On Being Ill
By Virginia Woolf
Hogarth Press, 1930
Design and illustration by Vanessa Bell

In August 1925 Virginia Woolf fainted at a party, and so began several months of the sort of indefinite illness into which she was occasionally plunged by what she called “my own queer, difficult nervous system”. Amid fever, fatigue and a jumping pulse, she wrote the essay “On Being Ill”. It appeared in January 1926 in the inaugural issue of T.S. Eliot’s New Criterion.