Books by Virginia Woolf

Orlando: A Biography

by Virginia Woolf

“Come, come! I’m sick to death of this particular self. I want another.”

As his tale begins, Orlando is a passionate sixteen-year-old nobleman whose days are spent in rowdy revelry, filled with the colorful delights of Queen Elizabeth I’s court. By the close, three centuries have passed, and he will have transformed into a thirty-six-year-old woman in the year 1928. Orlando’s journey is also an internal one—he is an impulsive poet who learns patience in matter of the heart, and a woman who knows what it is to be a man.

Virginia Woolf’s most unusual creation, Orlando is a fantastical biography as well as a funny, exuberant romp through history that examines the true nature of sexuality.

The Second Common Reader: Annotated Edition

by Virginia Woolf

Here, in twenty-six essays, Woolf writes of English literature in its various forms, including the poetry of Donne; the novels of Defoe, Sterne, Meredith, and Hardy; Lord Chesterfield’s letters and De Quincey’s autobiography. She writes, too, about the life and art of women. Edited and with an Introduction by Andrew McNeillie; Index.

Mrs. Dalloway

by Virginia Woolf

The authorized, original edition of Virginia Woolf’s masterpiece and one of the most “moving, revolutionary artworks of the twentieth century” (Michael Cunningham), with a foreword by Maureen Howard.
In this vivid portrait of a single day in a woman’s life, Mrs. Clarissa Dalloway is preoccupied with the last-minute details of preparation for a party while in her mind she is something much more than a perfect society hostess. As she readies her house for friends and neighbors, she is flooded with remembrances of the past—the passionate loves of her carefree youth, her practical choice of husband, and the approach and retreat of war. And, met with the realities of the present, Clarissa reexamines the choices that brought her there, hesitantly looking ahead to the unfamiliar work of growing old.
From the introspective Clarissa, to the lover who never fully recovered from her rejection, to a war-ravaged stranger in the park, the characters and scope of Mrs. Dalloway reshape our sense of ordinary life and reshaped English literature as we know it.
“Perhaps her masterpiece…Exquisite and superbly constructed…Required like most writers to choose between the surface and the depths as the basis of her operations, she chooses the surface and then burrows in as far as she can.” –E. M. Forster

Mrs. Dalloway

by Virginia Woolf

A stunning new edition of Virginia Woolf's engulfing portrait of a day in one woman's life.

Clarissa Dalloway, elegant and vivacious, is preparing for a party and remembering those she once loved. In another part of London, Septimus Warren Smith is suffering from shell-shock and is on the brink of madness. Smith's day interweaves with that of Clarissa and her friends, their lives converging as the party reaches its glittering climax. Virginia Woolf's masterly novel, in which she perfected the interior monologue, brings past, present, and future together on one momentous day in June 1923.

Mrs. Dalloway

by Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf’s 1925 novel of feminism, existentialism, and self-realization is an essential read for all lovers of classic literature.

Virginia Woolf’s classic novel centers around Clarissa Dalloway, a married high-society woman in post–World War I London who is preparing for a party at her home in the evening. Acutely aware of her standing among other members of her elite social class but yearning to find her true self, Clarissa embodies the internal and external conflicts of women in the early twentieth century. As she makes her way about London, Clarissa’s stream of consciousness is constantly interrupted by memories of her past, giving the reader a keen insight into the mind of a woman undergoing an existential crisis. Beloved by generations of readers, Mrs. Dalloway is a landmark novel that explores themes of feminism, mental illness, and self-realization.

To the Lighthouse

by Virginia Woolf

“Radiant as [To the Lighthouse] is in its beauty, there could never be a mistake about it: here is a novel to the last degree severe and uncompromising. I think that beyond being about the very nature of reality, it is itself a vision of reality.”—Eudora Welty, from the Introduction.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.

A Writer's Diary

by Virginia Woolf

An invaluable guide to the art and mind of Virginia Woolf, drawn from the personal record she kept over a period of twenty-seven years.

Included are entries that refer to her own writing, and those that are relevant to the raw material of her work, and, finally, comments on the books she was reading. The first entry included here is dated 1918 and the last, three weeks before her death in 1941. Between these points of time unfolds the private world—the anguish, the triumph, the creative vision—of one of the great writers of the twentieth century.

“A Writer’s Diary . . . is Virginia Woolf . . . The whole vibrates with the ups and downs of a passionate relationship . . . in the intensities, variations, alarms and excursions, panics and exaltations of her relationship to her art.”—New York Times Book Review

Edited and with a Preface by Leonard Woolf.

Monday or Tuesday: Eight Stories (Dover Thrift Editions: Short Stories)

by Virginia Woolf

One of the most distinguished critics and innovative authors of the twentieth century, Virginia Woolf published two novels before this collection appeared in 1921. However, it was these early stories that first earned her a reputation as a writer with "the liveliest imagination and most delicate style of her time." Influenced by Joyce, Proust, and the theories of William James, Bergson, and Freud, she strove to write a new fiction that emphasized the continuous flow of consciousness, time's passage as both a series of sequential moments and a longer flow of years and centuries, and the essential indefinability of character.
Readers can discover these and other aspects of her influential style in the eight stories collected here, among them a delightful, feminist put-down of the male intellect in "A Society" and a brilliant and sensitive portrayal of nature in "Kew Gardens." Also included are "An Unwritten Novel," "The String Quartet," "A Haunted House," "Blue & Green," "The Mark on the Wall," and the title story.
In recent years, Woolf's fiction, feminism, and high-minded sensibilities have earned her an ever-growing audience of readers. This splendid collection offers those readers not only the inestimable pleasures of the stories themselves, but an excellent entrée into the larger body of Woolf's work.

Monday or Tuesday: Eight Stories (Dover Thrift Editions: Short Stories)

by Virginia Woolf

One of the most distinguished critics and innovative authors of the twentieth century, Virginia Woolf published two novels before this collection appeared in 1921. However, it was these early stories that first earned her a reputation as a writer with "the liveliest imagination and most delicate style of her time." Influenced by Joyce, Proust, and the theories of William James, Bergson, and Freud, she strove to write a new fiction that emphasized the continuous flow of consciousness, time's passage as both a series of sequential moments and a longer flow of years and centuries, and the essential indefinability of character. Readers can discover these and other aspects of her influential style in the eight stories collected here, among them a delightful, feminist put-down of the male intellect in "A Society" and a brilliant and sensitive portrayal of nature in "Kew Gardens." Also included are "An Unwritten Novel," "The String Quartet," "A Haunted House," "Blue & Green," "The Mark on the Wall," and the title story. In recent years, Woolf's fiction, feminism, and high-minded sensibilities have earned her an ever-growing audience of readers. This splendid collection offers those readers not only the inestimable pleasures of the stories themselves, but an excellent entrée into the larger body of Woolf's work.

Jacob's Room (Dover Thrift Editions: Classic Novels)

by Virginia Woolf

Prized for their lyrical qualities, the novels of Virginia Woolf favor the psychological realms inhabited by her characters, where thoughts are so revealed that actions lose much of their importance. Most are also concerned with the structure of narrative, including the present novel, in which Woolf conveys the impression of time present and of time passing in individual experience as well as in the characters' awareness of historic time.
Considered Woolf's first original and distinguished work, Jacob's Room (1922) concerns a sensitive young man, Jacob Flanders, who finds himself unable to reconcile his love of classical culture with the chaotic reality of World War I. His story unfolds in a series of brief impressions and conversations, stream-of-consciousness narratives, internal monologues, and letters.
This inexpensive edition of Woolf's intense and affecting novel offers readers a first-rate example of subtle style and innovative techniques for which the author is admired.

Carlyle's House and Other Sketches (100 Pages)

by Virginia Woolf, David Bradshaw

Carlyle’s House and Other Sketches marks the first publication of one of Virginia Woolf’s very earliest notebooks. Recently unearthed from a collection of private papers, it contains a series of six striking and semi-autobiographical sketches, each transcribed and edited by Dr. David Bradshaw. From the cold formality of London townhouses with their rows of austere portraits, to the dull chaos of the academic’s abode, and the eccentric spinster’s Hampstead home, Virginia Woolf paints a series of portraits of everyday life, capturing character and setting in exquisite detail. Experimental in style, and heralding the later masterpieces Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, this early notebook is quintessential Woolf.

A Room of One's Own

by Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf’s pioneering work of feminism, “probably the most influential piece of non-fictional writing by a woman in [the twentieth] century” (Hermione Lee), featuring a new introduction by Xochitl Gonzalez, Pulitzer Prize finalist and New York Times bestselling author of Olga Dies Dreaming and Anita de Monte Laughs Last

A Penguin Classic

In October 1928, Virginia Woolf delivered a series of lectures to the two women’s colleges at Cambridge University, and the result was thus: A Room of One’s Own, an extended essay that outlines the limitations on women throughout history and in her own time. Through a series of metaphors, scenarios, and analysis of her literary predecessors—which includes a powerful thought experiment about a fictional sister of William Shakespeare and musings on female writers such as the Bronte sisters—Woolf argues that women need a literal and figurative personal space to make their mark on a society dominated by men. In doing so, she urges us to consider the ways in which we continue to be constrained by our material and societal circumstances today, at a time when these discrepancies are recognized as even more multifaceted than in Woolf’s era.

A Room of One's Own

by Virginia Woolf

2012 Reprint of Original 1929 Edition. Exact facsimile of the original edition, not reproduced with Optical Recognition Software. "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. While this extended essay in fact employs a fictional narrator and narrative to explore women both as writers of and characters in fiction, the manuscript for the delivery of the series of lectures, titled "Women and Fiction", and hence the essay, are considered non-fiction. 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.

A Room of One's Own

by Virginia Woolf

“I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.”

In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf imagines that Shakespeare had a sister—a sister equal to Shakespeare in talent, and equal in genius, but whose legacy is radically different. This imaginary woman never writes a word and dies by her own hand, her genius unexpressed. If only she had found the means to create, argues Woolf, she would have reached the same heights as her immortal sibling.

In this classic essay, Woolf takes on the establishment, using her gift of language to dissect the world around her and give voice to those who are without. Her message is a simple one: women must have a steady income and a room of their own in order to have the freedom to create.

With a Foreword by Mary Gordon

A Room of One's Own

by Virginia Woolf

In this extraordinary essay, Virginia Woolf examines the limitations of womanhood in the early twentieth century. With the startling prose and poetic license of a novelist, she makes a bid for freedom, emphasising that the lack of an independent income, and the titular “room of one’s own”, prevents most women from reaching their full literary potential.

As relevant in its insight and indignation today as it was when first delivered in those hallowed lecture theatres, A Room of One’s Own remains both a beautiful work of literature and an incisive analysis of women and their place in the world.

This Macmillan Collector’s Library edition features an afterword by the British art historian Frances Spalding.

A Room of One's Own

by Virginia Woolf

A collectible hardcover edition of Virginia Woolf’s pioneering work of feminism, “probably the most influential piece of non-fictional writing by a woman in [the twentieth] century” (Hermione Lee), featuring a new introduction by Xochitl Gonzalez, Pulitzer Prize finalist and New York Times bestselling author of Olga Dies Dreaming and Anita de Monte Laughs Last

A Penguin Vitae Edition

In October 1928, Virginia Woolf delivered two lectures to the women’s colleges at the University of Cambridge, arguing with inimitable wit and rhetorical mastery that an income and a room of one’s own are essential to a woman’s creative freedom. These lectures became the basis for A Room of One’s Own, a landmark in feminist thought, in which Woolf imagines the fictional Judith Shakespeare, sister to William and equally gifted but lost to history. How much genius has gone unexpressed, Woolf wonders, because women are not afforded the same privileges as men? A hundred years later, her brilliant polemic reverberates into our own time.

