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Virginia Woolf

Biography

Virginia Woolf

Adeline Virginia Woolf was an English writer and one of the foremost modernists of the twentieth century.

During the interwar period, Woolf was a significant figure in London literary society and a central figure in the influential Bloomsbury Group of intellectuals. Her most famous works include the novels MRS DALLOWAY (1925), TO THE LIGHTHOUSE (1927) and ORLANDO (1928), and the book-length essay A Room of One's Own (1929), with its famous dictum, "A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction."

Woolf suffered from severe bouts of mental illness throughout her life, thought to have been the result of what is now termed bipolar disorder, and committed suicide by drowning in 1941 at the age of 59.

Virginia Woolf

Books by Virginia Woolf

by Virginia Woolf - Nonfiction

"On Being Ill" is an essay by Virginia Woolf that appeared in T. S. Eliot's "The New Criterion" in January 1926. The essay sought to establish illness as a serious subject of literature along the lines of love, jealousy and battle. Woolf explores the taboos associated with illness, and she discusses how illness transforms experience and changes our relationship to the world around us.

by Virginia Woolf - Fiction

It was a Sunday evening in October, and in common with many other young ladies of her class, Katharine Hilbery was pouring out tea. Perhaps a fifth part of her mind was thus occupied, and the remaining parts leapt over the little barrier of day which interposed between Monday morning and this rather subdued moment, and played with the things one does voluntarily and normally in the daylight. But although she was silent, she was evidently mistress of a situation which was familiar enough to her, and inclined to let it take its way for the six hundredth time, perhaps, without bringing into play any of her unoccupied faculties.

by Virginia Woolf - Essays, Nonfiction

A ROOM OF ONE’S OWN is an extended essay by Virginia Woolf. First published in 1929, the essay was based on a series of lectures she delivered at Newnham College and Girton College, two women's colleges at Cambridge University in October 1928. The essay is generally seen as a feminist text, and is noted in its argument for both a literal and figural space for women writers within a literary tradition dominated by patriarchy.

by Virginia Woolf - Fiction

From one of the most innovative writers of the 20th century --- a splendid collection displaying the author's lively imagination and delicate style. Includes "A Haunted House," "A Society," "An Unwritten Novel," "The String Quartet," "Blue & Green," "Kew Gardens," "The Mark on the Wall," and the title story.

by Virginia Woolf - Fiction

In THE VOYAGE OUT, one of Woolf's wittiest, socially satirical novels, Rachel Vinrace embarks for South America on her father's ship, and is launched on a course of self-discovery in a modern version of the mythic voyage.

by Virginia Woolf - Fiction

Wonderfully captivating, the seven stories in MRS. DALLOWAY'S PARTY create a dynamic and delightful portrait of what Woolf called "party consciousness." As parallel expressions of the themes of MRS. DALLOWAY, these stories provide a valuable window into Woolf's writing mind and a further testament to her extraordinary genius.

by Virginia Woolf - Fiction

An invaluable guide to the art and mind of Virginia Woolf, drawn by her husband from the personal record she kept over a period of twenty-seven years. Included are entries that refer to her own writing, others that are clearly writing exercises; accounts of people and scenes relevant to the raw material of her work; and comments on books she was reading. Edited and with a Preface by Leonard Woolf.

by Virginia Woolf - Nonfiction

Known for her novels, and for the dubious fame of being a doyenne of the 'Bloomsbury Set', in her time Virginia Woolf was highly respected as a major essayist and critic with a special interest and commitment to contemporary literature, and women's writing in particular. This spectacular collection of essays and other writings does justice to those efforts, offering unique appraisals of Aphra Behn, Mary Wollstonecraft, the Duchess of Newcastle, Dorothy Richardson, Charlotte Bronte, and Katherine Mansfield, amongst many others. 

by Virginia Woolf - Fiction

Virginia Woolf’s intention to publish her short stories is carried out in this volume, posthumously collected by her husband, Leonard Woolf. Containing six of eight stories from Monday or Tuesday, seven that appeared in magazines, and five other stories, the book makes available Virginia Woolf’s shorter works of fiction. Foreword by Leonard Woolf.

by Virginia Woolf - Nonfiction

Woolf’s first and most popular volume of essays. This collection has more than twenty-five selections, including such important statements as “Modern Fiction” and “The Modern Essay.”

by Virginia Woolf - Classics, Fiction

This brilliant novel explores the hidden springs of thought and action in one day of a woman's life. Direct and vivid in her account of the details of Clarissa Dalloway's preparations for a party she is to give that evening, Woolf ultimately managed to reveal much more.

by Virginia Woolf - Fiction

The tale of Jacob Flanders, a lonely young man unable to reconcile his love of classical culture with the chaotic reality of World War I society, unfolds in a series of brief impressions and conversations, internal monologues, and letters. A sensitive examination of character development and the meaning of life.

by Virginia Woolf - Fiction

The serene and maternal Mrs. Ramsay, the tragic yet absurd Mr. Ramsay, and their children and assorted guests are on holiday on the Isle of Skye. From the seemingly trivial postponement of a visit to a nearby lighthouse, Woolf constructs a remarkable, moving examination of the complex tensions and allegiances of family life and the conflict between men and women.

by Virginia Woolf - Nonfiction

In “Reminiscences,” the first of five pieces included in MOMENTS OF BEING, Woolf focuses on the death of her mother, “the greatest disaster that could happen,” and its effect on her father, a demanding Victorian patriarch who played a crucial role in her development as an individual and a writer. Three of the essays she wrote for the purpose of reading at the Memoir Club, a postwar regrouping of Bloomsbury, and “A Sketch of the Past” the last and longest of the five essays, gives an account of Woolf's early years in her family's household at 22 Hyde Park Gate.

by Virginia Woolf - Nonfiction

Volume I of a five-part volume, written by Virginia Woolf, that focuses on 1915-1919. The entire five-part volume covers from 1915 up until her death in 1941.

by Virginia Woolf - Fiction

In her most exuberant, most fanciful novel, Woolf has created a character liberated from the restraints of time and sex. Born in the Elizabethan Age to wealth and position, Orlando is a young nobleman at the beginning of the story-and a modern woman three centuries later. “A poetic masterpiece of the first rank” (Rebecca West). The source of a critically acclaimed 1993 feature film directed by Sally Potter.

by Virginia Woolf - Fiction

In Woolf’s last novel, the action takes place on one summer’s day at a country house in the heart of England, where the villagers are presenting their annual pageant. A lyrical, moving valedictory.

by Virginia Woolf - Fiction

The principal theme of this ambitious book is time, threading together three generations of an upper-class English family, the Pargiters. The characters come and go, meet, talk, think, dream, grow older, in a continuous ritual of life that eludes meaning.

by Virginia Woolf - Nonfiction

The author received three separate requests for a gift of one guinea-one for a women’s college building fund, one for a society promoting the employment of professional women, and one to help prevent war and “protect culture, and intellectual liberty.” This book is a threefold answer to these requests-and a statement of feminine purpose.

by Virginia Woolf - Fiction

One of Woolf’s most experimental novels, THE WAVES presents six characters in monologue --- from morning until night, from childhood into old age --- against a background of the sea. The result is a glorious chorus of voices that exists not to remark on the passing of events but to celebrate the connection between its various individual parts.