Virginia Woolf's Insiders

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I didn't really understand that she wasn't a complete insider, right? She always seemed like a insider to that very kind of posh world. And I could see suddenly how she was. The weight of that strangeness in the world overtook her at the end of her life. That seems to be what we all most know about her actually. We know she was in pain because of the way it ended. It's such an image that she created in her own suicide - and also wrote very well about awkwardness.

Welcome to the Wintering Sessions with Katherine May.

This week Katherine chats to writer Joanne Limburg about the ways that we can find connection in the experience of outsidership.

While writing her astonishing new book, Letters To My Weird Sisters, Joanne sought out women from the past who were marked out as ‘weird’, from Virginia Woolf, who was unable to choose the ‘right’ ballgown, to Katharina Kepler, who was put on trial for witchcraft. Drawing on her Jewish heritage, Joanne urges us all to assert the humanity of those who seem unfathomably different to us - the physically and intellectually disabled people who were considered to be ‘life unworthy of life’ in the Holocaust.

There is so much hope in Joanne’s project to own and cherish her own ‘weirdness’, and to find a kind of sisterhood there, stretching across time. Many listeners will find their community here, too.

JOANNE LINKS

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Letters To My Weird Sisters: On Autism and Feminism

KATHERINE LINKS

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