In this edition, Pulitzer Prize finalist for commentary and bestselling novelist Xochitl Gonzalez contributes an introductory essay that extends the argument to Woolf’s housekeeper, breaking down divides of not only gender but also race and class in order to include all women in Woolf’s profoundly inspiring call to realize their creative potential.

Penguin Vitae—loosely translated as “Penguin of one’s life”—is a deluxe hardcover series from Penguin Classics celebrating a dynamic and diverse landscape of classic fiction and nonfiction from seventy-five years of classics publishing. Penguin Vitae provides readers with beautifully designed classics that have shaped the course of their lives, and welcomes new readers to discover these literary gifts of personal inspiration, intellectual engagement, and creative originality.

Mrs. Dalloway: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)

by Virginia Woolf

A stunning new edition of Virginia Woolf's engulfing portrait of one day in a woman's life, featuring a new foreword by Jenny Offill, the New York Times bestselling author of Weather and Dept. of Speculation

A Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition, with flaps and deckle-edged paper

"Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself." It's one of the most famous opening lines in literature, that of Virginia Woolf's beloved masterpiece of time, memory, and the city. In the wake of World War I and the 1918 flu pandemic, Clarissa Dalloway, elegant and vivacious, is preparing for a party and remembering those she once loved. In another part of London, Septimus Smith is suffering from shell-shock and on the brink of madness. Their days interweave and their lives converge as the party reaches its glittering climax. In a novel in which she perfects the interior monologue and recapitulates the life cycle in the hours of the day, from first light to the dark of night, Woolf achieves an uncanny simulacrum of consciousness, bringing past, present, and future together, and recording, impression by impression, minute by minute, the feel of life itself.

This edition is collated from all known proofs, manuscripts, and impressions to reflect the author's intentions, and includes a catalog of emendations, an illuminating introduction and endnotes by the distinguished feminist critic Elaine Showalter, and a map of Mrs. Dalloway's London.

For more than seventy-five years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 2,000 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Genius and Ink: Virginia Woolf on How to Read

by Virginia Woolf

FOREWORD BY ALI SMITH
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY FRANCESCA WADE
Who better to serve as a guide to great books and their authors than Virginia Woolf?
In the early years of its existence, the Times Literary Supplement published some of the finest writers in English: T. S. Eliot, Henry James and E. M. Forster among them. But one of the paper’s defining voices was Virginia Woolf, who produced a string of superb essays between the two World Wars.
The weirdness of Elizabethan plays, the pleasure of revisiting favourite novels, the supreme examples of Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot and Henry James, Thomas Hardy and Joseph Conrad: all are here, in anonymously published pieces, in which may be glimpsed the thinking behind Woolf’s works of fiction and the enquiring, feminist spirit of A Room of One’s Own.
Here is Woolf the critical essayist, offering, at one moment, a playful hypothesis and, at another, a judgement laid down with the authority of a twentieth-century Dr Johnson. Here is Woolf working out precisely what’s great about Hardy, and how Elizabeth Barrett Browning made books a “substitute for living” because she was “forbidden to scamper on the grass”. Above all, here is Virginia Woolf the reader, whose enthusiasm for great literature remains palpable and inspirational today.

The London Scene: Six Essays on London Life

by Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf was already an accomplished novelist and critic when she was commissioned by the British edition of Good Housekeeping to write a series entitled "Six Articles on London Life." Originally published bimonthly, beginning in December 1931, five of the essays were eventually collected and published in 1981. The sixth essay, "Portrait of a Londoner," had been missing from Woolf's oeuvre until it was rediscovered at the University of Sussex in 2004. Ecco is honored to publish the complete collection in the United States for the first time.
A walking tour of Woolf's beloved hometown, The London Scene begins at the London Docks and follows Woolf as she visits several iconic sites throughout the city, including the Oxford Street shopping strip, John Keats's house on Hampstead Heath, Thomas Carlyle's house in Chelsea, St. Paul's Cathedral, Westminster Abbey, and the Houses of Parliament.
These six essential essays capture Woolf at her best, exploring modern consciousness through the prism of 1930s London while simultaneously painting an intimate, touching portrait of this sprawling metropolis and its fascinating inhabitants.

The Voyage Out (Classic, 20th-Century, Penguin)

by Virginia Woolf

A party of English people are aboard the Euphrosyne, bound for South America. Among them is Rachel Vinrace, a young girl, innocent and wholly ignorant of the world of politics and society, books, sex, love and marriage. She is a free spirit half-caught, momentarily and passionately, by Terence Hewet, an aspiring writer who she meets in Santa Marina. But their engagement is to end abruptly, and tragically. Virginia Woolf's first novel, published in 1915, is a haunting exploration of a young woman's mind, signalling the beginning of her fascination with capturing the mysteries and complexities of the inner life.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Orlando: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)

by Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf’s pioneering novel about a time-traveling sixteenth-century nobleman who wakes up in the body of a woman, with a new foreword by Andrea Lawlor, author of Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl

“A brilliant book that teaches you so much about identity and love—all these fundamental questions that we ask ourselves.” —Emma Corrin

“I read this book and believed it was a hallucinogenic, interactive biography of my own life and future.” —Tilda Swinton

A Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition, with flaps and deckle-edged paper

First masculine, then feminine, Orlando is a young sixteenth-century nobleman who gallops through the centuries, from Elizabethan England and imperial Turkey to Virginia Woolf’s own time. Will he find happiness with the exotic Russian Princess Sasha? Or is the dashing explorer Shelmerdine the ideal man? And what form will Orlando take on the journey—a nobleman, traveler, writer? Man or . . . woman?

Written for the charismatic, bisexual writer Vita Sackville-West, Orlando is one of Woolf’s most popular and accessible novels, a playful mock biography of a chameleon-like historical figure that is both a wry commentary on gender and, in Woolf’s own words, a “writer’s holiday” that delights in its ambiguity and capriciousness.

This edition is collated from all known proofs, manuscripts, and impressions to reflect the author’s intentions, and includes an introduction and notes by the distinguished scholar and coauthor of The Madwoman in the Attic Sandra M. Gibert.

For more than seventy-five years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 2,000 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Jacob's Room

by Virginia Woolf

The story of a man’s life from a day in his childhood to the day of his death. “Jacob’s Room...comes as a tremendous surprise. The impossible has occurred. The style closely resembles that of Kew Gardens....The break with Night and Day and even with The Voyage Out is complete. A new type of fiction has swum into view” (E. M. Forster).

Jacob's Room

by Virginia Woolf

Jacob's Room is Virginia Woolf's first truly experimental novel. It is a portrait of a young man, who is both representative and victim of the social values which led Edwardian society into war. Jacob's life is traced from the time he is a small boy playing on the beach, through his years in Cambridge, then in artistic London, and finally making a trip to Greece, but this is no orthodox Bildungsroman. Jacob is presented in glimpses, in fragments, as Woolf breaks down traditional ways of representing character and experience. The novel's composition coincided with the consolidation of Woolf's interest in feminism, and she criticizes the privileged thoughtless smugness of patriarchy, `the other side', `the men in clubs and Cabinets'. Her stylistic innovations are conscious attempts to realize and develop women's writing and the novel dramatizes her interest in the ways both language and social environments shape differently the lives of men and women. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

Jacob's Room

by Virginia Woolf

He left everything just as it was.... Did he think he would come back?

Jacob's Room was the first book in Virginia Woolf's unique, experimental style, making it an important text of early Modernism. Ostensibly, the story is about the life of Jacob Flanders, the title character, who is evoked purely by other characters' perceptions and memories of him. Jacob remains an absence throughout. Elegiac in tone, the work beautifully memorializes the longing and pain of a generation that lost so many of its most promising young men to World War I.

Upon it's release E.M. Forster remarked, "amazing.... a new type of fiction has swum into view."

The Art of The Novella Series

Too short to be a novel, too long to be a short story, the novella is generally unrecognized by academics and publishers. Nonetheless, it is a form beloved and practiced by literature's greatest writers. In the Art Of The Novella series, Melville House celebrates this renegade art form and its practitioners with titles that are, in many instances, presented in book form for the first time.

Jacob's Room

by Virginia Woolf

Based on Woolf's brother Thoby, who died in 1906, "Jacob's Room" follows the life of a fatherless boy from his childhood to his tragic death in World War I, and remains a shining example of Woolf's genius and literary daring. Revised reissue.

Jacob's Room

by Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf's third novel is an unconventional literary portrait of its title character--an awkward but strangely fascinating young man coming of age in the years leading up to the First World War--that is pervaded throughout by a sense that "nobody sees any one as he is". Jacob's Room marks a radical departure from the conventions of realist fiction by seeking to evoke the experiential texture of human cognition and urban modernity in an entirely new way. Endlessly surprising and inventive in its handling of narrative perspective, this is one of the central achievements of modern English literature.

Three Guineas

by Virginia Woolf, Mark Hussey

“Though we see the same world, we see it through different eyes.”

Setting out to answer the question “How are we to prevent war?” Virginia Woolf argues that the inequalities between women and men must first be addressed. Framing her arguments in the form of a letter, Woolf wittily ponders to whom—among the many who have requested it—she will donate a guinea. As she works out her reasons for which causes she will support, Woolf articulates a vision of peace and political culture as radical now as it was when first published on the eve of the Second World War. A founding text of cultural theory, Three Guineas can also help us understand the twenty-first-century realities of endless war justified by “unreal loyalties.”

“Witty, scornful, deeply serious…If you are a woman, or anti-war, or both, read it.”—The New Yorker

Three Guineas

by Virginia Woolf, Mark Hussey

Three Guineas is written as a series of letters in which Virginia Woolf ponders the efficacy of donating to various causes to prevent war. In reflecting on her situation as the "daughter of an educated man" in 1930s England, Woolf challenges liberal orthodoxies and marshals vast research to make discomforting and still-challenging arguments about the relationship between gender and violence, and about the pieties of those who fail to see their complicity in war-making. This pacifist-feminist essay is a classic whose message resonates loudly in our contemporary global situation.

Annotated and with an introduction by Jane Marcus

The Waves

by Virginia Woolf

“I am made and remade continually. Different people draw different words from me.”

Innovative and deeply poetic, The Waves is often regarded as Virginia Woolf’s masterpiece. It begins with six children—three boys and three girls—playing in a garden by the sea, and follows their lives as they grow up, experience friendship and love, and grapple with the death of their beloved friend Percival. Instead of describing their outward expressions of grief, Woolf draws her characters from the inside, revealing their inner lives: their aspirations, their triumphs and regrets, their awareness of unity and isolation.

The Waves

by Virginia Woolf

Set on the coast of England against the vivid background of the sea, The Waves introduces six characters -- three men and three women -- who are grappling with the death of a beloved friend, Percival. Instead of describing their outward expressions of grief, Virginia Woolf draws her characters from the inside, revealing them through their thoughts and interior soliloquies. As their understanding of nature's trials grows, the chorus of narrative voices blends together in miraculous harmony, remarking not only on the inevitable death of individuals but on the eternal connection of everyone. The novel that most epitomizes Virginia Woolf's theories of fiction in the working form, The Waves is an amazing book very much ahead of its time. It is a poetic dreamscape, visual, experimental, and thrilling.

