On Being Ill: with Notes from Sick Rooms by Julia Stephen
Ten years ago, Paris Press made history publishing Virginia Woolf’s forgotten essay, On Being Ill, which Woolf biographer Hermione Lee describes as daring, strange, and original. In this revelatory new edition, Woolf’s inquiry into illness and its impact on the mind is paired with her mother’s observations about caring for the body. Julia Stephen was famously devoted to nursing loved ones and others in need. She had no professional training but took to heart Florence Nightingale’s precept that every woman is a nurse and emulated Nightingale’s best-selling Notes on Nursing with her own Notes from Sick Rooms. In this long-overlooked, precise, and piquant little manual, Stephen is compassionate and ironic, observing that everyone deserves to be tenderly nursed while addressing the small evil of crumbs in bed. This unprecedented literary reunion of mother and daughter is stunning on many fronts, but physician and literary scholar Rita Charon focuses on the essentials in her astute afterword, writing that Woolf’s perspective as a patient and Stephen’s as a nurse together illuminate the goal of care—to listen, to recognize, to imagine, to honor. --Donna Seaman