvious sense, but in the literary sense.”

But it was “Ulysses,” and the bewilderment caused by “Ulysses,” a novel that restricts itself to a day in the lives of two characters, that showed Woolf a new path. Whatever she professed to think of it, everything she was to write from then on owes if not debts of influence then debts of provocation to James Joyce. It was engaging with his work that helped her write, in the essay “Modern Fiction,” what is possibly one of the most lucid and passionate advocacies for fiction:

If a writer were a free man and not a slave, if he could write what he chose, not what he must, if he could base his work upon his own feeling and not upon convention, there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the accepted style, and perhaps not a single button sewn on as the Bond Street tailors would have it. Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. Is it not the task of the novelist to convey this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit, whatever aberration or complexity it may display, with as little mixture of the alien and external as possible? We are not pleading merely for courage and sincerity; we are suggesting that the proper stuff of fiction is a little other than custom would have us believe it.

So one does not need the epic. You can do as much, perhaps more, with as little as two characters and a day. And you no longer cast your net in order to catch the whole sea. Instead, you angle for the one perfect fish.

The industrious intellect and imagination of a novelist might at times be superficially motivated by a fervor for recognition, or the desire to compete with an admired contemporary, but few works of any worth were sustained by vanity alone. What is required is the persistent need to envisage the world anew, to remake the self, or reorientate her, like a sitter adjusting her posture in order to gain a different view. Once ego’s noise subsides, the old obsessions return. One of the most persistent of these was the political and private life of women. She revealed with savage accuracy the patronizing tactics of men. The effect is not only the result of her talent for social satire—shown in abundance in her earlier fiction—but also of the rebellious instinct of a curious and unsentimental consciousness trapped inside the confines of feminine domesticity. How would she have written if she were not a member of the sex, as she tells us in “A Room of One’s Own,” that had to sit “indoors all these millions of years”? In the same essay, Woolf offers her recommendations for what a woman writer needs: “Five hundred a year and a room with a lock on the door.” A poignant and pragmatic conclusion, but a domestic one, a private remedy to a public problem.

In the end, what transformed the place of women in Britain was not “five hundred a year and a room with a lock on the door” but the most cataclysmic event of the time, the First World War. The war exposed the extent and danger of social inequalities. Forty per cent of the men who volunteered for military service were not physically fit to serve. The dire state of the health of the nation was revealed, and suddenly the collective well-being of society began to gain precedence over individual liberty. It paved the way toward a nationalized health service. And the men who went to fight left behind their jobs. No less than a third of the male workforce joined the Army. Women filled the gap. As the suffragette Ray Strachey, Woolf’s sister-in-law, put it: “Middle-aged women who had been quiet mothers of families were suddenly transformed into efficient plumbers, chimney sweeps, or grave diggers; flighty and giggling young girls turned into house-painters and electricians; ladies whose lives had been spent in the hunting-field turned into canal boatmen and ploughmen.” Nearly a million of them went into engineering. After the war, it became no longer acceptable to have half of the population indoors. It was women’s extraordinary contribution to the war that granted them the vote. When the men returned, male resentment in the workplace grew. Feminism became necessary to secure and advance the gains made by women. Virginia Woolf was one of its most eloquent exponents. In fact, “A Room of One’s Own,” what is still today a necessary and powerful argument for women’s rights, would not have been possible were it not for the historical transformations the war forced through. Her referring to the war as a “preposterous masculine fiction” was a tactic to elevate and distinguish feminine reason. The war killed nine hundred and fifty thousand men from Britain and the Empire and left 1.5 million wounded. The economic and military might of the British Empire was no longer supreme.

Yet the war offered Woolf the novelist an opportunity to turn the restrictions of her gender to an unexpected advantage. She did not have the option to write directly about the war: the story of its conflicts and the drama of its battles. Instead, in her next novel,” Jacob’s Room,” she becomes a miniaturist: interested in the tremors of the war on the intimate lives of men and women. Gearing up for the challenge, she wrote in her diary, “I figure the approach will be entirely different this time: No scaffolding; scarcely a brick to be seen; all crepuscular, but the heart, the passion, the humour, everything as bright as fire in the mist.” The word “crepuscular” brings to mind a line from Samuel Beckett, when Pozzo tells Vladimir, in “Waiting for Godot,” “But I see what it is, you are not from these parts, you don’t know what our twilights can do.” “Jacob’s Room” inhabits the twilight. It tells the early life of Jacob Flanders through the women who knew him. He later dies in the war, but we don’t follow him there. It’s Woolf’s first modernist novel, a Joycean experiment in how much one can exclude.