Mrs. Dalloway's Party: A Short Story Sequence

by Virginia Woolf

"Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the gloves herself. Big Ben was striking as she stepped out into the street. It was eleven o'clock and the unused hour was fresh as if issued to children on a beach."
-from "Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street"

The landmark modern novel Mrs. Dalloway creates a portrait of a single day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway as she orchestrates the last-minute details of a grand party. But before Virginia Woolf wrote this masterwork, she explored in a series of fascinating stories a similar revelry in the mental and physical excitement of a party.
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.

Orlando (Annotated): A Biography

by Virginia Woolf, Mark Hussey

Begun as a "joke," Orlando is Virginia Woolf's fantastical biography of a poet who first appears as a sixteen-year-old boy at the court of Elizabeth I, and is left at the novel's end a married woman in the year 1928. Part love letter to Vita Sackville-West, part exploration of the art of biography, Orlando is one of Woolf's most popular and entertaining works. This new annotated edition will deepen readers' understanding of Woolf's brilliant creation.

Annotated and with an introduction by Maria DiBattista

A Room Of One's Own (annotated)

by Virginia Woolf

This annotated edition of the landmark inquiry into the women's role in society by one of the twentieth century's greatest thinkers, Viriginia Woolf's classic A Room of One's Own features an introduction by English and Women's Studies professor Susan Gubar, perfect for critical analysis in classrooms and beyond.“A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.”In A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf imagines that Shakespeare had a sister: a sister equal to Shakespeare in talent, equal in genius, but whose legacy is radically different. This imaginary woman never writes a word and dies by her own hand, her genius unexpressed. But if only she had found the means to create, urges Woolf, she would have reached the same heights as her immortal sibling. In this classic essay, Virginia Woolf takes on the establishment, using her gift for language to dissect the world around her and give a voice to those who have none.

To The Lighthouse (annotated)

by Virginia Woolf

The annotated, authorized edition of one of the great literary masterpieces of the twentieth century with commentary by leading Virginia Woolf scholar Mark Hussey.
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 conflict between men and women.
To the Lighthouse is made up of three powerfully charged visions into the life of the Ramsay family living in a summer house off the rocky coast of Scotland. There’s the serene and maternal Mrs. Ramsay, the tragic yet absurd Mr. Ramsay, their eight children, and assorted holiday guests. With the lighthouse excursion postponed, Woolf shows the small joys and quiet tragedies of everyday life that seemingly could go on forever.
But as time winds its way through their lives, the Ramsays face, alone and together, the greatest of human challenges and its greatest triumph—the human capacity for change.
A moving portrait in miniature of family life, To the Lighthouse also has profoundly universal implications, giving language to the silent space that separates people and the space that they transgress to reach each other.
This authorized edition from the Virginia Woolf library features: Biographical Preface Chronology Introduction to the text Extensive notes Suggestions for further reading
This annotated edition is the perfect companion to more fully understand To the Lighthouse, its importance in twentieth century literature, and Virginia Woolf's world.

Mrs. Dalloway (annotated)

by Virginia Woolf

The annotated, authorized edition of a great literary masterpiece of the twentieth century with commentary by Women’s Studies professor Bonnie Kime Scott.
This brilliant novel explores the hidden springs of thought and action in one day of a woman's life and is one of the most “moving, revolutionary artworks of the twentieth century” (Michael Cunningham).
Clarissa Dalloway is preoccupied with the last-minute details of preparation for a party while in her mind she is something much more than a perfect society hostess. As she readies her house for friends and neighbors, she is flooded with remembrances of the past—the passionate loves of her carefree youth, her practical choice of husband, and the approach and retreat of war. And, met with the realities of the present, Clarissa reexamines the choices that brought her there, hesitantly looking ahead to the unfamiliar work of growing old.
From the introspective Clarissa, to the lover who never fully recovered from her rejection, to a war-ravaged stranger in the park, the characters and scope of Mrs. Dalloway reshape our sense of ordinary life and reshaped English literature as we know it.
This authorized edition from the Virginia Woolf library features: Biographical Preface Chronology Introduction to the text Extensive notes Suggestions for further reading
This annotated edition is the perfect companion to more fully understand Mrs. Dalloway, its importance in twentieth century literature, and Virginia Woolf's world.

Nurse Lugton's Curtain

by Virginia Woolf

Frozen in the pattern of a drawing-room curtain, a dreamlike world waits patiently while Nurse Lugton sews. As she dozes in the lamplight, the animals adorning the curtain nod to one another and slowly awaken, making their way toward a sparkling lake and a magical town.

This wondrous story by Virginia Woolf was found among the manuscript pages of her Mrs. Dalloway. Julie Vivas's glorious illustrations bring Mrs. Woolf's words to life to create a magical volume that will enchant children and adults alike.

To the Lighthouse (Penguin Vitae)

by Virginia Woolf

A collectible hardcover edition of Virginia Woolf's masterpiece, featuring a new foreword by Patricia Lockwood

A Penguin Vitae Edition

Every summer, Mr. and Mrs. Ramsey and their eight children vacation on Scotland’s idyllic Isle of Skye, surrounded by artist friends. They expect these summers will go on forever, but with the arrival of World War I, they are forced to reckon with change, loss, and time’s unstoppable march, before making, years later, the long-awaited return to Skye and to its towering lighthouse. An intimate, impressionistic meditation on memory, grief, the brutalities of war, and the tensions of domestic life, revolutionary for its use of stream of consciousness and shifting points of view, and infused with a singular poetic essence, To the Lighthouse is both a landmark in modernist writing and one of the greatest literary works of the twentieth century.

Penguin Vitae—loosely translated as "Penguin of one's life"—is a deluxe hardcover series from Penguin Classics celebrating a dynamic and diverse landscape of classic fiction and nonfiction from seventy-five years of classics publishing. Penguin Vitae provides readers with beautifully designed classics that have shaped the course of their lives, and welcomes new readers to discover these literary gifts of personal inspiration, intellectual engagement, and creative originality.

To the Lighthouse: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)

by Virginia Woolf

A must-have new edition of Virginia Woolf’s masterpiece, featuring a cover illustrated by Alison Bechdel, the New York Times bestselling author of Fun Home, and a new foreword by Patricia Lockwood

A Penguin Classics Graphic Deluxe Edition, with flaps and deckle-edged paper

Every summer, Mr. and Mrs. Ramsey and their eight children vacation on Scotland’s idyllic Isle of Skye, surrounded by artist friends. They expect these summers will go on forever, but with the arrival of World War I, they are forced to reckon with change, loss, and time’s unstoppable march, before making, years later, the long-awaited return to Skye and to its towering lighthouse. An intimate, impressionistic meditation on memory, grief, the brutalities of war, and the tensions of domestic life, revolutionary for its use of stream of consciousness and shifting points of view, and infused with a singular poetic essence, To the Lighthouse is both a landmark in modernist writing and one of the greatest literary works of the twentieth century.

This edition is collated from all known proofs, manuscripts, and impressions to reflect the author’s intentions, and includes a catalog of emendations and an introduction by the distinguished biographer and critic Hermione Lee.

For more than seventy-five years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 2,000 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Mrs. Dalloway (Penguin Vitae)

by Virginia Woolf

A collectible hardcover edition of Virginia Woolf's engulfing portrait of one day in a woman's life, featuring a foreword by Jenny Offill, the New York Times bestselling author of Weather and Dept. of Speculation

A Penguin Vitae Edition

"Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself." It's one of the most famous opening lines in literature, that of Virginia Woolf's beloved masterpiece of time, memory, and the city. In the wake of World War I and the 1918 flu pandemic, Clarissa Dalloway, elegant and vivacious, is preparing for a party and remembering those she once loved. In another part of London, Septimus Smith is suffering from shell-shock and on the brink of madness. Their days interweave and their lives converge as the party reaches its glittering climax. In a novel in which she perfects the interior monologue and recapitulates the life cycle in the hours of the day, from first light to the dark of night, Woolf achieves an uncanny simulacrum of consciousness, bringing past, present, and future together, and recording, impression by impression, minute by minute, the feel of life itself.

Penguin Vitae—loosely translated as "Penguin of one's life"—is a deluxe hardcover series from Penguin Classics celebrating a dynamic and diverse landscape of classic fiction and nonfiction from seventy-five years of classics publishing. Penguin Vitae provides readers with beautifully designed classics that have shaped the course of their lives, and welcomes new readers to discover these literary gifts of personal inspiration, intellectual engagement, and creative originality.

Mrs. Dalloway/ A Room of One's Own

by Virginia Woolf

In Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf details Clarissa Dalloway€™s preparations for a party of which she is to be hostess, exploring the hidden springs of thought and action in one day of a woman€™s life. Paired here with A Room of One€™s Own, a masterful and provocative essay on women€™s role in society, this beautiful hardcover edition will be a welcome addition to the library of any Woolf scholar or fan.

The Voyage Out (Modern Library Torchbearers)

by Virginia Woolf

A young woman learns about life, and love found and lost, in this thought-provoking debut novel by one of the twentieth century’s most brilliant and prolific writers—with an introduction by Elisa Gabbert, author of The Unreality of Memory

“Absolutely unafraid . . . Here at last is a book which attains unity as surely as Wuthering Heights, though by a different path.”—E. M. Forster

London, 1905: Twenty-four-year-old Rachel Vinrace is a free spirited but painfully naïve young woman when she embarks on a sea voyage with her family to South America. Arriving in Santa Marina, a town on the South American coast, Rachel and her aunt Helen are introduced to a group of English expatriates, among them the sensitive Terence Hewet, an aspiring writer who is drawn to Rachel’s unusual and dreamy nature. The two fall in love, unaware of the tragedy that lies ahead.

With hints of Jane Austen, The Voyage Out is a softer and more traditional novel than Virginia Woolf’s later work, even as its poetic style and innovative technique—with detailed portraits of characters’ inner lives and mesmeric shifts between the quotidian and the profound—reflect Woolf’s signature style.

The Modern Library Torchbearers series features women who wrote on their own terms, with boldness, creativity, and a spirit of resistance.

Mrs. Dalloway (Vintage Classics)

by Virginia Woolf

This new edition of one of Virginia Woolf’s most celebrated novels features an introduction by Michael Cunningham, acclaimed bestselling author of The Hours.

Mrs. Dalloway chronicles a June day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway–a day that is taken up with running minor errands in preparation for a party and that is punctuated, toward the end, by the death of a young man she has never met. In giving an apparently ordinary day such immense resonance and significance–infusing it with the elemental conflict between death and life–Virginia Woolf triumphantly discovers her distinctive style as a novelist. Originally published in 1925, Mrs. Dalloway is Woolf’s first complete rendering of what she described as the “luminous envelope” of consciousness: a dazzling display of the mind’s inside as it plays over the brilliant surface and darker depths of reality.

This edition uses the text of the original British publication of Mrs. Dalloway, which includes changes Woolf made that never appeared in the first or subsequent American editions.

