Food is an essential part of the human experience of the natural world, and for Virginia Woolf, as for most of us, it has many meanings. Much has been written and discussed about Woolf 's eating disorders, her fear and loathing of food and refusal to eat properly (or at all) when she was ill. But just as she displayed a lively and outgoing character when she was well compared to the depression and anxiety that accompanied her sporadic illness, so too, she had a vivid appreciation for food, in both her personal enjoyment and appreciation of it and her use of it in her novels and essays, letters and diaries. From gathering mushrooms and baking bread to the boeuf en daube dinner in To the Lighthouse, this paper will explore Woolf 's positive experience with food and eating.

BoThemotionally–rooted childhood traumas and biologically–based mental illness are asserted as major factors in Virginia Woolf's life, either or both contributing to her eating problems. Louise DeSalvo attributed Woolf's eating disorders to the former, citing maternal neglect and paternal bullying as well as molestation by her step–brother Gerald Duckworth, conjecturing that as it occurred on a ledge where dishes of food were placed, “The very sight of a plate of food must have made her sick, recalling her feelings of disgust and shame” (104–5).

Her nephew and first biographer, Clive Bell, claimed mental illness, using the terms “madness” and “insanity” for what is now thought to be bipolar disorder. Hermione Lee took a balanced approach, calling Woolf “a sane woman who had an illness” (171), with genetic, biological and environmental factors all contributing. She expressed concern about diagnostic labels: “To choose a language for Virginia Woolf 's illness is … to rewrite and represent, perhaps to misrepresent it” (172). Allie Glenny called her work on Woolf's eating distress “the vindication of Virginia Woolf as a woman not only of genius but also of eminent sanity … [in spite of] pathologizing labels intended to silence her or at the least to devalue her viewpoint” (vi).