When your power is limited, when you cannot vote, when your opinions and contributions are dismissed solely because of your gender, then the disgrace of witnessing your own people butcher and be butchered must not only cause you to revisit everything you assumed about human nature but also asks you to view it from the distance of the outsider. The war, like a flame eating moths, annihilated those presumptions. It delivered Woolf, perhaps more vividly and abruptly than her male contemporaries, to the hard face of the truth, of what we are capable of doing. It is hard not to in part attribute her sobriety and keenness of vision to her marginal status as a woman. Her prose becomes more sharply invested with the visual and material world. It fills up with shifting and precise, unfixed and yet vivid resonances. Her writing comes to have the double effect of heightening our sense of reality and making that reality seem questionable or impermanent. This is the departure that “Jacob’s Room” achieves. It does not do away entirely, as was Woolf’s intention, with conventional narrative structure—scenes are set with relatively familiar descriptive modes of places, objects, how people are seated—but her doubts mature into a sort of existential uncertainty. The scalpel grows sharper.

This method of hinting obliquely and only through suggestion at horror has influenced the course of the novel. The profound works of W. G. Sebald, for example, a German writer burdened with the question of how to address the ruination of the Second World War, is a literary event made in some way possible by Virginia Woolf. She helped show him how direct documentation is not necessarily the best course to follow. In the last interview he gave before his untimely death, in 2001, Sebald credited the insight to reading Virginia Woolf, and particularly her essay “The Death of the Moth,”

the wonderful example of her description of a moth coming to its end on a windowpane somewhere in Sussex, and this is a passage of some two pages only, I think. And it’s written somewhere, chronologically speaking, between the battlefields of the Somme and the concentration camps erected by my compatriots. There is no reference made to the battlefields of the Somme in this passage, but one knows as a reader of Virginia Woolf that she was greatly perturbed by the First World War, by its aftermath, by the damage it did to people’s souls—the souls of those who got away and, naturally, of those who perished. I think that a subject which at first glance seems quite far removed from the undeclared concern of a book can encapsulate that concern.

Sebald was an inheritor of a dark history, interested in the shame of the progeny. Like the South African author J. M. Coetzee, his contemporary, Sebald was concerned with how to convey not savagery and guilt but their inheritance. Woolf, excluded from the vote and therefore from politics and the decisions that lead countries to war and peace, shared with them the condition of being implicated in the actions of others. It seems every great novelist is conscious of being both implicated in and subject to history. The war helped Woolf understand this. Still, she was heavily criticized for what was perceived as an evasion. She was subjected to passionate calls by noted figures, such as her esteemed friend Katherine Mansfield, to write directly about the war. She kept her poise. Hers is a singular example of literary independence. And now we can see that her decision of expressing the tremors of the masculine epic of war through domestic life was poignantly subversive, true, and truly free.

As a sentence in “Jacob’s Room” puts it, “There is something absolute in us which despises qualification.”

There was a relationship between Woolf’s mental illness and her writing. Bouts of mental crises hit her between novels. The edges of sanity revealed what seemed to her to be the true workings of the mind. With each book she became more obsessed with language and how when we speak we often fall short of or else exceed what we intended to express. Talking as a betrayal: saying too much, or not enough. The birth of psychoanalysis at the time added to this. Woolf knew of the writings of Sigmund Freud. Her friend Lytton Strachey’s brother, James Strachey, was the Austrian’s translator. To Woolf and her Bloomsbury friends, psychoanalysis must have confirmed what they already suspected, that social norms and accepted forms of behavior were often there to veil the gulf that exists between what is professed and the truth. Perhaps it confirmed Woolf’s instinct, one that persisted from the start, and to which she often attributed her estrangement from the world, that all is not what appears. Woolf was aware of Freud’s proposition that close observation of uncensored thought and speech, the ways in which we reveal and interrupt ourselves, can cause deeply buried truths to arise. She was aware of the danger. She might have agreed with Karoline von Günderrode who, in Christa Wolf’s novel “No Place on Earth,” scans the large room where a party is gathered and thinks, “How fortunate that our thoughts do not dance in visible letters above our heads. If they did, any contact between human beings, even a harmless social gathering such as this, could easily become a convocation of murderers.” But Woolf cannot be reduced to a psychoanalytical novelist. She sort of discards Freud or, as the expression goes, she takes him in her stride. In this way, she is truer to our time where, if we look at Freud at all, then it is perhaps with gratitude but also with that amused affection one pays an eccentric uncle. Nonetheless, Uncle Freud nudged her along a little.

