Reprint of 'The Hogarth letters'. In the early 1930's Leonard and Virginia Woolf commissioned twelve letters from a wide variety of authors with a view that they should tackle leading social and moral issues of the day. Among the subjects dealt with are family life, political oppression, modern poetry, modernism itself, religious ethics and nuclear disarmament.
In this work, Virginia Woolf observes that though illness is part of every human being’s experience, it has never been the subject of literature—like the more acceptable subjects of war and love. We must, Woolf says, invent language to describe pain. Woolf discusses the cultural taboos associated with illness and explores how illness changes the way we read.