Riva Lehrer’s Circle Stories
Erica L. Williams, “The Healing Power of Black Women’s Words”
Tracy K. Smith on The Cancer Journals
Tracy K. Smith is an American poet and educator, and the 22nd Poet Laureate of the United States (2017 to 2019). Here, she describes how Lorde’s experience of breast cancer shaped her revolutionary politics.
“Tracy K. Smith” by Slowking4 is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0
Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals
Full text here, accessible online through Brooklyn College’s library.
Fanney Burney, Mastectomy Letter
Letter from Frances Burney to her sister Esther about her mastectomy without anesthetic, 1812.
“Frances Burney” by Scanned by Phrood; Original by Edward Francesco Burney (1760-1848) is in the Public Domain
“On Being Ill”
By Virginia Woolf
This essay first appeared in 1926 in The New Criterion. Woolf asks the questions, why has literature been silent on the topic of illness? How does illness shape our understanding of ourselves, and the world around us?
Photograph of Virginia Woolf with hand on face wearing a fur stole, 1927.
“Photograph of Virginia Woolf, 1927” by Unknown is in the Public Domain
Resources: Learn more about Virginia Woolf here.
The Yellow Wallpaper
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Originally published in The New England Magazine in January, 1892.
“Charlotte Perkins Gilman” by Barry and Marble, San Francisco, 1895 is in the Public Domain
The Death of Ivan Ilych
Leo Tolstoy (1828-1901) is a Russian novelist, playwright and essayist . His novella The Death of Ivan Ilych was published in 1886 and is considered one of the masterpieces of his late fiction. It follows the illness of Ivan Ilych, a high-court judge in nineteenth-century Russia.
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