wow, i am shocked and flabbergasted. i have only read one virginia woolf book before: a room of ones own, which is obviously deeply feminist and brilliant and still relevant. i did not know anything about her but through fate, this book found it‘s way to me. on being ill is a small essay of hers where she talks about how there are no books about illness even tho it is such a common and exhausting thing to experience. literature talks all about the mind but never about the body: the headaches, the shivers and fevers, the endless horrible nights with the pains and loneliness. the doctors who don‘t understand what you are talking about and how spirituality suddenly helps, because nothing else will. she was so right with everything she said and i love that she talked about it then. good fictional books about illness are to this day seldom and i hope i‘ll one day find a good one. so i‘m very grateful to have found and read this book and once again for woolfs brilliance, as she was way before her time. (here‘s a great analysis of her book https://www.themarginalian.org/2019/05/06/virginia-woolf-on-being-ill/ ) ⚠️ TW: CSA, suicide, mental health problems then i read more about her life and damn girl. woolf grew up in a very dysfunctional and patriarchal family. she was sexually abused from age six to 24 by her brother and her step-brother - they also sexually abused her sister. her father sexually abused her step-sister, who was also raped by her cousins. a lot of patriarchal structures and abuse in this family. then her mother died when she was 13 and a few years later her sister who took care of her. it is no wonder, that through her traumas - especially the CSA, which she describes as very traumatic - she got ill. woolf had bipolar disorder, depression, suicidal attempts (she died by suicide) and many mental breakdowns all her life. no wonder, this poor woman. but what is more important here is how she handled it all. woolf was ahead of her time and did exactly everything, that experts now suggest to CSA survivors on how to handle their abuse: she talked about it publicly (!!!); everyone knew about it, including her father who didn‘t save her. she wrote about it endessly in her diarys, like how she felt and her symptoms. she even read and met freud (who she thought was an old, ill man lmao queen) and started making protocols about her depression, going about it very scientific. she was very interested in psychology and bettering herself, understanding her trauma and fighting on getting better. she found the love of her life, her husband who supported her greatly. due to her sexual trauma she didn‘t have sex with him but instead had sexual relationships with many women (so she‘s also a queer queen). she truly tried her best but the actions of the men in her family were unfixable and during another mental breakdown she took her own life. virginia woolf was smart, brave and a force to be reckoned with. she was ahead of her time: not only her feminist stances but also her views on literature and illness, on psychology and mental health. she is a big inspiration, as she should be. this is once again the story of a woman who was brilliant but never was able to live up to her potential because men hurt her. i will start diving into woolfs works now, as i feel so much closer to her now and am incredibly in awe of her. ps: i got all my info from this brilliant paper on how CSA affected woolfs life (https://www.scirp.org/journal/paperinformation?paperid=48809 ) i highly recommend reading it. there‘s a book about it called „virginia woolf: the impact of childhood sexual assault on her life and work“ by louise desaldo, which i must read immediately now. the book isn‘t about CSA at all, only about illness. since it doesn‘t contain this senstive topic, i recommend reading it once in your life, especially if you‘ve experienced illness.