Ravenous Identity: Eating and Eating Distress in the Life and Work of Virginia Woolf - Hardcover

Allie Glenny

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0333765176 ISBN 13: 9780333765173

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000

Synopsis

Leonard Woolf has described how, when Virginia Woolf's distress was at its most acute, for weeks almost at every meal one had to sit, often for an hour or more, trying to induce her to eat a few mouthfuls. Drawing upon Alison Glenny's personal experience of anorexia, this work is a feminist consideration of Virginia Woolf's use of self-starvation as a life tool and food as a complex artistic metaphor. Glenny attempts to understand what underlay this distress for Virginia Woolf as an individual, an understanding which she arrives at by examining the way in which food and eating are symbolically expressed and explored in both Woolf's life and her work.

About this title

About the Author

Allie Glenny has a Ph.D. in English literature and is currently a freelance editor.

From Library Journal

In this debut book, Glenny (Ph.D., English literature), a former anorexic, attributes the "omnipresence" of food in the writing of Virginia Woolf to her "premature weaning" (at ten weeks), the early death of her mother, and, most significantly, sexual abuse by her half-brother. While this densely written study breaks new ground in Woolf scholarship, Glenny goes too far by becoming an apologist for anorexia. Instead of simply showing how important food was as a metaphor for Woolf, Glenny makes disturbing comments such as "anorexia can, at its most positive, function as a bell-jar in which personal and political change is fermented." She also suggests that anorexia provides women an "effective emergency measure" in which to gain a sense of self, particularly in response to childhood abuse. Clearly, Woolf was able to quiet her demons temporarily, but her 1941 suicide attests to her ultimate status as a victim. Recommended for larger academic collections.
-Diane Gardner Premo, Rochester P.L., NY
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0333765176
• ISBN 13: 9780333765173
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 256