To the Lighthouse (Vintage Classics)

by Virginia Woolf

A beautiful edition of the groundbreaking classic novel, with a new introduction by award-winning writer Susan Choi

“Without question one of the two or three finest novels of the twentieth century. Woolf comments on the most pressing dramas of our human predicament: war, mortality, family, love.” –Rick Moody, bestselling author of The Ice Storm

The enduring power of this iconic classic flows from the brilliance of its narrative technique and the impressionistic beauty of its prose. Though the novel turns on the death of its central figure, Mrs. Ramsay, her presence pervades every page in a poetic evocation of loss and memory that is also a celebration of domestic life and its most intimate details. Observed across the years at their vacation house on the Isle of Skye, Mrs. Ramsay and her family seek to recapture meaning from the flux of things and the passage of time. To the Lighthouse enacts a moving allegory of the creative consciousness and its momentary triumphs over fleeting material life.

Orlando: A Biography (Vintage Classics)

by Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf's fantastical novel about an Elizabethan nobleman who lives for three centuries and transitions into a woman, with a new introduction by Carmen Maria Machado.

The long-lived protagonist of Orlando begins as a passionate teenage aristocrat, whose days are spent in rowdy revelry at the colorful Tudor court of Queen Elizabeth and his nights in writing earnest poetry. A favorite of the elderly queen, he falls in love with and is jilted by a wayward Russian princess. Two kings later, now in his thirties, Orlando is sent to serve as ambassador to Constantinople, where he awakens one day to find himself in the body of a woman. The Lady Orlando takes this circumstance in stride. She returns to England, engages in love affairs with both men and women, consorts with the famous poets of each age, finds happiness with a gender-nonconforming husband, and at last achieves publication of her own epic poem in the year 1928. A playful and exuberant romp through history, Orlando is Woolf’s most lighthearted and unusual novel. VINTAGE CLASSICS.

A Room of One's Own (Vintage Classics)

by Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf’s classic plea for a world in which women are free to use their gifts is as powerful and resonant as ever.

In this influential extended essay, Virginia Woolf outlined what women need in order to fully make use of their abilities. Using powerful images and memorable thought experiments--such as a fictional sister of William Shakespeare, who is as talented as her brother but limited in ways he was not--Woolf analyzes the many ways in which women have been held back throughout history and still are in her own time. First published in 1929, A Room of One's Own has been a towering and inspirational statement of feminist principles for nearly a century--and remains relevant now, at a time of growing awareness of the kind of social injustices that she decried.

A Truth Universally Acknowledged: 33 Great Writers on Why We Read Jane Austen

by C. S. Lewis, Virginia Woolf, Anna Quindlen

Why are we so fascinated with Jane Austen’s novels? Why is Austen so universally beloved? The essayists in this volume offer their thoughts on the delightful puzzle of Austen’s popularity. Classic and contemporary writers—novelists, essayists, journalists, scholars, and a filmmaker—discuss the tricks and treasures of Austen’s novels, from her witty dialogue, to the arc and sweep of her story lines, to her prescriptions for life and love.

Virginia Woolf examines Austen’s maturation as an artist and speculates on how her writing would have changed had she lived another twenty years, while Anna Quindlen examines the enduring issues of social pressure and gender politics that make Pride and Prejudice as vital today as ever. From Harold Bloom to Martin Amis, Somerset Maugham to Jay McInerney, Eudora Welty to Amy Bloom, each writer reflects on Austen’s place in both the literary canon and our cultural imagination.

Melymbrosia: A Novel

by Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf completed Melymbrosia in 1912 when she was thirty years old. The story concerned the emotional and sexual awakening of a young Englishwoman traveling abroad, and bristled with social commentary on issues as varied as homosexuality, the suffrage movement, and colonialism. She was warned by colleagues, however, that publishing an outspoken indictment of Britain could prove disastrous to her fledgling career as a novelist. Moreover, the critical offensive from men would be especially harsh towards a woman author. Woolf thus revised the novel extensively, omitting much of the political candor until, in 1915, the quieter book was published under the title The Voyage Out. The original Melymbrosia offers a rare look into the formative mind of the modernist master who revolutionized twentieth century literature. Here, one sees the young Virginia Woolf learning her craft.

Like James Joyce’s Stephen Hero, the original treatment of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, or Ralph Ellison’s posthumously published Juneteenth, Melymbrosia is a "lost classic" that owes its existence to the research of a devoted scholar, in this instance Louise DeSalvo, who spent seven years uncovering the original novel from Woolf’s papers in the archives of the New York Public Library.

Night and Day: 100th Anniversary Edition (Restless Classics)

by Virginia Woolf

The 100th Anniversary Edition of Virginia Woolf’s timely, overlooked second novel―a remarkable story of two women navigating the possibilities opened up by the struggle for women’s suffrage―introduced for Restless Classics by bestselling author of Fates and Furies Lauren Groff and illustrated by graphic artist Kristen Radtke.
Since its publication in 1919, Virginia Woolf’s second novel has been largely dismissed as “traditional”―but reading the book more closely today shows us just how prescient and unconventional it was. On its surface, Night and Day plays with the tropes of Shakespearean comedy: We follow the romantic endeavors of two friends, Katharine Hilbery and Mary Datchet, as love is confessed and rebuffed, partners switched, weddings planned and cancelled, until we finally arrive at two engagements. But these dramas play out against the first steps of the women’s suffrage movement, as women’s roles in society fitfully started to shift away from charm, subservience, and self-sacrifice toward equal partnership. Ultimately, Woolf’s novel is a subversive challenge to the male-writer establishment of the Edwardian age―Henry James, E.M. Forster, their forebears and successors―that undercuts the unequal gender dialectic on which their plots depend.
The Virginia Woolf of Night and Day is every bit as brilliant, funny, sharp, and imbued with a deep love of language as in her celebrated later works Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse. What makes Night and Day so remarkable is its devotion to “real life.” As bestselling author of Fates and Furies Lauren Groff writes in her introduction, “Virginia Woolf, in pushing outward in this book toward an articulation of a new and better kind of marriage, doesn’t stop for a moment to try to seduce the reader into loving her characters―she is too fixated on breaking new ground and exploring her ideas.”
This edition, beautifully illustrated by Kristen Radtke, celebrates the 100th anniversary of this key work not only of the Woolf canon, but also of the vital history of feminist literature.

The Annotated Mrs. Dalloway

by Virginia Woolf, Merve Emre

Virginia Woolf’s groundbreaking novel, in a lushly illustrated hardcover edition with illuminating commentary from a brilliant young Oxford scholar and critic.
“Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.” So begins Virginia Woolf’s much-beloved fourth novel. First published in 1925, Mrs. Dalloway has long been viewed not only as Woolf’s masterpiece, but as a pivotal work of literary modernism and one of the most significant and influential novels of the twentieth century. In this visually powerful annotated edition, acclaimed Oxford don and literary critic Merve Emre gives us an authoritative version of this landmark novel, supporting it with generous commentary that reveals Woolf’s aesthetic and political ambitions―in Mrs. Dalloway and beyond―as never before.
Mrs. Dalloway famously takes place over the course of a single day in late June, its plot centering on the upper-class Londoner Clarissa Dalloway, who is preparing to throw a party that evening for the nation’s elite. But the novel is complicated by Woolf’s satire of the English social system, and by her groundbreaking representation of consciousness. The events of the novel flow through the minds and thoughts of Clarissa and her former lover Peter Walsh and others in their circle, but also through shopkeepers and servants, among others. Together Woolf’s characters―each a jumble of memories and perceptions―create a broad portrait of a city and society transformed by the Great War in ways subtle but profound ways. No figure has been more directly shaped by the conflict than the disturbed veteran Septimus Smith, who is plagued by hallucinations of a friend who died in battle, and who becomes the unexpected second hinge of the novel, alongside Clarissa, even though―in one of Woolf’s many radical decisions―the two never meet.
Emre’s extensive introduction and annotations follow the evolution of Clarissa Dalloway―based on an apparently conventional but actually quite complex acquaintance of Woolf’s―and Septimus Smith from earlier short stories and drafts of Mrs. Dalloway to their emergence into the distinctive forms devoted readers of the novel know so well. For Clarissa, Septimus, and her other creations, Woolf relied on the skill of “character reading,” her technique for bridging the gap between life and fiction, reality and representation. As Emre writes, Woolf’s “approach to representing character involved burrowing deep into the processes of consciousness, and, so submerged, illuminating the infinite variety of sensation and perception concealed therein. From these depths, she extracted an unlimited capacity for life.” It is in Woolf’s characters, fundamentally unknowable but fundamentally alive, that the enduring achievement of her art is most apparent. For decades, Woolf’s rapturous style and vision of individual consciousness have challenged and inspired readers, novelists, and scholars alike. The Annotated Mrs. Dalloway, featuring 150 illustrations, draws on decades of Woolf scholarship as well as countless primary sources, including Woolf’s private diaries and notes on writing. The result is not only a transporting edition of Mrs. Dalloway, but an essential volume for Woolf devotees and an incomparable gift to all lovers of literature. 100 color illustrations

Oh, to Be a Painter! (ekphrasis)

by Virginia Woolf

The twentieth volume in the renowned ekphrasis series, this collection of Virginia Woolf’s writings on the visual arts offers a whole new perspective on the revolutionary author.

Despite wide interest in Woolf’s writings, and in the artists and art critics in her Bloomsbury circle, there is no accessible edition or selection of essays dedicated to her writings on art. This volume collects her longest essay on painting, “Walter Sickert: A Conversation” (1934), alongside shorter essays and reviews, including “Pictures and Portraits” (1920) and “Pictures” (1925).

These formally inventive texts reveal the centrality of the visual arts to Woolf’s writing and vision. They show her engaging with contemporary debates about modern art and are innovative in their treatment of ideas about color and form, including in response to the work of her sister, the painter Vanessa Bell, who designed many of her book covers and jackets. In these essays and reviews, Woolf illuminates the complex and interdependent relationship between the artist and society, and reveals her own shifting perspectives during decades of social and political change. She also provides sharp and astute commentary on specific works of art and on the relationship between art and writing.

An introduction by Claudia Tobin situates the essays within their cultural contexts.

How Should One Read a Book?

by Virginia Woolf

"Where are we to begin? How are we to bring order into this multitudinous chaos and so get the deepest and widest pleasure from what we read?"

Published for the first time as a standalone volume, Virginia Woolf's short, impassioned essay, How Should One Read a Book? celebrates the enduring importance of great literature. In this timeless manifesto on the written word, rediscover the joy of reading and the power of a good book to change the world.

One of the most significant modernist writers of the 20th Century, Virginia Woolf and her visionary essays are as relevant today as they were nearly one hundred years ago.

Features a new introduction by Sheila Heti.

Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West: Love Letters (Vintage Classics)

by Virginia Woolf, Vita Sackville-West

With an original introduction by Alison Bechdel, author of Fun Home and creator of the "Bechdel Test."

"I am reduced to a thing that wants Virginia. I composed a beautiful letter to you in the sleepless nightmare hours of the night, and it has all gone. I just miss you, in a quite simple desperate human way."
In 1922, the relatively unknown writer Virginia Woolf met the popular author, aristocrat—and notorious Sapphist—Vita Sackville-West. Virginia didn’t think much of Vita’s conversation, but she did think very highly of her legs. In her diary she wrote: "But could I ever know her?" It was to be the start of nearly 20 years of correspondence, flirtation, literary inspiration, and deep friendship. Virginia would write her most playful novel, Orlando, for and about Vita, and their close bond would end only with Virginia’s tragic death in 1941.
Here is the true love story of Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West, told through selected letters and diary entries, allowing us to hear these women’s complex and constantly changing feelings for each other in their own words. Passionate, witty, and lyrical, their writing gives us a vivid sense of their extraordinary lives: from Vita’s travels across the globe with her foreign diplomat husband, to Virginia’s gossip about parties with the Bloomsbury set; from their shared love of dogs and gardens, to their grief and fear as war breaks out across Europe.
These letters bring to life a relationship that—even a hundred years later—feels radical, relatable, and vital.

