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." Even when she was relatively relaxed about food, he said, "It was extraordinarily difficult to get her to eat enough to keep her strong and well."
In Ravenous Identity, Allie Glenny examines the way in which food and eating are symbolically expressed and explored in both Woolf's life and her work. Woolf's writing shows an abiding interest in food, from the sharps and sweets of lunch in the men's college vs. the bitter taste of the greens served for dinner in the women's college in A Room of One's Own, to Neville's physical and ontological sensations digesting dinner, the butter oozing through Bernard's crumpet, and Susan plunging her hands into the bread dough in The Waves.
Drawing upon Glenny's personal experience of anorexia, Ravenous Identity is a feminist consideration of Virginia Woolf's widely unrecognized use of and relationship to food as a complex artistic metaphor.
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