Three years after “Jacob’s Room,” in 1925, when Virginia Woolf was forty-three, she resurrected Clarissa Dalloway, a character from “The Voyage Out,” and placed her centre stage. It was to be her best novel yet. Instead of the hills where the grass softens the heavens and in the late evening “the flamingo hours fluttered softly through the sky,” in “Mrs. Dalloway” the most passionately described landscape is that of the city. One of the novel’s principle characters is the noisy, rumbling, chaotic, and democratic London. As in ancient Greek drama, and Joyce’s “Ulysses,” the novel takes place in a single day. There’s an inward drive to the narrative. The exceptional sensitivity toward the smallest turns of mind and the piercing perceptions of the most agile twists in moods are illuminated. What takes our breath away in literature is not the new but the encounter with what has been silently known. “Mrs. Dalloway” is extraordinary, but it is not Woolf’s finest novel.

She was right in that “books continue each other, in spite of our habit of judging them separately”; we ought to take the writer in her totality. But in my mind “To the Lighthouse” is the culmination of everything Woolf has been working toward. She spoke about the interdependence of words, how they color and infect one another, that there is no pure meaning, that each word is nudged and changed by those strung to it. Like the words we have invented, we, too, cannot exist outside history. But what also appears here is a new silence. All great writing is infected with silence, but it is very rare indeed to observe a master wielding that vacuum blankness of the unsaid with such elegant precision. Part of the effect is that you feel you are inside a mind, inhabiting another’s interiority. But there also is the register of history, in the vast expanse of the sea welded in a continuous fabric to the sky. Everything out there is unknown, and the lighthouse has no hope to illuminate where we are heading. All it does is call attention to itself and the rock it stands on. It is a perpetual circular warning, a white scream. We are trapped in history, poised between two world wars.

Novelists often find themselves or themselves create situations in which they are obliged to speak about one of their books, a book they are no longer writing. A process of justification and rationalization and remembering ensues. More often than not, this ends up with over-defended stories that attempt to explain motives and intentions that are now long in the past, and therefore might be accurately remembered but are, more often than not, invented under obligation to explain oneself or else to retrospectively attempt to reenter that pure space where one was a servant of and a contributor to, with all one has got, the mechanism of a work of fiction. It is very rare to hear a novelist speak accurately about writing a novel because it is extremely difficult to explain.

Virginia Woolf was a rare example. She wrote well about her writing. She described working on “To the Lighthouse” as a process “without any premeditation.” And I believe her. What she arrived at here was not the outcome of calculated stylistic intent but, rather, the result of a long process of observation and then surrender and fidelity to the outcomes. History—the horrific events of a war that ravished the world with monstrous appetite, and the great social changes that followed—might have accelerated her progress in the form. But mostly it was the unique talent and keenness of vision that made her write some of the most luminous fiction of the twentieth century.

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“on being ill” anthology out oct. 25.

Monday 18 October 2021 by Paula Maggio

Even in the midst of the current pandemic , illness remains an unpopular theme in literature. But in her essay, On Being Ill Virginia Woolf asks whether illness should not receive more literary attention, taking its place alongside the recurring themes of “love, battle and jealousy.” According to the publishers, this book, On Being Ill , does exactly that.

Thinking about illness

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.

Book launch Nov. 5, in person and live online

The book launch of this new edition will take place Nov. 5 at 7 p.m. GMT at Perdu Literary Foundation in Amsterdam and will be also be transmitted live online. The event will mainly be in English.

Elte Rauch from Uitgeverij HetMoet will talk about how the book came into being and will introduce the panel members and writers. There will be readings and contributions from Mieke van Zonneveld, Deryn Rees-Jones, Lucia Osborne-Crowely, Nadia de Vries and Jameisha Prescod. Marielle O’Neill from the Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain will speak about Woolf’s essay. The evening will be accompanied by music.

Tickets are €7.50. For more information email Elte Raunch: [email protected]

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Posted in books , events , On Being Ill , pandemic | Tagged anthology , On Being Ill , pandemic | 2 Comments

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[…] Hetmoet published the first Dutch translation of On Being Ill in 2021. […]

[…] Ane used her printing press to print one sentence on one sheet of paper every day from “On Being Ill,“ Woolf’s 1930 […]

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A Lexicon for the Sick Room: Virginia Woolf's Narrative Medicine

• PMID: 31402341
• DOI: 10.1353/lm.2019.0000

In her 1926 essay On Being Ill, Virginia Woolf explores the "poverty of the language" in matters of illness and uncovers a lexical rift between patients and caregivers-one that continues to trouble contemporary medical culture. Even as her essay exposes and deplores the sick room's scant lexicon, Woolf herself worked to address these shortcomings throughout her career, steadily crafting a wider and more capacious vocabulary for illness. Such a language, she felt, could heighten the patient's ability to articulate the sensory nuances of illness and, in so doing, foster empathy for the ill. In arguing for the patient's expressive autonomy and advancing new models of humane caregiving, Woolf's writings and nascent lexicography anticipate the rise of narrative medicine in the twenty-first century.