Monday or Tuesday (Hesperus Classics)

by Virginia Woolf

A collection of eight deliberately fragmentary and experimental sketches, Monday or Tuesday remains unique in being the only volume of short stories that Virginia Woolf published herself. A woman gazes at a mark on a wall and ponders the vagaries of thought and opinion; a succession of couples are caught up with nostalgia for their past as they stroll among the vibrant flowers of Kew Gardens; a heron soars high above cities and towns, lakes and mountains, while below, life continues in all its mundanity; and blue and green are given their expression in words. Monday or Tuesday is a brilliant and striking series of impressions, written in Woolf’s characteristic lyrical and startling prose.

Mrs Dalloway (Chiltern Classic)

by Virginia Woolf

Chiltern creates the most beautiful editions of the World’s finest literature.
Your favorite classic titles in a way you have never seen them before; the tactile layers, fine details and beautiful colors of these remarkable covers make these titles feel extra special and look striking on any shelf.
Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, first published in 1925, examines one day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, an upper-class Londoner married to a member of Parliament. The novel addresses the nature of time in personal experience through multiple stories, particularly that of Clarissa, as she prepares for and hosts a party, and that of the World War I veteran Septimus Warren Smith, who suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder. The novel is widely considered to be a groundbreaking work of twentieth-century literary fiction.
The narrative begins and ends with Clarissa as it details a day in her life. Clarissa is a seemingly disillusioned socialite whose mood fluctuates: at some moments she seems delighted, at others she seems depressed. Her overall affect suggests suppressed symptoms of depression.
Mrs. Dalloway begins with Clarissa’s preparatory errand to buy flowers. Unexpected events occur―a car emits an explosive noise and a plane writes in the sky―and incite different reactions in different people. Soon after she returns home, her former lover Peter arrives. The two converse, and it becomes clear that they still have strong feelings for each other.

Virginia Woolf: Inspiring Quotes from an Original Feminist Icon

by Virginia Woolf

The first and collection of Virginia Woolf's most inspirational quotes.

'No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself.' Over 100 words of wisdom from the inimitable Virginia Woolf on love, literature, feminism, food, work, ageing, authenticity, nature, truth, happiness and everything in between, carefully selected and curated from Woolf's timeless novels, essays and speeches. A celebration of one of the world's best loved writers and a true feminist icon, in a beautifully packaged, small-format gift book.

Orlando: A Graphic Novel Adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s Queer Classic

by Virginia Woolf

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The Life of Violet: Three Early Stories

by Virginia Woolf

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jacobs-room

by Virginia Woolf

Jacob Flanders is a young man passing from adolescence to adulthood in a hazy rite of passage. From his boyhood on the windswept shores of Cornwall to his days as a student at Cambridge, his elusive, chameleon-like character is gradually revealed in a stream of loosely related incidents and impressions: whether through his mother's letters, his friend's conversations, or the thoughts of the women who adore him. Then we glimpse him as a young man, caught under the glare of a London streetlamp. It is 1914, he is twenty-six, and Europe is on the brink of war... This tantalizing novel heralded Woolf's bold departure from the traditional methods of the novel, with its experimental play between time and reality, memory and desire.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Night and Day (Penguin Twentieth Century Classics)

by Virginia Woolf

An immaculately-observed social comedy that explores the boundaries between personal freedom and the demands of love

Katharine Hilbery is beautiful and privileged, but uncertain of her future. She must choose between becoming engaged to the oddly prosaic poet William Rodney, and her dangerous attraction to the passionate Ralph Denham. As she struggles to decide, the lives of two other women—women's rights activist Mary Datchet and Katharine's mother, Margaret, struggling to weave together the documents, events and memories of her own father's life into a biography—impinge on hers with unexpected and intriguing consequences. Virginia Woolf's delicate second novel is both a love story and a social comedy, yet it also subtly undermines these traditions, questioning a woman's role and the very nature of experience. This edition of Night and Day includes a detailed introduction by Julia Briggs, which considers the key themes of the novel and its place in the tradition of social comedy, a map of central London of the period and notes.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

The Virginia Woolf Signature Edition: An Inspiring Notebook for Curious Minds (The Signature Notebook Series)

by Virginia Woolf

Chase your inspiration alongside inspiring quotes from English author Virginia Woolf.
Become inspired by quotes from one of the most influential feminist authors of the 20th century. The perfect gift for anyone delving into the secrets of the subconscious or tying together threads of daily life into elaborate masterpieces. Embossed with Virginia Woolf's looping signature, a smooth, simulated-moleskin binding gives this notebook a cover even Mrs. Dalloway would approve of. Whether penning stream of consciousness fiction or your grocery list, this notebook is full of enough quotes to keep you writing long into the night.

Kew Gardens

by Virginia Woolf

"White butterflies danced one above another, making with their white shifting flakes the outline of a shattered marble column above the tallest flowers; the glass roofs of the palm house shone as if a whole market full of shiny green umbrellas had opened in the sun; and in the drone of the aeroplane the voice of the summer sky murmured its fierce soul."

On a hot summer's day, the Palm House at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, sees the shuffle of thousands of visitors. While some are glad to catch a moment's rest, others have been inspired by the house's magnificent displays--both floral and human. A century ago, one of the Garden's most famous visitors turned her observations into an enchanting story.

Kew Gardens is one of Virginia Woolf's earliest short stories. The gentle narrative drifts among an eclectic group of visitors as they stroll through the Gardens, including a young couple, a pair of middle-aged ladies looking for tea, and even a snail making a determined trek through the flower beds. Woolf creates an impressionistic world with snippets of conversation, wondering thoughts, and sparks of color.

This edition published by Kew features delightful illustrations by Livi Mills. It will be a treasured addition to the bookshelves of Woolfians everywhere.

Modern Classics Room of Ones Own (Penguin Modern Classics)

by Virginia Woolf

Collecting two book-length essays, A Room of One's Own and Three Guineas is Virginia Woolf's most powerful feminist writing, justifying the need for women to possess intellectual freedom and financial independence. This Penguin Modern Classics edition is edited with an introduction and notes by Michele Barrett. A Room of One's Own, based on a lecture given at Girton College, Cambridge, is one of the great feminist polemics, ranging in its themes from Jane Austen and Carlotte Brontë to the silent fate of Shakespeare's gifted (imaginary) sister and the effects of poverty and sexual constraint on female creativity. Three Guineas was published almost a decade later and breaks new ground in its discussion of men, militarism and women's attitudes towards war. These two pieces reveal Virginia Woolf's fiery spirit and sophisticated wit, and confirm her status as a highly inspirational essayist. Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) is regarded as a major 20th century author and essayist, a key figure in literary history as a feminist and modernist, and the centre of 'The Bloomsbury Group'. This informal collective of artists and writers which included Lytton Strachey and Roger Fry, exerted a powerful influence over early twentieth-century British culture. Between 1925 and 1931 Virginia Woolf produced what are now regarded as her finest masterpieces, from Mrs Dalloway (1925) to the poetic and highly experimental novel The Waves (1931). She also maintained an astonishing output of literary criticism, short fiction, journalism and biography, including the playfully subversive Orlando (1928) and A Room of One's Own (1929) a passionate feminist essay. If you enjoyed A Room of One's Own, you might like Woolf's Orlando, also available in Penguin Modern Classics. 'Probably the most influential piece of non-fictional writing by a woman in this century' Hermione Lee, Financial Times

A Room of One's Own/Three Guineas

by Virginia Woolf

A Room of One's Own, based on a lecture given at Girton College Cambridge, is one of the great feminist polemics, ranging in its themes from Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte to the silent fate of Shakespeare's gifted (imaginary) sister and the effects of poverty and sexual constraint on female creativity. Three Guineas was published almost a decade later and breaks new ground in its discussion of men, militarism and women's attitudes towards war. These two pieces reveal Virginia Woolf's fiery spirit and sophisticated wit and confirm her status as a highly inspirational essayist.

The Years

by Virginia Woolf

The most popular of Virginia Woolf's novels during her lifetime, The Years is a savage indictment of British society at the turn of the century, edited with an introduction and notes by Jeri Johnson in Penguin Modern Classics. The Years is the story of three generations of the Pargiter family - their intimacies and estrangements, anxieties and triumphs - mapped out against the bustling rhythms of London's streets during the first decades of the twentieth century. Growing up in a typically Victorian household, the Pargiter children must learn to find their footing in an alternative world, where the rules of etiquette have shifted from the drawing-room to the air-raid shelter. A work of fluid and dazzling lucidity, The Years eschews a simple line of development in favour of a varied and constantly changing style, emphasises the radical discontinuity of personal experiences and historical events. Virginia Woolf's penultimate novel celebrates the resilience of the individual self and, in her dazzlingly fluid and distinctive voice, she confidently paints a broad canvas across time, generation and class. Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) is regarded as a major 20th century author and essayist, a key figure in literary history as a feminist and modernist, and the centre of 'The Bloomsbury Group'. This informal collective of artists and writers which included Lytton Strachey and Roger Fry, exerted a powerful influence over early twentieth-century British culture. Between 1925 and 1931 Virginia Woolf produced what are now regarded as her finest masterpieces, from Mrs Dalloway (1925) to the poetic and highly experimental novel The Waves (1931). She also maintained an astonishing output of literary criticism, short fiction, journalism and biography, including the playfully subversive Orlando (1928) and A Room of One's Own (1929) a passionate feminist essay. If you enjoyed The Years, you might also like Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End, also available in Penguin Classics. 'Inspired ... a brilliant fantasia of all Time's problems, age and youth, change and performance, truth and illusion' The Times Literary Supplement

The Years

by Virginia Woolf

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.

Modern Classics To the Lighthouse (Penguin Modern Classics)

by Virginia Woolf

A pioneering work of modernist fiction, using her unique stream-of-consciousness technique to explore the inner lives of her characters, Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse is widely regarded as one of the greatest artistic achievements of the twentieth century. This Penguin Classics edition is edited by Stella McNichol, with an introduction and notes by Hermione Lee. To the Lighthouse is at once a vivid impressionistic depiction of a family holiday, and a meditation on marriage, on parenthood and childhood, on grief, tyranny and bitterness. For years now the Ramsays have spent every summer in their holiday home in Scotland, and they expect these summers will go on forever; but as the First World War looms, the integrity of family and society will be fatally challenged. With a psychologically introspective mode, the use of memory, reminiscence and shifting perspectives gives the novel an intimate, poetic essence, and at the time of publication in 1927 it represented an utter rejection of Victorian and Edwardian literary values. Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) is regarded as a major 20th century author and essayist, a key figure in literary history as a feminist and modernist, and the centre of 'The Bloomsbury Group', an informal collective of artists and writers that exerted a powerful influence over early twentieth-century British culture. Between 1925 and 1931 Virginia Woolf produced what are now regarded as her finest masterpieces, from Mrs Dalloway (1925) to the poetic and highly experimental novel The Waves (1931). She also maintained an astonishing output of literary criticism, short fiction, journalism and biography, including the playfully subversive Orlando (1928) and A Room of One's Own (1929) a passionate feminist essay. If you enjoyed To the Lighthouse, you might like James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, also available in Penguin Classics. 'Bears endless re-reading ... the sea encircles the story in a brilliant ebb and flow' Rachel Billington

Modern Classics Mrs Dalloway (Penguin Modern Classics)

by Virginia Woolf

A brand new series of five of Woolf's major works, in beautifully designed hardback editions On a June morning in 1923, Clarissa Dalloway is preparing for a party and remembering her past. Elsewhere in London, Septimus Smith is suffering from shell-shock and on the brink of madness. Their days interweave and their lives converge as the party reaches its glittering climax. Here, Virginia Woolf perfected the interior monologue and the novel's lyricism and accessibility have made it one of her most popular works.

