On Being Ill

The essay seeks to establish illness as a serious subject of literature along the lines of love, jealousy and battle. Woolf writes, "Considering how common illness is, how tremendous the spiritual change that it brings, how astonishing, when the lights of health go down, the undiscovered countries that are then disclosed, what wastes and deserts of the soul a slight attack of influenza brings to light... it becomes strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love, battle, and jealousy among the prime themes of literature."