• Cost of Illness*
• Medicine in Literature*
• Narrative Medicine*

Real women are still missing from the movies — the Bechdel Test proves it

‘i only go to a movie if it satisfies three basic requirements,’ one woman tells another in alison bechdel’s 1985 comic strip. in the wake of ‘barbie,’ the bechdel test has hit the mainstream..

The next time you watch a movie, try asking yourself these three questions: Does it feature at least two women? Who talk to each other? About something other than a man?

That simple metric, which is known as the Bechdel Test and first surfaced nearly 40 years ago, reveals a lot about Hollywood’s representation of women onscreen. And in the hot-pink wake of “Barbie,” it’s seeing a resurgence.

On International Women’s Day, Alamo Drafthouse Seaport joined the chain’s other cinemas across the country in handing out limited-edition Bechdel Test scorecards to moviegoers, who were invited to grade their favorite film — pass or fail. Meanwhile, subscribers to Max, the streaming home of HBO, could choose from a menu of movies called “Acing the Bechdel Test” and featuring releases like “Legally Blonde,” “The Bling Ring,” “Evil Dead Rise,” and “My Neighbor Totoro.”

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No one is more amazed by the test’s endurance than its accidental creator, cartoonist Alison Bechdel , who introduced the concept in a 1985 episode of her comic strip “Dykes to Watch Out For.” In that episode, “The Rule,” two women pass by a movie theater advertising testosterone-fueled fare. “I only go to a movie if it satisfies three basic requirements,” one friend tells the other, before laying out her formula.

Bechdel, who was living in New York City at the time, says she “ripped off” the concept from her friend Liz Wallace, who explained it one day while they were changing after karate class. “I had a comic strip due, like, the next day, and I remembered it,” Bechdel said, speaking from her Vermont studio by Zoom. “It was very easy to remember.”

It was also “sort of a joke,” she said, noting her partner doesn’t like it when she says that. “It’s very serious stuff, but I think maybe the reason it did get a cultural purchase is because it comes at it from this humorous angle — and that’s just more palatable for people.”

Bechdel has long been ambivalent about the Bechdel Test (also known as the Bechdel-Wallace Test), which got “a second life on the internet when film students started talking about it” in the 2000s, as she explained on her website . The test has spawned a user-edited database of 10,000-plus movies as well as countless conversations, variants, memes. It even has its own Merriam-Webster dictionary definition .

On Oscars night March 10, the writer and feminist Rebecca Solnit tweeted that Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” — which swept the awards with seven wins — not only “nuked” the Bechdel Test but “disappeared the great physicist Lise Meitner, she who first comprehended that atoms could be and had been split.”

Other frequently cited Bechdel Test fails: “ Casablanca ,” “ Star Wars ,” “ Back to the Future ,” “ Reservoir Dogs ,” “Avatar,” “The Social Network,” “ The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo ,” “ The Avengers ,” “ The Grand Budapest Hotel ,” and the entire “ Lord of the Rings” trilogy .

Famous passes : “Alien,” “Thelma & Louise,” “Frozen,” and “Hidden Figures.” Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie” not only aced the Bechdel Test, it flipped the script on stereotypical gender roles and subverted the male gaze: “Barbie has a great day every day, but Ken only has a great day if Barbie looks at him,” goes Helen Mirren’s narration.

Other movies expose the test’s limits (see sidebar). Bechdel is the first to admit many movies could “superficially pass the Bechdel Test” without “creating three-dimensional female characters or giving them agency.” Conversely, a film like Sarah Polley’s “Women Talking” nearly tanks : Yes, a community of women and girls are talking to each other, about the men they’re trying to escape.

In other words, don’t take the test too literally — but don’t tear up that mental scorecard, either. According to the University of Southern California Annenberg Inclusion Initiative’s recent annual report , only 30 of the 100 highest-grossing movies last year featured a girl or woman in a leading or co-leading role, marking a sharp drop from 2022 (with 44 films). Even factoring in the 2023 Hollywood strikes, “ this is an industry failure ,” says the report’s coauthor Stacy L. Smith, rewinding women’s representation in film back to 2010 levels.

Once a wrinkle appears on a woman’s face, her chances sink. Not counting ensemble films like “80 for Brady” and “Book Club: The Next Chapter,” only three top-grossing movies last year featured a woman age 45 or older as a lead or co-lead, while 10 times as many (32) films featured a man in the same age bracket (overwhelmingly, they were white men — hello, Bradley Cooper, Cillian Murphy, Harrison Ford, Tom Cruise). Salma Hayek was the lone woman of color over 45 to lead or co-lead a movie — about a male stripper — “Magic Mike’s Last Dance.”

The Bechdel Test continues to be “a very useful tool to highlight the poor representation of female characters,” said Martha M. Lauzen, founder and executive director of the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film at San Diego State University.

