Leonard Woolf has described how, when Virginia Woolf's distress was at its most acute, 'for weeks almost at every meal one had to sit, often for an hour or more, trying to induce her to eat a few mouthfuls.' Drawing upon Alison Glenny's personal experience of anorexia, Ravenous Identity is a feminist consideration of Virginia Woolf's widely unrecognized use of self-starvation as a life-tool and food as a complex artistic metaphor. Glenny attempts to understand what underlay this distress for Virginia Woolf as an individual - an understanding which she arrives at by examining the way in which food and eating are symbolically expressed and explored in both Woolf's life and her work.