In her essay 'On Being Il' Virginia Woolf expresses surprise that illness has failed to find a place among the prime themes of literature. The Faber Book of Fevers and Frets vividly demonstrates that she was quite wrong - that illness is and always has been the business of writers.
Coleridge, Byron, Shelley and Donne; Katherine Mansfield, D. H. Lawrence, Louisa May Alcott and Dryden; Kipling, Hardy, Fanny Burney, Dickens, Pope, Susan Sontag and Brecht...almost everyone who has written has written about illness.
D. J. Enright's anthology of poetry and prose is divided into sections, each with its own introduction - 'Eyes, Ears and Teeth', 'Hospitals and Patients', 'Melancholy and Love Sickness', 'Manias, Phobias, Fantasies, Fears', 'Breakdown and Madness', and many more. It is chiefly concerned with ailments and anxieties well this side of the fatal and many of the pieces are light-hearted, even comical. It will amuse, entertain and solace. It casts a brilliant light on our notions of health as well as our expectations from life.
D. J. Enright was born in 1920 in Leamington, Warwickshire. He taught in universities in Egypt, Japan, Germany and Thailand, before becoming Professor of English at the University of Singapore from 1960 to 1970. He now lives in London. He edited The Oxford Book of Death (1983) and Fair of Speech: The Uses of Euphemism (1985), and among his books are A Mania for Sentences (1983), The Alluring Problem (1986), Fields of Vision (1988), and a novel, Academic Year (1955, reissued 1985). His most recent book of poetry is Collected Poems 1987.
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