As for behind-the-scenes roles, the picture isn’t much better. Despite topping the 2023 box office at $1.4 billion globally, Lauzen says in her annual “Celluloid Ceiling” report , Gerwig’s success with “Barbie” was “the ultimate illusion,” considering how dramatically underrepresented women are as directors, and in other key positions. Across the 250 highest-grossing movies of last year, women accounted for only 16 percent of directors , 17 percent of writers, 21 percent of editors, and 7 percent of cinematographers. But when there was at least one female director on a movie, “substantially more women” were hired for those jobs.

“There’s an idea that women are afraid of other women, and I think that’s because so many times we’ve been told there’s only room for one of us at the table,” said Gillian Robespierre, who frequently collaborates with Milton’s Jenny Slate (Robespierre directed Slate in “Obvious Child,” “Landline,” and her new comedy special, “ Seasoned Professional ”). “At least in my circle of filmmaker friends, we do actually help each other” and share notes about everything from scripts and actors to agents and “money — how much you make, how much you ask for.”

She’s currently adapting Laura Zigman’s novel “ Separation Anxiety ,” about a 50-year-old Cambridge mother and wife whose life is falling apart — maybe a tough pitch, but so was “Obvious Child,” Robespierre’s “romantic comedy” about abortion. “The thing is, I did not ask for permission to make that film,” she said. “I didn’t pitch that film. I didn’t go and do the water-bottle tour — because no one would serve me water.” Robespierre and her producing and writing partner, Elisabeth Holm, raised the money to finance it on their own.

Lauzen started collecting data on women’s underrepresentation and employment in film and television in the late 1990s . Once in a while, an article would come out saying “things had never been better for women in Hollywood,” she recalled. But she suspected the data would tell a different story — and it did. What she didn’t realize was “how difficult it would be to create change.”

“I haven’t thought about the Bechdel Test in a really long time,” says director Angela Robinson, whose feature “ Professor Marston and the Wonder Women ,” set at Harvard, also aces the test. “It was everywhere, and then it kind of went away.”

But the #MeToo movement, which exposed sexual abuse and harassment in Hollywood, also made sexism mainstream news.

“Over the last five years, there was a big wave about inclusion, and female filmmakers, and looking at parity,” Robinson said. “I often call these things ‘punching the blob’ . . . you punch and you punch — and you see it moving, but then it slowly just re-forms.”

“Being a woman of color, you get a very earnest ‘we’re interested in your vision and your voice’” message, she said of the path to Hollywood. But the reality of Hollywood is that “it’s business,” and “if you’re there, taking the job, then that means there’s probably a white dude who doesn’t get the job … and people aren’t necessarily going to be happy about that.”

And not everyone wants to see traditional roles challenged. Boston native Frankie Shaw created the semi-autobiographical Showtime series “SMILF,” in which she played a struggling single mom in Southie. “It was a rallying cry for working-class mothers,” she said, “but some people were so pissed at seeing how imperfect she was.”

The Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media provides a script-analysis system, Spellcheck for Bias , which uses a text-analysis tool and social-science research to identify biases and stereotypes as well as opportunities in six areas (gender, race, LGBTQIA+ identity, disability, age, and body type).

As a result of such tools, says Madeline Di Nonno, the institute’s CEO, major industry partners have changed scripts to better reflect the world in which we live. “It’s easier to fix things on the front end than on the back end,” she said.

Long before Bechdel’s test or the bias spellcheck, someone else noted the characters who got to speak and have full lives in works of fiction — and those who didn’t.

Her name? Virginia Woolf.

In her 1929 essay, “A Room of One’s Own,” Woolf wrote that women were rarely represented as friends. Instead, “almost without exception” they were “shown in their relation to men.”

Bechdel now believes Wallace, the friend she ripped off, ripped off the concept from Woolf . Four decades later, the concept continues to inspire riffs, copycats, variants, and spoofs — like the Sexy Lamp Test . “If you can remove a female character from your plot and replace her with a sexy lamp and your story still works,” explains writer Kelly Sue DeConnick, “you’re a hack.”

Bechdel is a fan of a recently created Bechdel-like test for climate change , which asks whether a film acknowledges that climate change exists, and whether any characters know it.

“It’s been sort of amusing to me,” the cartoonist said, “just to see how culture happens — to see how this old piece of lesbian, feminist, I-don’t-know-what-you-would-even-call-it . . . how that, over decades, got morphed into something really substantive and informative that people are talking about.

That’s really cool.”

Brooke Hauser can be reached at [email protected] . Follow her @brookehauser .

Guest essay: Why the National Institutes of Health is important to W.Va.

By shelley moore capito.

