The year is 1926. Queen Elizabeth II is christened. Wage cuts and increased working hours for coal miners precipitate a general strike of workers. A.A. Milne publishes Winnie-the-Pooh. The League of Nations accepts Germany as the sixth permanent member on the council deeming it a “peace-loving country”.
It is also the year that Virginia Woolf published her essay, On Being Ill, in January’s volume of The New Criterion – the literary review headed up by T.S. Eliot. The essay had been written from her sickbed, as Woolf lay recovering after fainting at her nephew Quentin’s 15th birthday dinner months before.
In the essay, Woolf argues that illness is “the great confessional” which is never talked about in literature because of the “poverty” of language when it comes to sickness and disease. Books on influenza, poetry on pneumonia and tomes on toothache and typhoid are “null, negligible and non-existent”, she declares, reckoning with Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, Proust, Donne and Keats.
