HER BOOKS
Virginia Woolf wrote far more fiction than Joyce and far more nonfiction than either Joyce or Faulkner. Nine novels, six volumes of diaries (including her early journals), six volumes of letters, and numerous volumes of collected essays show her deep engagement with major 20th-century issues.
Though many of her essays began as reviews, written anonymously to deadlines for money, and many include imaginative settings and whimsical speculations, they are serious inquiries into reading and writing, the novel and the arts, perception and essence, war and peace, class and politics, privilege and discrimination, and the need to reform society.
Her Novels in Chronological Order
The Voyage Out
Virginia Woolf’s first novel, The Voyage Out, published in 1915, is a witty social satire that witnesses the maturity of the young Englishwoman Rachel Vinrace. She begins a long voyage to South America from London, on her father’s ship with her unusual family. In the eclectic array of passengers with which they launch, Woolf invokes satire to address modern criticisms of Edwardian life. This physical passage also becomes a journey of self-discovery for Rachel, taking on mythical proportions as uncertain distances on a ship of light and shadow alternately reveal and obscure her suffering and love. A haunting story with the beautifully flowing language uniquely characteristic of Woolf, Rachel’s tragic coming-of-age tale unfolds the spiritual growth of a young woman that spans continents.
Publication date: 1915
Publisher: Duckworth Press
Virginia Woolf’s first two books, The Voyage Out and Night and Day, were published by a press owned by her step-brother, George Duckworth, before the Woolf’s had their own printing press. The two dust jackets displayed here were reprints by the Hogarth Press and were designed by Vanessa Bell, her sister.
Night and Day
Virginia Woolf’s second novel, published in 1919, 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. The protagonist, 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.
Publication date: 1919
Publisher: Duckworth Press
Jacob’s Room
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 coming of age story. Jacob is presented in glimpses, in fragments, as Woolf breaks down traditional ways of representing character and experience. The publication of Jacob’s Room includes a series of firsts. It is the first novel published by their Hogarth Press: it is also the first book to have a dust jacket…The dust jacket for Jacob’s Room was a collaborative effort: Vanessa made the drawing, Virginia chose the terra-cotta colouring, and Leonard Woolf advised alterations to the lettering.
Publication date: 1922
Publisher: Hogarth Press
Mrs Dalloway
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.
Publication date: 1925
Publisher: Hogarth Press
To the Lighthouse
To the Lighthouse is at once a vivid impressionistic depiction of a family, the Ramseys, whose annual summer holiday in Scotland falls under the shadow of war, and a meditation on marriage, on parenthood and childhood, on grief, tyranny and bitterness. The novel’s use of stream of consciousness, reminiscence and shifting perspectives gives it an intimate, poetic essence, and at the time of publication in 1927 it represented an utter rejection of all that had gone before.
Pub date: 1927
Publisher: Hogarth Press
Orlando
Orlando is a fictional biography of a person called Orlando who lives over three hundred years from Queen Elizabeth’s reign in the sixteenth century through to King Edwards reign in 1928, the year Virginia Woolf wrote the novel. In the beginning of the book Orlando is a nobleman who has literary ambitions. As a man he writes plays and poems every day of his life while courting some of his generation’s most beautiful women. Everything changes when he turns into woman, and for the remainder, Woolf draws comparisons between the thought processes of men and women across the different eras. Written for the charismatic, bisexual writer Vita Sackville-West, this playful mock biography of a chameleon-like historical figure is both a wry commentary on gender and, in Woolf’s own words, a ‘writer’s holiday’ which delights in its ambiguity and capriciousness.
Publication date: 1928
Publisher: Hogarth Press
The Waves
Among her many literary accomplishments, Virginia Woolf is perhaps best known for the daring and inventive narration she used throughout her writing. Of all of her novels, The Waves, which was published in 1931, implements some of the most innovative and bold narration that Woolf employed. The 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.