Ten years ago, many West Virginians had to leave the state to get treatment for certain diseases, illnesses or other medical issues. That is not the case today thanks in part to research and advancements supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

If you are not familiar with NIH and the work it is supporting right here in West Virginia, the NIH is the largest biomedical research agency in the world, and it is funded by the federal government, with the primary mission of improving health and bringing hope to patients and families affected by disease. In fact, I have heard NIH described as the beacon for medical research in our nation.

The NIH is also a driver of economic growth, supporting jobs and the purchase of goods and materials, funding more than $92.89 billion in economic activity last year — or $2.46 of economic activity for every $1 of research funding, according to the United for Medical Research 2024 Update, “NIH’s Role in Sustaining the U.S. Economy, FY2023.”

I serve as the Ranking Member of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, Education and Related Agencies (Labor-HHS), which oversees funding for NIH. In that role, I’ve had the chance to work very closely with them over the years and bring various leaders from the agency to see the good work happening in West Virginia, as well as the challenges we face.

I invited NIH Director Dr. Monica Bertagnolli, M.D., to West Virginia for this reason. Together, we made a number of visits at WVU Health Sciences and witnessed proudly the innovative research, talented researchers and advancements happening right here in West Virginia. Much of this was made possible by the partnership that has been fostered with NIH over the years. From cancer detection and treatment, to the treatment of Parkinson’s disease and substance use disorder, universities throughout West Virginia — particularly WVU — are making significant contributions to biomedical research.

Seeing first-hand the initiatives being worked on in West Virginia — such as West Virginia Clinical and Translational Science Institute’s (WVCTSI) new mobile unit, which will allow individuals all over the state to participate in clinical trials for new treatments — showed the true promise of what continued investment in the state’s biomedical research programs can bring.

While the impact of NIH funding is important to every state, it is especially important in rural states like West Virginia, where the population and economy is smaller and there are fewer organizations conducting biomedical research. Congress and NIH understand this and also realize the promise that institutions in these states can play in the research, prevention and treatment of disease.

In 1993, Congress created the NIH Institutional Development Award (IDeA) program to provide research institute funding to states that historically received little federal research and development funding. As a result of this and other funding from NIH, institutions big and small across West Virginia have received resources and have been able to move us as a state and nation forward to new treatments and cures for diseases.

At West Virginia University, this program has been instrumental in developing robust and world-class research in neuroscience, cancer, stroke and vision science. From 2016 to 2022, West Virginia received a total of $267 million in NIH research awards, which resulted in $549 million in new economic activity and over 3,660 jobs. This funding over the years has enabled institutions in West Virginia, like WVU, to build their capacity and has led to medical breakthroughs and improvements.

While these numbers are important and impressive, what NIH means to West Virginia goes far beyond economics. Each of these dollars are going towards making individuals and families across the state healthier. At institutions across West Virginia, including WVU, progress across a variety of research fields is being made – whether it be cancer, stroke, Alzheimer’s or other diseases and conditions that are far too prevalent in our state and nation.

Dr. Bertagnolli understands this. The partnership we have built — with not just each other, but with NIH as a whole throughout my time in the U.S. Senate — has and will continue to lead to important research advancements and medical breakthroughs that can serve as a model for research happening nationwide.

U.S. Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.) is the Ranking Member of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, Education and Related Agencies (Labor-HHS). Capito also serves as the vice chairman of the Senate Republican Conference, the fifth ranking Republican in the U.S. Senate.

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Rebecca Hall Redefines Stardom

How does an actor carve out a career they want? From indies like “Christine” to blockbusters such as the “Godzilla vs. Kong” movies, Ms. Hall may have cracked the code.

“I wanted to be a movie star as much as I wanted to be an artist,” the actor Rebecca Hall said. Credit... Josefina Santos for The New York Times

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By Thessaly La Force

• March 28, 2024

Rebecca Hall stood in front of an easel, her face contemplative. She moved a paintbrush gently on a palette, then applied the paint to the canvas. This was in her studio, a converted barn next door to where Ms. Hall lives in upstate New York with her husband, the actor Morgan Spector, and their 5-year-old daughter, Ida.

When she’s not acting, Ms. Hall paints as a way of channeling her creativity. Her father, Sir Peter Hall — who founded the Royal Shakespeare Company — once warned her about dividing her talents. “He said that it’s very hard to do more than one thing, which really haunted me for a really long time,” Ms. Hall said. “Increasingly, though, I refuse to stay in one lane.”

This, in many ways, is Ms. Hall in a nutshell: unwilling to be boxed in, an artist at heart. At 41, Ms. Hall is considered by some to be one of her generation’s most talented actresses. She possesses an unnerving maturity and an unparalleled capacity for versatility. She can so thoroughly embody a character that, as the New York Times film critic Manohla Dargis once wrote, “she becomes your way into the movie as well as the reason you keep watching.” But her career choices reveal a circuitous route toward stardom, a push and pull between projects with famous directors and actors and those on a much smaller scale, including independent films and stage productions.