Modern Classics Orlando a Biography (Penguin Modern Classics)

by Virginia Woolf

Once described as the 'longest and most charming love-letter in literature', the Virginia Woolf's Orlando is edited by Brenda Lyons with an introduction and notes by Sandra M. Gilbert in Penguin Classics. Written for Virginia Woolf's intimate friend, the charismatic writer Vita Sackville-West, Orlando is a playful mock 'biography' of a chameleonic historical figure, immortal and ageless, who changes sex and identity on a whim. First masculine, then feminine, Orlando begins life as a young sixteenth-century nobleman, then gallops through three centuries to end up as a woman writer in Virginia Woolf's own time. A wry commentary on gender roles and modes of history, Orlando is also, in Woolf's own words, a light-hearted 'writer's holiday' which delights in ambiguity and capriciousness. Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) is regarded as a major 20th century author and essayist, a key figure in literary history as a feminist and modernist, and the centre of 'The Bloomsbury Group'. This informal collective of artists and writers, which included Lytton Strachey and Roger Fry, exerted a powerful influence over early twentieth-century British culture. Between 1925 and 1931 Virginia Woolf produced what are now regarded as her finest masterpieces, from Mrs Dalloway (1925) to the poetic and highly experimental novel The Waves (1931). She also maintained an astonishing output of literary criticism, short fiction, journalism and biography, including the playfully subversive Orlando (1928) and A Room of One's Own (1929) a passionate feminist essay. If you enjoyed Orlando, you might like Woolf's The Waves, also available in Penguin Modern Classics. 'I read this book and believed it was a hallucinogenic, interactive biography of my own life and future' Tilda Swinton

A Haunted House And Other Short Stories

by Virginia Woolf

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.

Selected Essays (Oxford World’s Classics)

by Virginia Woolf

This selection brings together thirty of Woolf's best essays across a wide range of subjects including writing and reading, the role and reputation of women writers, the art of biography, and the London scene. They are enchanting in their own right, and indispensable to an understanding of this great writer. Published On: 2011-04-25

Moments of Being

by Virginia Woolf

Moments of Being is “the single most moving and beautiful thing that Virginia Woolf ever wrote about her own life” (The New York Times) and her only autobiographical writing, published years after her death.
This collection of five pieces written for different audiences spanning almost four decades reveals the remarkable unity of Virginia Woolf’s art, thought, and sensibility.?
“Reminiscences,” written during her apprenticeship period, exposes the childhood shared by Woolf and her sister, Vanessa, while “A Sketch of the Past” illuminates the relationship with her father, Leslie Stephens, who played a crucial role in her development as an individual a writer. Of the final three pieces, composed for the Memoir Club, which required absolute candor of its members, two show Woolf at the threshold of artistic maturity and one shows a confident writer poking fun at her own foibles.

The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf

by Virginia Woolf

Though she is best known as a novelist, this comprehensive volume displays Virginia Woolf as a master of short fiction. In almost fifty sketches and stories, Woolf updated the narrative models of her day with a powerful avant-garde style that later distinguished her classic novels. [This book] chronicles thirty-five years of Woolf's most innovative writing. From early works such as "The Mark on the Wall" and "Kew Gardens" to later works in which she explores marriage, such as "The Legacy" and "Lappin and Lapinova," the contents of this collection successfully showcase the range of the author's genius. -- Back cover.

Between The Acts (annotated)

by Virginia Woolf, Mark Hussey

The annotated, authorized edition of the renowned author’s last novel with commentary by literary critic and Virginia Woolf specialist Melba Cuddy-Keane.
Between the Acts takes place on one summer’s day at a country house in the heart of England, where the villagers are presenting their annual pageant as World War II looms.
In the garden of Pointz Hall, the Oliver family’s country seat, everyone from the village has gathered to present the traditional pageant—scenes from the history of England starting with the Middle Ages. As the story of England unfolds, the lives of the villagers also take shape. The past blends with the present and art blends with life in a narrative full of invention and lyricism.
Through her character’s passionate musings and private dramas, and through the enigmatic figure of the pageant author, Miss La Trobe, Virginia Woolf’s final novel both celebrates and satirizes Englishness. Even so, the coming of war hangs over the whole community, heralding a new act.
This authorized edition from the Virginia Woolf library features: Biographical Preface Chronology Introduction to the text Extensive notes Suggestions for further reading
This annotated edition is the perfect companion to more fully understand Between the Acts, its importance in twentieth century literature, and Virginia Woolf's world.

The Voyage Out (Oxford World's Classics)

by Virginia Woolf

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. Lorna Sage's Introduction and Explanatory Notes offer guidance to the reader new to Woolf, and illuminate Woolf's presence, not identifiable in the heroine, but in the social satire, lyricism and patterning of consciousness in one woman's rite of passage.

About the Series: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

Flush: A Biography

by Virginia Woolf

This story of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s cocker spaniel, Flush, enchants right from the opening pages. Although Flush has adventures of his own with bullying dogs, horrid maids, and robbers, he also provides the reader with a glimpse into Browning’s life. Introduction by Trekkie Ritchie.

Jacob's Room (annotated)

by Virginia Woolf, Mark Hussey

Woolf's first distinctly modernist novel follows an aloof yet beloved young man from his childhood through his student days to his too-early death during World War I.

Annotated and with an introduction by Vara Neverow

The Years (annotated)

by Virginia Woolf, Mark Hussey

The Years is a sweeping tale of three generations of the Pargiter family, from the late nineteenth century to the 1930s, in the thick of life's cycles of birth, death, and the search for a pattern in all the chaos. Annotated and with an introduction by Eleanor McNees

The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 3: 1919-1924

by Virginia Woolf

During the period in which these essays were written, Woolf published Night and Day and Jacob's Room, contributed widely to British and American periodicals, and progressed from straight reviewing to more extended critical essays. "Excellently edited, the essays reconfirm [Woolf's] major importance as a twentieth-century writer" (Library Journal). Edited and with an Introduction by Andrew McNeillie; Index.

Between the Acts

by Virginia Woolf

In Virginia Woolf’s lyrical, inventive last novel, the action takes place on one summer’s day at a country house in the heart of England on the eve of World War II.
“Love. Hate. Peace. Three emotions made the ply of human life.” Between the Acts takes place on a June day in 1939 at Pointz Hall, the Oliver family’s country house in the heart of England. In the garden, everyone from the village has gathered to present the annual pageant — scenes from the history of England starting with the Middle Ages. As the story of England unfolds, the lives of the villagers also take shape.
The past blends with the present and art blends with life in a narrative full of invention, affection, and lyricism. Through her characters' passionate musings and private dramas, and through the enigmatic figure of the pageant's author, Miss La Trobe, Virginia Woolf's final novel both celebrates and mocks Englishness. Even so, the coming of war looms over the whole community, heralding a new act.

On Being Ill: with Notes from Sick Rooms by Julia Stephen (Paris Press)

by Virginia Woolf

With magnificent language, Virginia Woolf explores the ways that illness transforms our perceptions

This new publication of On Being Ill with Notes from Sick Rooms presents Virginia Woolf and her mother Julia Stephen in textual conversation for the first time in literary history. In the poignant and humorous essay On Being Ill, Virginia Woolf observes that though illness is a part of every human being's experience, it is not celebrated as a subject of great literature in the way that love and war are embraced by writers and readers. We must, Woolf says, invent a new language to describe pain. Illness, she observes, enhances our perceptions and reduces self-consciousness; it is "the great confessional." Woolf discusses the taboos associated with illness and she explores how it changes our relationship to the world around us. Notes from Sick Rooms addresses illness from the caregiver's perspective. With clarity, humor, and pathos, Julia Stephen offers concrete and useful information to caregivers today.

Originally published by Paris Press in 2002 as On Being Ill, this paperback edition includes an introduction to Notes from Sick Rooms and to Julia Stephen by Mark Hussey, the founding editor of Woolf Studies Annual, and a poignant afterword by Rita Charon, MD, the founder of the field of Narrative Medicine. Hermione Lee's brilliant introduction to On Being Ill is a superb introduction to Virginia Woolf's life and writing. This book is embraced by the general public, the literary world, and the medical world.

Night and Day

by Virginia Woolf

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 the demands of the previous generation without disowning it altogether. Katherine must decide whether or not she loves the iconoclastic Ralph Denham; Woolf seeks a way of experimenting with the novel for that still allows her to express her affection for the literature of the past. This is the most traditional of Woolf's novels, yet even here we can see her beginning to break free; in this, her second novel, with its strange mixture of comedy and high seriousness, Woolf had already found her own characteristic voice. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

Mrs. Dalloway : Introduction by Nadia Fusini

by Virginia Woolf

 Mrs. Dalloway chronicles a June day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway–a day that is taken up with running minor errands in preparation for a party and that is punctuated, toward the end, by the suicide of a young man she has never met. In giving an apparently ordinary day such immense resonance and significance–infusing it with the elemental conflict between death and life–Virginia Woolf triumphantly discovers her distinctive style as a novelist. Originally published in 1925, Mrs. Dalloway is Woolf’s first complete rendering of what she described as the “luminous envelope” of consciousness: a dazzling display of the mind’s inside as it plays over the brilliant surface and darker depths of reality. This edition uses the text of the original British publication of Mrs. Dalloway, which includes changes Woolf made that never appeared in the first or subsequent American editions.(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)

Jacob's Room: A Norton Critical Edition (Norton Critical Editions)

by Virginia Woolf

Jacob’s Room is Virginia Woolf’s experimental third novel, set in England during the halcyon days before World War I. The text reprinted here is the first British edition, which Woolf approved, and which retains her original layout, including paragraph spacing. A generous “Contexts” section provides extracts from Woolf’s diaries and letters as well as comments on the novel from her fellow writers and friends, among them E. M. Forster and T. S. Eliot. Also included are the short stories “The Mark on the Wall,” “Kew Gardens,” and “An Unwritten Novel,” which Woolf viewed as early experiments with the innovative method used in Jacob’s Room. An additional short story, “A Woman’s College from Outside,” which Woolf originally intended to be Chapter 10 of Jacob’s Room, is also included. Finally, Woolf’s classic essay “Modern Novels,” written shortly before she began work on Jacob’s Room, provides insight into her aesthetic and technique.

“Criticism” is divided into two sections: “Contemporary Reception and Reviews” contains personal responses to the novel, from Lytton Strachey and E. M. Forster, as well as eleven reviews from contemporary periodicals. “Critical Essays” offers insightful interpretations by Judy Little, Alex Zwerdling, Kate Flint, Kathleen Wall, and Edward L. Bishop.

A Selected Bibliography is also included.