Publication date: 1931
Publisher: Hogarth Press
The Years
The Years, the last novel she would publish in her lifetime, is the story 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, as their Victorian upbringing gives way to a new world, where the rules of etiquette have shifted from the drawing room to the air-raid shelter. Although spanning fifty years, the novel is not epic in scope, focusing instead on the small private details of the characters’ lives. Virginia Woolf’s penultimate novel is a celebration of the resilience of the individual amid time, change, life, death and renewal.
Publication date: 1937
Publisher: Hogarth Press
Between the Acts
Woolfe’s final novel, Between the Acts, published posthumously by Leonard, is set at the country house of Pointz Hall on the day of the annual village pageant, and shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War. The pageant precipitates manifold dramas of passion among the audience and the play’s director herself, and encourages reflections on the continuity between the primeval and the present, the range of parts people play, and the violent impulses behind British imperialism. the novel “sums up and magnifies Woolf’s chief preoccupations: the transformation of life through art, sexual ambivalence, and meditation on the themes of flux of time and life, presented simultaneously as corrosion and rejuvenation—all set in a highly imaginative and symbolic narrative encompassing almost all of English history.” It is the most lyrical of all her works, not only in feeling but in style, being chiefly written in verse
Publication date: 1941
Publisher: Hogarth Press
Her Short Stories
The short stories of Virginia Woolf have never received serious scrutiny, critics determinedly maintaining that the novels contain the heart of the matter and that the stories are merely preparatory exercises. A careful analysis of her forty or so known stories suggests that they are indeed important (not merely peripheral to the novels and criticism) and are successful in developing specific techniques and themes germane to her total canon.
One of the reasons why the stories have never been taken seriously, of course, is that they simply are not stories by any conventional definition— but are nonetheless “short fiction” of interest and significance.
The stories derive from three distinctly separate chronological periods. The earliest group (1917-1921) was published in Monday or Tuesday and included two stories available only in that volume, now out of print. This phase of creation utilized one primary technique—that of evolving an apparently random stream of impressions from a usually inanimate and tiny focusing object, and was generally optimistic about the “adorable world.”
The second group of her short fiction (those stories appearing in magazines between 1927 and 1938) illustrates a progression in both technical virtuosity and in personal discipline: the fictional universe is now peopled, and the randomness of the early sketches has given way to a more selective exploitation of the thoughts inspired by motivating situations.
The third group, posthumously published by Leonard Woolf in 1944 without his wife’s imprimatur (and recognizably “only in the stage beyond that of her first sketch”), still reveals a desire in the author to pursue her original objective suggested in “A Haunted House“–the unlayering of facts to bare the “buried treasure” truth, using imagination as her only tool.
Her short stories in alphabetical order:
| A Haunted House — (1921) A Simple Melody — (1925) A Society — (1921) A Summing Up — (1944) An Unwritten Novel — (1920) Ancestors — (1923) Happiness — (1925) In the Orchard — (1923) Kew Gardens — (1917) Moments of Being — (1925) Monday or Tuesday — (1921) Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown — (1924) Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street — (1923) Phyllis and Rosamond — (1906) Solid Objects — (1920) Sympathy — (1919) The Evening Party — (1920) The Introduction — (1925) The Lady in the Looking-Glass — (1929) The Legacy — (1940) The Man who Loved his Kind — (1944) The Mark on the Wall — (1917) The Mysterious Case of Miss V — (1906) The New Dress — (1927) The Shooting Party — (1938) The String Quartet — (1921) The Symbol — (1930s) The Watering Place — (1941) Together and Apart — (1944) |
But by neglecting the stories the critics have missed a mine of information: herein lies an “artist’s sketchbook,” which, like A Writer’s Diary, provides a major avenue into the mind of one of the most remarkable writers of our age.
