Being Ill

In the essay «Being Ill» (1926), Virginia Woolf raises the question: why are there scandalously few texts devoted to illness, a daily and inseparable phenomenon of human life? According to the writer, who herself suffered greatly from physical ailments, a person forcibly cut off from the familiar world and confined to bed gains a completely different vision of things. For Woolf, illness is a springboard that allows one to break free from common truths, the «cordial deception» of society, and begin to perceive the world beyond norms, as if from within oneself. In her view of illness, she diverges from her mother, Julia Stephen, an experienced nurse and author of the practical guide «Notes from the Sick Rooms» (1883). Both texts are published for the first time in Russian and introduce the reader to two different ways of writing about illness from two women who are very different from each other.