The dental travails of Virginia Woolf

In common with the readers of Dental Update, I spend a lot of time reading scientific papers, directives and the general stuff of professional life, plus, in my case, all the articles which are submitted by our wonderful authors to this journal. Perhaps not in common with all readers, for my holiday reading, I choose something which is a total opposite, namely, crime fiction, with authors' names such as Jo Nesbo and Torquil MacLeod springing to mind. However, having at one time read all the works of Graham Greene, I decided to look at the work of another accomplished English author, Virginia Woolf, starting with ‘A room of one's own’ and moving on to a book of her essays. She was born in 1882 into a family with strong associations with literature, her father being a notable historian and, even as a child, she had the freedom of her father's extensive library. Her mother died in 1985, the year in which she first had a breakdown and her father died in 1904, precipitating another breakdown yet, in 1905 (aged 23 years), she began to write for the Times Literary Supplement. She married Leonard Woolf in 1912, by which time she was a productive author, with her career as a writer of fiction covering the years 1912 to 1941, the year that she died.¹