Modern Classics Between the Acts (Penguin Modern Classics)

by Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf's last novel, in equal parts a triumphant celebration and witty mockery of 'Englishness', Between the Acts is edited by Stella McNichol, with an introduction and notes by Gillian Beer in Penguin Modern Classics. Outwardly a novel about life in a country house in whose grounds there is to be a pageant, Between the Acts is also a striking evocation of English experience in the months leading up to the Second World War. Through dialogue, humour and the passionate musings of the characters, Virginia Woolf explores how a community is formed (and scattered) over time. The tableau, a series of scenes from English history, and the private dramas that go on between the acts are closely interlinked. Through the figure of Miss La Trobe, author of the pageant, Virginia Woolf questions imperialist assumptions and, at the same time, re-creates the elusive role of the artist. Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) is regarded as a major 20th century author and essayist, a key figure in literary history as a feminist and modernist, and the centre of 'The Bloomsbury Group'. This informal collective of artists and writers which included Lytton Strachey and Roger Fry, exerted a powerful influence over early twentieth-century British culture. Between 1925 and 1931 Virginia Woolf produced what are now regarded as her finest masterpieces, from Mrs Dalloway (1925) to the poetic and highly experimental novel The Waves (1931). She also maintained an astonishing output of literary criticism, short fiction, journalism and biography, including the playfully subversive Orlando (1928) and A Room of One's Own (1929) a passionate feminist essay. If you enjoyed Between the Acts, you might like Woolf's The Waves, also available in Penguin Modern Classics. 'A powerful and prophetic statement' Richard Shone, The Times

The Charleston Bulletin Supplements

by Virginia Woolf, Quentin Bell

In the summer of 1923, Virginia Woolf’s nephews, Quentin and Julian Bell, founded a family newspaper, The Charleston Bulletin. Quentin decided to ask his aunt Virginia for a contribution: “It seemed stupid to have a real author so close at hand and not have her contribute.” But instead of an occasional contribution, Woolf joined forces with Quentin, and from 1923 until 1927, they created booklets of stories and drawings that were announced within the household as Supplements. Written or dictated by Woolf and illustrated by Quentin, these Supplements present a unique collaboration between the novelist during her most prolific years and the child-painter. In Virginia Woolf, Quentin Bell found not only a professional author and an experienced journalist, but, above all, a close companion and conspirator who shared his irreverence and, more often than not, his mischievous sense of humor.

The Supplements are transcribed in full here for the first time alongside forty of Bell’s original illustrations. The articles describe the escapades of family members, household servants, and associates of the Bloomsbury Group, leaving nobody unscathed by the sharp wit of aunt and nephew. Designed to tease the adults, they portray Bloomsbury eccentricities along with the foibles and mishaps of the residents and visitors at Charleston. This is the first time the Supplements have been published since they were written, and will be welcomed by fans of Woolf and her circle.

The Voyage Out (Dover Value Editions)

by Virginia Woolf

"A strange, tragic, inspired novel . . . as poignant as anything in modern fiction." — E. M. Forster
This acclaimed novel marked the debut of one of the twentieth century's most brilliant and important writers. In Virginia Woolf's captivating exploration of a young woman's growing self-awareness, the events of a shipboard journey to South America parallel the naive heroine's inner quest. Her experiences, from a first kiss to a surprising flowering of real love, may inspire the reader to reflect on gender roles in society, love among intellectuals, and the strivings and sorrows of life.
The Voyage Out offers an excellent introduction to Woolf's writing. Not only is it the first of her novels, it is also one of the most accessible. Less formally experimental than Woolf's later books, but highly representative of her poetic style and innovative techniques, it offers a moving depiction of the thrills and confusion of youth.

The Voyage Out

by Virginia Woolf

The Modern Library is proud to include Virginia Woolf's first novel, The Voyage Out--together with a new Introduction by Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Michael Cunningham. Published to acclaim in England in 1915 and in America five years later, The Voyage Out marks Woolf's beginning as one of the twentieth century's most brilliant and prolific writers.

Less formally experimental than her later novels, The Voyage Out none-theless clearly lays bare the poetic style and innovative technique--with its multiple figures of consciousness, its detailed portraits of characters' inner lives, and its constant shifting between the quotidian and the profound--that are the signature of Woolf's fiction.

Rachel Vinrace, Woolf's first heroine, is a motherless young woman who, at twenty-four, embarks on a sea voyage with a party of other English folk to South America. Guileless, and with only a smattering of education, Rachel is taken under the wing of her aunt Helen, who desires to teach Rachel "how to live."Arriving in Santa Marina, a village on the South American coast, Rachel and Helen are introduced to a group of English expatriates. Among them is the young, sensitive Terence Hewet, an aspiring writer, with whom Rachel falls in love. But theirs is ultimately a tale of doomed love, set against a chorus of other stories and other points of view, as the narrative shifts focus between its central and peripheral characters. E. M. Forster praised The Voyage Out as "a book which attains unity as surely as Wuthering Heights, though by a different path."

This edition includes a new Introduction by Michael Cunningham, bestselling author of The Hours. Cunningham at once unfolds an engaging short essay of Woolf's early life and career, an insightful exploration of the themes to which Woolf returns again and again in her fiction, and a spirited defense of the relevance and lasting importance of her art. Katherine Anne Porter wrote of Woolf: "The world of arts was her native territory; she ranged freely under her own sky, speaking her mother tongue fearlessly."

The Death of the Moth and Other Essays

by Virginia Woolf

A highly acclaimed collection of twenty-eight essays, sketches, and short stories presenting nearly every facet of the author's work. "Up to the author's highest standard in a literary form that was most congenial to her" (Times Literary Supplement (London)). "Exquisitely written" (New Yorker); "The riches of this book are overwhelming" (Christian Science Monitor). Editorial Note by Leonard Woolf.

The Common Reader: First Series, Annotated Edition

by Virginia Woolf

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.” Edited and with an Introduction by Andrew McNeillie; Index.

Mrs Dalloway (Vintage Classics Woolf Series)

by Virginia Woolf

In this vivid portrait of one day in a woman's life, Clarissa Dalloway is preoccupied with the last-minute details of a party she is to give that evening. As she readies her house she is flooded with memories and re-examines the choices she has made over the course of her life.

Room of One's Own and Three Guineas (Vintage Classics Woolf Series)

by Virginia Woolf

WITH AN INTRODUCTION, PLUS EXTENSIVE NOTES AND REFERENCES BY HERMIONE LEEThis volume combines two books which were among the greatest contributions to feminist literature this century. Together they form a brilliant attack on sexual inequality. A Room of One's Own, first published in 1929, is a witty, urbane and persuasive argument against the intellectual subjection of women, particularly women writers. The sequel, Three Guineas, is a passionate polemic which draws a startling comparison between the tyrannous hypocrisy of the Victorian patriarchal system and the evils of fascism.

The Waves (vintage Classics Woolf Series)

by Virginia Woolf

WITH INTRODUCTIONS BY JEANETTE WINTERSON AND GILLIAN BEERThe Waves is an astonishingly beautiful and poetic novel. It begins with six children playing in a garden by the sea and follows their lives as they grow up and experience friendship, love and grief at the death of their beloved friend Percival. Regarded by many as her greatest work, The Waves is also seen as Virginia Woolf's response to the loss of her brother Thoby, who died when he was twenty-six.The Vintage Classics Virginia Woolf series has been curated by Jeanette Winterson, and the texts used are based on the original Hogarth Press editions published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf.

Two Stories

by Virginia Woolf, Mark Haddon

Hogarth Press's first publication appeared in 1917: Two Stories, bound in bright Japanese paper, contained a short story from both Virginia and Leonard Woolf. Typeset and bound by Virginia, with illustrations by Dora Carrington, 134 copies were printed by Leonard using a small handpress installed in the dining room at Hogarth House. To celebrate the 100th anniversary of "Publication No. 1," this new edition of Two Stories takes the original text of Virginia’s story, "The Mark on the Wall" (with illustrations by Dora Carrington), and pairs it with a new story, "St Brides Bay," by Mark Haddon, a lifelong reader of Virginia Woolf. Two Stories also includes a portrait of Virginia Woolf by Mark Haddon, and a short introduction from the publisher about the founding of the Press.

Chekhov's Three Sisters and Woolf's Orlando Two Renderings for the Stage

by Virginia Woolf, Anton Chekhov

Adaptations of two classic works through the unique lens of playwright Sarah Ruhl.

The Collected Essays and Letters of Virginia Woolf

by Virginia Woolf

This book contains a fantastic collection of Virginia Woolf's best essays and letters on a range of subjects including feminism, war, the works of other writers, and more. Contents include: "Virginia Woolf", "Henry James: The Old Order", "Henry James: Within the Rim", "The Letters of Henry James", "David Copperfield", "Professions for Women", "The Rev William Cole", "A Letter to a Young Poet", "Twelfth Night", "At the Old Vic", "Lord Chesterfield's Letters to his Son", "Reflections at Sheffield Place", "Craftsmanship", "The Historian and 'The Gibbon'", "Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid", etc. Adeline Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) was an English writer. She is widely hailed as being among the most influential modernist authors of the 20th century and a pioneer of stream of consciousness narration. Woolf was a central figure in the feminist criticism movement of the 1970s, her works having inspired countless women to take up the cause. She suffered numerous nervous breakdowns during her life primarily as a result of the deaths of family members, and it is now believed that she may have suffered from bipolar disorder. In 1941, Woolf drowned herself in the River Ouse at Lewes, aged 59. Other notable works by this author include: "Pattledom" (1925), "A Room of One's Own" (1929), and "The Waves" (1931). Read & Co. Great Essays is publishing this brand new collection of classic essays now complete with a specially-commissioned biography of the author.

Essays on the Self (Classic Collection)

by Virginia Woolf

Questions of identity and individual experience are addressed by Virgina Woolf in this superb collection

The Notting Hill Editions Classic Collection series brings together the great essayists of the past, introduced by contemporary writers. Essays on the Self is a surprising collection spanning twenty-one years of Virginia Woolf’s life, from the ages of thirty-seven to fifty-eight, the year before her suicide. The question of the self is central, in some way, to every essay in this book. Whether she is discussing the rights of women, the revolutions of modernity, social inequality, or the future of the novel, Woolf acknowledges that a writer’s task is to find a unique self through which to view the world. The thirteen essays are introduced by the novelist Joanna Kavenna.

A Room of One's Own (Deluxe, Hardbound Edition)

by Virginia Woolf

This keepsake edition presents Virginia Woolf's powerful extended essay, first published in 1929.

• If a woman is to write fiction, ''she must have money and a room of her own.'' Incisive and entertaining, this feminist classic remains relevant to this day.
• Elegant gift edition is embossed and embellished with gold foil.
• Each turn of the page is accentuated by gilded-gold edges that catch the light.
• Premium paper is acid-free and of archival quality.
• Designed for portability, compact volume measures 4-1/2'' wide x 7-1/2'' high.
• A must for any library.

An influential English writer of the 20th century, Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) is renowned as a modernist and feminist. Her timeless classic, A Room of One's Own, continues to offer profound insights into the ability of women to freely express themselves.

The Hours / Mrs. Dalloway A Novel

by Virginia Woolf, Michael Cunningham

Michael Cunningham brings together his Pulitzer Prize–winning novel with the masterpiece that inspired it, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway.

In The Hours, the acclaimed author Michael Cunningham draws inventively on the life and work of Virginia Woolf and the story of her novel, Mrs. Dalloway, to tell the story of a group of contemporary characters struggling with the conflicting claims of love and inheritance, hope and despair. In this edition, Cunningham brings his own Pulitzer Prize–winning novel together with Woolf’s masterpiece, which has long been hailed as a groundbreaking work of literary fiction and one of the finest novels written in English.

