10 JANUARY 1931, Page 27

On Being Ill, by Virginia Woolf (The Hogarth Press 21s.),

is an exercise in style. We are carried down the thirty-four pages on a stream of gentle allusions, mild exaggerations and the like, till we find ourselves at rest in the shaded pool of an allusion to Lady Waterford—lulled by the gentle motion to something like the idleness of illness. For it is not of the more violent illnesses that we read, but of those in which the prin- cipal sensation is of the absence of vitality, a suggestion admirably conveyed. It is a pity that such exquisite work, in such a format, should be marred by uneven inking, and by the failure to correct obvious misprints.

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