Virginia Woolf's exuberant 'biography' tells the story of the cross-dressing, sex-changing Orlando who begins life as a young noble in the sixteenth century and moves through numerous historical and geographical worlds to finish as a modern woman writer in the 1920s. The book is in part a happy trib[...]

'I am making up "To the Lighthouse" - the sea is to be heard all through it' Inspired by the lost bliss of her childhood summers in Cornwall, Virginia Woolf produced one of the masterworks of English literature in To the Lighthouse. It concerns the Ramsay family and their summer guests on the Isle o[...]

'I lay in the garden and red the Browning love letters, and the figure of their dog made me laugh so I couldn't resist making him a Life.' Throughout her career, Woolf invokes the animal world both directly and metaphorically. She started to write a biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's spaniel [...]

Katherine Hilbery, torn between past and present, is a figure reflecting Woolf's own struggle with history. Both have illustrious literary ancestors: in Katherine's case, her poet grandfather, and in Woolf's, her father Leslie Stephen, writer, philosopher, and editor. Both desire to break away from [...]

Political and social change during Woolf's lifetime led her to address the role of the state and the individual. Michael H. Whitworth shows how ideas and images from contemporary novelists, philosophers, theorists, and scientists fuelled her writing, and how critics, film-makers, and novelists have [...]

'I, who would wish to feel close over me the protective waves of the ordinary, catch with the tail of my eye some far horizon.' Intensely visionary yet absorbed with the everyday; experimental, daring and challenging, The Waves is regarded by many as Virginia Woolf's greatest achievement. It follow[...]

"You'll call this sentimental--perhaps--but then a dog somehow represents the private side of life, the play side," Virginia Woolf confessed to a friend. In this charming and engaging book, Maureen Adams celebrates this private, playful side telling readers about the relationships between five remar[...]

This juxtaposition of Virginia Woolf and Christa Wolf, writers of two distinct cultures, countries and generations, focuses on the strategies the two authors share in creating their female characters. Hermann looks at each author within the social and historical conditions that produced them, employ[...]

Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Avant-Garde traces the dynamic emergence of Woolf's art and thought against Bloomsbury's public thinking about Europe's future in a period marked by two world wars and rising threats of totalitarianism. Educated informally in her father's library and in Bloomsbury's[...]

'She had a perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day'.

On a June morning in 1923, Clarissa Dalloway, the glittering wife of a Member of Parliament, is prepar[...]

These essays explore music and its relationship to language, aesthetics, and culture in the life and work of the preeminent Modernist writer Virginia Woolf (Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando, A Room of One's Own, and other works). Approaching Woolf from musicology, literary criticism, and ge[...]

Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse have often been described as 'poetic' and 'difficult'. The essays in this book show how attentive readers can follow their stories and relate them directly to the 'real' world. Some work out 'who speaks'. Some explore the novels' debates about England in the 1920s:[...]