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

"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 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. 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."--BOOK JACKET.