Ill Feelings: Stories of Unexplained Illness

Ill Feelings is a collective biography of medically unexplained illness. Structured around the narrative of their own ill feelings, Alice Hattrick uncovers their and their mother’s case histories, and branches out into the records of ill health that women have written about in diaries and letters. Their cast of characters includes Virginia Woolf and Alice James, the poets Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Emily Dickinson, John Ruskin’s lost love Rose la Touche, the artist Louise Bourgeois and the nurse Florence Nightingale.

Ill Feelings is a moving and defiant debut from a bold new voice in narrative nonfiction, with echoes of Leslie Jamison and Emilie Pine but with a texture and voice - a generative, transcendent rage - all its own.