The two novels, published side by side with a new introduction by Cunningham, display the extent of their affinity, and each illuminates new facets of the other in this joint volume. In his introduction, Cunningham re-creates the wonderment of his first encounter with Mrs. Dalloway at fifteen—as he writes, “I was lost. I was gone. I never recovered.” With this edition, Cunningham allows us to disappear into the world of Woolf and into his own brilliant mind.

Virginia's Sisters

by Virginia Woolf, Edith Wharton, Anna Akhmatova, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Zelda Fitzgerald, Marina Tsvetaeva

The anthology includes stories and poems by well-known authors such as Virginia Woolf, Radclyffe Hall, Alice Dunbar Nelson, Gertrude Stein, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Zelda Fitzgerald, Edith Wharton, Emma Goldman, Katherine Mansfield as well as many new translations of international women's writing from the same period. These include writers such as Colette, Maria Messina, Antonia Pozzi, Fani Popova Mutafova, Magda Isanos, Gabriela Mistral, Carmen de Burgos, Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetaeva, May Ziadeh, Yenta Serdatzky and others.

A Room of One's Own Introduction by Merve Emre

by Virginia Woolf

A Contemporary Classics hardcover edition of Virginia Woolf’s classic plea for a world in which women are free to use their gifts.

In this influential extended essay, Woolf outlines what women need in order to fully make use of their innate abilities. Using provocative images and memorable thought experiments—including the fictional Judith Shakespeare, who is as talented as her brother William but limited in ways he was not—Woolf decries the means by which women have been held back throughout history and in her own time.

Woolf urges both men and women to break free of the limitations of their roles and develop new traditions in which they can explore the depths and peaks of human experience through writing about ordinary things and ordinary people—a process in which she herself was a pioneer. A Room of One's Own, first published in 1929, has been a rallying cry for generations of women and continues to be an inspiration in our own century.

Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket. Contemporary Classics include an introduction, a select bibliography, and a chronology of the author's life and times.

Orlando

by Virginia Woolf

A collectible hardcover edition of Virginia Woolf’s pioneering novel about a time-traveling sixteenth-century nobleman who wakes up in the body of a woman, with a new foreword by Andrea Lawlor, author of Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl

“A brilliant book that teaches you so much about identity and love—all these fundamental questions that we ask ourselves.” —Emma Corrin

“I read this book and believed it was a hallucinogenic, interactive biography of my own life and future.” —Tilda Swinton

A Penguin Vitae Edition

First masculine, then feminine, Orlando is a young sixteenth-century nobleman who gallops through the centuries, from Elizabethan England and imperial Turkey to Virginia Woolf’s own time. Will he find happiness with the exotic Russian Princess Sasha? Or is the dashing explorer Shelmerdine the ideal man? And what form will Orlando take on the journey—a nobleman, traveler, writer? Man or . . . woman?
 
Written for the charismatic, bisexual writer Vita Sackville-West, Orlando is one of Woolf’s most popular and accessible novels, a playful mock biography of a chameleon-like historical figure that is both a wry commentary on gender and, in Woolf’s own words, a “writer’s holiday” that delights in its ambiguity and capriciousness.

This edition is collated from all known proofs, manuscripts, and impressions to reflect the author’s intentions, and includes an illuminating introduction and notes by the distinguished scholar and coauthor of The Madwoman in the Attic Sandra M. Gibert.

Penguin Vitae—loosely translated as “Penguin of one’s life”—is a deluxe hardcover series from Penguin Classics celebrating a dynamic and diverse landscape of classic fiction and nonfiction from seventy-five years of classics publishing. Penguin Vitae provides readers with beautifully designed classics that have shaped the course of their lives, and welcomes new readers to discover these literary gifts of personal inspiration, intellectual engagement, and creative originality.

A Passionate Apprentice The Early Journals, 1897-1909

by Virginia Woolf, Leaska

These early journals record Virginia Woolf's "sublime trajectory" (Bloomsbury Review) from a gifted adolescent to a professional writer and complete the magnificent self-portrait provided by her published letters and diaries. Edited and with a Preface and Introduction by Mitchell A. Leaska; Index.

Mrs Dalloway

by Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf’s stream-of-consciousness modernist masterpiece.

The New Dress

by Virginia Woolf

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books

'Waking, I cry "Oh, is this your - buried treasure? The light in the heart."'

In these exquisite stories from the genius of English modernism, everyday objects acquire profound significance: a lump of buried green glass leads to a lifetime of obsession; a mark on the wall prompts a questioning of reality itself; a pale-yellow silk dress provokes a painful self-reckoning. Beautiful, strange and pioneering, each piece is a small precious stone to be held to the light and savoured.

On Being Ill

by Virginia Woolf

"Always to have sympathy, always to be accompanied, always to be understood would be intolerable."

Virginia Woolf's essay begins by lamenting the surprise neglect of ill-health as a potential literary subject. What then unfolds is a dazzlingly written series of reflections on sickness, fiction, and the chilling indifference of the natural world. Above all a testament to the fundamental solitariness of the human soul, this is an indispensable work by the preeminent stylist of twentieth-century English literature.

Orlando A Biography

by Virginia Woolf

'I feel the need of an escapade after these serious poetic experimental books...I want to kick up my heels & be off.'

Orlando tells the tale of an extraordinary individual who lives through centuries of English history, first as a man, then as a woman; of his/her encounters with queens, kings, novelists, playwrights, and poets, and of his/her struggle to find fame and immortality not through actions, but through the written word. At its heart are the life and works of Woolf's friend and lover, Vita Sackville-West, and Knole, the historic home of the Sackvilles. But as well as being a love letter to Vita, Orlando mocks the conventions of biography and history, teases the pretensions of contemporary men of letters, and wryly examines sexual double standards.

This new edition discusses Woolf's stylistic aims, the biographical parallels, and the work's literary context, and includes the original illustrations.

ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

A Penguin Classics a Room of One's Own

by Virginia Woolf

A Room of One's Own is Virginia Woolf's most powerful feminist essay, justifying the need for women to possess intellectual freedom and financial independence.

Based on a lecture given at Girton College, Cambridge, the essay is one of the great feminist polemics, ranging in its themes from Jane Austen and Carlotte Brontë to the silent fate of Shakespeare's gifted (imaginary) sister and the effects of poverty and sexual constraint on female creativity.

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) is regarded as a major twentieth-century author and essayist, a key figure in literary history as a feminist and modernist, and the centre of 'The Bloomsbury Group'. Between 1925 and 1931 Woolf produced what are now regarded as her finest masterpieces, from Mrs Dalloway (1925) to the poetic and highly experimental novel The Waves (1931). She also maintained an astonishing output of literary criticism, short fiction, journalism and biography, including the playfully subversive Orlando (1928) and A Room of One's Own (1929).

If you enjoyed A Room of One's Own, you might like Woolf's Orlando, also available in Penguin Modern Classics.

'Probably the most influential piece of non-fictional writing by a woman in this century'
Hermione Lee, Financial Times

A Room of One's Own Gilded Pocket Edition

by Virginia Woolf

This handsome gift edition presents Virginia Woolf's classic work, A Room of One's Own, featuring a luxurious gold embossed cover design, gilded page edges and patterned endpapers.

One of the greatest arguments for female emancipation, A Room of One's Own began as a lecture series at Cambridge University defending women's independence. In this extended essay, Virginia Woolf brings to life the many issues facing women of her era and pioneered the path toward a more equal future. Passionate, insightful, and beautifully written, A Room of One's Own is a tour-de-force by one of the 20th century's greatest writers.

This pocket-sized gift edition contains the classic and unabridged text, presented with a gold embossed cover design, ivory pages, beautifully designed endpapers and gold gilded page edges. Part of the Arcturus Ornate Classics series, this book makes wonderful gift for any lover of classic literature.

ABOUT THE SERIES: Arcturus Ornate Classics are beautifully bound editions of iconic literary works across history. These compact, foil-embossed hardbacks are printed using deluxe ivory paper and make the perfect gift.

Una Habitación Propia / a Room of One's Own

by Virginia Woolf

Edición en tapa dura del ensayo que se ha convertido en un icono de la literatura modernista y del feminismo, con una nueva y cuidada traducción.

Texto señero del feminismo del siglo XX, basado en dos conferencias impartidas por Virginia Woolf en la universidad de Cambridge, Una habitación propia indaga con singular ironía y talento narrativo en los graves efectos que tuvo la discriminación sexual en la creatividad de las mujeres, al tiempo que propone un camino liberador a través de la independencia económica.

En esta nueva edición, la espléndida traducción de Ana Mata Buil, basada en los originales más fiables, presta especial atención a las cuestiones de género. Además, se incluye como apéndice el artículo «Las mujeres y la novela», en el que Woolf publicó por primera vez los postulados centrales de su famoso libro.

ENGLISH DESCRIPTION

A Room of One's Own is an essay written by Virginia Woolf. It was published in 1929 and is based on two lectures given by the author in 1928 at two colleges for women at Cambridge. In this famous essay, Woolf addressed the status of women, and women artists in particular. In this essay, the author also asserts that a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write. According to Woolf, women's creativity has been curtailed due to centuries of prejudice and financial and educational disadvantages.

To emphasize her view, she offers the example of an imaginary gifted but uneducated sister of William Shakespeare, who, discouraged from all eventually kills herself. This imaginary woman never writes a word and dies by her own hand, her genius unexpressed. If only she had found the means to create, argues Woolf, she would have reached the same heights as her immortal sibling.

Woolf celebrates the work of women who have overcome that tradition and become writers, including Jane Austen, George Eliot, and the Brontë sisters, Anne, Charlotte, and Emily. In the final section Woolf suggests that great minds are neutral and argues that intellectual freedom requires financial freedom.

Orlando A Norton Critical Edition

by Virginia Woolf

"Virginia Woolf's Orlando can be daunting for new and experienced readers alike, but its pleasures await those willing to immerse themselves in this elusive and highly allusive text. This much-needed and long-awaited edition will prove a boon to readers, offering both useful textual annotations and informative contextual readings. Madelyn Detloff's critical selections help to make this challenging text more accessible and provide an instructive framework for gaining a greater understanding of Woolf's gender- and genre-bending novel."

--Ana R. Rojas, University of San Francisco

"The Norton Critical Edition of Orlando is a tour de force, guiding readers through the dazzling world of Virginia Woolf's novel with a range of important critical perspectives and their relevant archives. Detloff's brilliant editorial vision tackles some of the most difficult topics surrounding Orlando and its adaptations across media, while doing justice to the ongoing revelations inspired by Woolf's most audacious masterpiece."

--Amy E. Elkins, Macalester College

To the Lighthouse Introduction by Julia Briggs

by Virginia Woolf

A beautiful hardcover edition of Virginia Woolf's groundbreaking novel.

Though its fame as an icon of twentieth-century literature rests primarily on the brilliance of its narrative technique and the impressionistic beauty of its prose, To the Lighthouse is above all the story of a quest, and as such it possesses a brave and magical universality.

Observed across the years at their vacation house facing the gales of the North Atlantic, Mrs. Ramsay and her family seek to recapture meaning from the flux of things and the passage of time. Though it is the death of Mrs. Ramsay on which the novel turns, her presence pervades every page in a poetic evocation of loss and memory that is also a celebration of domestic life and its most intimate details. Virginia Woolf’s great book enacts a powerful allegory of the creative consciousness and its momentary triumphs over fleeting material life.