Most recently, she appears in this month’s “Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire,” a big-budget monster film. In it, she plays Dr. Ilene Andrews, an anthropological linguist, who serves as a maternal Jane Goodall-type figure for Kong. It’s the type of heavily marketed blockbuster that a younger Rebecca Hall might have objected to altogether. So why did she choose to do it?

“The cynical answer is you don’t get to be an artist in this day and age without doing some of those,” she replied. “But I’m also a straight-up lover of cinema, and that involves all kinds of cinema. I don’t have the mentality of, ‘Oh, I’ve got to do one for them, and then I can do one for me.’ There’s also a huge amount of fun in it, and I’m proud of the end result.”

Ms. Hall shared a story about starting out in Hollywood. She had just signed with Creative Artists Agency and was visiting Los Angeles for the first time. “I was being sent around to auditions, and I sensed a little bit of a pattern,” she said. “I wasn’t anywhere near getting any of these jobs. But I wrote a letter to my agent at the time saying, ‘I think of myself as a different kind of actor. I want to do interesting independent films. Please stop putting me up for these blockbusters. I’m not a conventional movie star, and how dare you.’”

Ms. Hall paused. “I mean, I was probably nicer than that. I’m more polite. But the gist of it was: ‘I wish for you to conceive of me as something other than what you’re conceiving me.’”

The story made Ms. Hall cringe now. “As cool and righteous as it sounds, I think it was an error,” she said. “The more of those big jobs that I would’ve done in my 20s, the more access I would’ve had to other work. It was also incredibly arrogant to assume that all those films were unworthy. Of course, I wanted to be in those films, too. I didn’t know what I was talking about.”

“I don’t think either of us ever had ‘movie star’ set in our sights,” said Dan Stevens, her co-star in “Godzilla x Kong,” who met Ms. Hall as students in Cambridge when they were both cast in a stage production of “Macbeth.” “Rebecca always had ‘artist’ written all over her.”

Ms. Hall’s Hollywood star turn came in 2008, as the conservative brunette to Scarlett Johansson’s more impulsive blonde in Woody Allen’s “Vicky Cristina Barcelona,” a role for which she was nominated for a Golden Globe. Before that, she had apprenticed under her father and, notably, made her television debut at the age of 10 in “The Camomile Lawn.” Sir Peter would later cast her at 21 as Rosalind in an acclaimed production of “As You Like It.” She has gone on to play a wide variety of characters, including Ben Affleck’s virtuous love interest in “The Town” and a ditsy Las Vegas dancer in Stephen Frears’s “Lay the Favorite.” In 2016, she received wide acclaim for “Christine,” a film based on a true story about a television reporter who took her own life on camera in 1974, directed by Antonio Campos.

“Rebecca loves playing women on the verge of a breakdown,” said Mr. Campos. “She likes playing complicated, hard roles.”

He added: “It’s funny, she’s either doing a romantic comedy, or she’s doing the most complicated, tricky, difficult, unhinged performance.”

Overall, her body of work has revealed a curious eclecticism, one that is best explained, Ms. Hall said, more by her drive to try something new as an actor than by an interest in building a strategic career, though she acknowledged the former was a “luxury not always guaranteed.”

Hollywood may not be able to categorize Ms. Hall, but the fashion world has happily embraced her many variations. Ms. Hall and Mr. Spector frequently attend fashion shows, most recently as the guests of Thom Browne, Gabriela Hearst and Batsheva Hay. “Someone with that caliber of intelligence and curiosity, it’s normal that she will articulate herself in different mediums so she can sense and understand the world,” said Ms. Hearst.

“She’s always been interested in great work,” said the actor Khalid Abdalla, who also attended Cambridge with Ms. Hall and directed her in a production of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” at that time, which won the hard-earned praise of her father. “Not interested in stardom, not interested in celebrity for celebrity’s sake, but how you negotiate that path, particularly as a woman. And particularly as a woman in a pre-Me-Too era in your 20s,” Mr. Abdalla added.

But the Hollywood that Ms. Hall grew up admiring had changed. It isn’t as easy to build a career doing indies. Ms. Hall acknowledged that the Gen X attitude against selling out no longer applied. If anything, actors today reverse-engineer their artistic bona fides (think: Robert Pattinson), first achieving mega-fame with a franchise, then leveraging that celebrity to make what they want.

Still, she has no regrets. “You should ask her: ‘What are the projects you haven’t done?’” Mr. Campos said. “There are films where I went, ‘Oh my God, you didn’t do that! Why didn’t you do that?’ But I think she’s very content with how things are going. She does what she wants to do.”

A few weeks later, I asked Ms. Hall about this. Could she share some of the more iconic roles she has turned down? “Oh, I’ve got some good ones,” she said, chuckling. She appeared to run through a list in her head. She stopped herself. “Oh no, I can’t, I can’t. I don’t want to get into it. It opens too many cans of worms. I think I’ll do it when I’m much older, then I’ll spill everything.”

‘Acting comes easy to me’

In the last few months, Ms. Hall has been quietly sharing her paintings on social media. She recently began to sell them to interested people in her direct messages. This April, a number of her paintings — studies of various audiences — will be on view at Alchemy Gallery in New York City, in dialogue with the work of her friend, Rob Roth, an actor, artist and creative director of the band Blondie. “I asked her, ‘Well, why audiences?’” explained Roth. “And Rebecca said, ‘Well, they’ve been staring at me for so long, I figured I should look at them.’”

Three years ago, Ms. Hall made her directorial debut with her adaptation of Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel, “Passing.” The project was 15 years in the making. Ms. Hall had originally read the book in response to the fact that her maternal grandfather — a Black hotel doorman from Detroit — passed as white after marrying a woman of Dutch descent. Ms. Hall’s mother, the acclaimed opera singer Maria Ewing, passed as white as well. The film offered a sense of closure for Ms. Ewing, who died in 2022. “She reached some real peace about her racial identity towards the end, which I never thought would happen,” said Ms. Hall.

She is now at work on a new script for a film she wants to direct, one that is loosely inspired by her relationship with her mother. For all of her mother’s life, Ms. Hall had to manage her expectations around her own celebrity: Ms. Ewing had always encouraged her to be a star, but she had to be careful never to eclipse her mother, she said.

“There’s no easy way of saying this: My mother had a lot of profound mental health complications. And I was a caretaker for her entire life, in one way or another. So it was very hard for me. I was always thinking about her. It was impossible to navigate, because I was always doing something wrong.”

Ms. Hall knows it will take time to produce such a personal film. After “Passing,” Ms. Hall found, to her surprise, that she wanted to return to her acting career more urgently than ever.

“I don’t say this lightly or flippantly, but acting comes easy to me,” she said. “And the ease with which I often find acting can lead to a kind of disrespect for it in a weird way.”

In 2022, she chose to star in the thriller “Resurrection,” where, as a single mother terrorized by a man from her past, she delivered an eight-minute monologue that the Vulture film critic Bilge Ebiri wrote “is so riveting, so mystifying and terrifying that you shouldn’t be surprised if it shows up in every acting class sometime in the near future.”

Ms. Hall had wanted a real challenge. “Storytelling has been around forever, so I came out of it being like, ‘Oh, acting is really one of the noblest professions.’ It reinvigorated something in me.”

Ms. Hall is appearing next in Janicza Bravo’s “The Listeners,” a BBC adaptation of the 2021 novel by Jordan Tannahill about a woman who can hear a sound that no one else can. She also has a role in James L. Brooks’s upcoming comedy “Ella McCay,” with Ayo Edebiri and Jamie Lee Curtis, about a young politician who steps into the role of her mentor. It began filming last month.

“I felt some kind of tether to her,” said Ms. Bravo about their time filming “The Listeners.” “There are these people you fall in love with on the screen, and you have a false idea of what they are going to be like. She was better than the thing I had imagined.”

Ms. Hall has been married to Mr. Spector, 43, since 2015. The couple first met the year before, while both in the Broadway revival of Sophie Treadwell’s “Machinal” and have worked together many times since. Their wedding was a spontaneous and improvised affair — something only two actors would have had. They rented a barn for a weekend and asked friends to perform a ritual or ceremony with them. “We had a theme, which was ‘bring your own wedding,’” Ms. Hall said.

She said she hadn’t expected to want marriage, or a family, but that changed with Mr. Spector. (She had her own tabloid moment in 2010 when it was rumored she was the cause for the split between the director Sam Mendes and Kate Winslet. Mr. Mendes and Ms. Hall dated from 2011 to 2013.) “Marriage felt to me like a Kierkegaardian ‘leap of faith,’” said Ms. Hall. “I believe that the whole idea of it is logically impossible, so deciding to do it anyway is a pure act of hope.”

While the afternoon light was fading, Ms. Hall finished her painting. Or it was finished enough. Ms. Hall likes the work of Alex Katz, and she has a similar fondness for flat lines and bright colors. In the next few weeks, Ms. Hall would embark on the press tour for “Godzilla x Kong.”

She talked about how much she loves her life upstate, with its deliberate sense of isolation. Both are at the heart of the conflicting impulses that drive her as an actor: “I wanted to be a movie star as much as I wanted to be an artist,” she explained. “I was always dancing towards a desire to be an iconically famous amazing movie star, and also, ‘Oh, no, certainly not. I must hide immediately.’ I was always doing that dance, and I still am, and I probably will forever. That’s just my truth.”

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