Her Playwriting
Freshwater: A Comedy
In 1935 Woolf completed Freshwater, an absurdist drama based on the life of her great-aunt Julia Margaret Cameron. Featuring such other eminences as the poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and the painter George Frederick. Virginia Woolf researched the life of her great-aunt, the photographer Julia Margaret Cameron, publishing her findings in an essay titled Pattledom (1925) and later in her introduction to her 1926 edition of Cameron’s photographs. She had begun work on a play based on an episode in Cameron’s life in 1923, but abandoned it. Finally it was performed on 18 January 1935 at the studio of her sister, Vanessa Bell on Fitzroy Street in 1935. Woolf directed it herself, and the cast were mainly members of the Bloomsbury Group, including Vanessa, her daughter Angelica Garnett, Virginia’s husband Leonard and Duncan Grant, Angelica’s father. Freshwater is a short three act comedy satirizing the Victorian era. It was not performed again in Woolf’s lifetime. It was found among Leonard Woolf’s papers after his death in 1969 and was not published till 1976, when the Hogarth Press produced an edition, edited by Lucio Ruotolo, who was living in Virginia Woolf’s home, Monk’s House, at the time.
Her Long Form & Collected Essays
No only was Virginia Woolf a great novelist and writer of short stories, she was also an essayist of amazing stylishness and wit. Her models were the classical essayists of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century – Addison, Steele, Hazlitt, and Lamb – all of whom she had read during her literary apprenticeship, which took place in the library of her father, Sir Leslie Stephen.
Woolf wrote a body of autobiographical work and more than 500 essays and reviews, some of which, like A Room of One’s Own (1929) were of book length. Not all were published in her lifetime. Shortly after her death, Leonard Woolf produced an edited edition of unpublished essays titled The Moment and other Essays published by the Hogarth Press in 1947. Many of these were originally lectures that she gave and several more volumes of essays followed, such as The Captain’s Death Bed: and other essays (1950).
Fiction was the core of Virginia Woolf’s work. But she took her essay writing very seriously, spending a great deal of time on each essay and finding they provided a refreshing diversion from fiction. Her essays informed her fiction, and vice versa.
On Being Ill (1926)
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. The essay has an interesting history. It was first published by T.S.Eliot in his magazine The Criterion in 1926, alongside contributions from Aldous Huxley, Gertrude Stein, Jean Cocteau, and D.H.Lawrence’s The Woman Who Rode Away. Then it was republished as a single volume by the Hogarth Press in 1930.
Publication date: 1930
Publisher: Hogarth Press
A Room of One’s Own (1929)
The dramatic setting of A Room of One’s Own is that Woolf has been invited to lecture on the topic of Women and Fiction. She advances the thesis that “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” Her essay is constructed as a partly-fictionalized narrative of the thinking that led her to adopt this thesis. The figure of Judith Shakespeare is generated as an example of the tragic fate a highly intelligent woman would have met with under those circumstances. In light of this background, she considers the achievements of the major women novelists of the nineteenth century and reflects on the importance of tradition to an aspiring writer. A survey of the current state of literature follows, conducted through a reading the first novel of one of the narrator’s contemporaries. Woolf closes the essay with an exhortation to her audience of women to take up the tradition that has been so hardly bequeathed to them, and to increase the endowment for their own daughters.
Walter Sickert: A Conversation (1934)
This essay connects Virginia Woolf to Walter Richard Sickert, one of the most significant British artists of the early modern period. He is considered a prominent figure in the transition from Impressionism to Modernism. In this essay, Woolf describes an imaginary conversation that took place on a December evening. One immediately notices how much the Woolfian language draws on poetry, drinking from it and, while keeping the rationality intact, it turns into lyricism. The essay continues with a roundup of great writers — from Pope, to Keats, to Tennyson — whose pictorial but also musical properties Woolf analyses, the unconscious lexical choice that serves to nourish the reader’s eye and ear. Woolf believes that there is no contemporary writer capable of writing life as Sickert knows how to paint it.
Three Guineas (1938)
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. Although Three Guineas is a work of non-fiction, it was initially conceived as a “novel–essay” which would tie up the loose ends left in her earlier work, A Room of One’s Own. The book was to alternate between fictive narrative chapters and non-fiction essay chapters, demonstrating Woolf’s views on war and women in both types of writing at once.
The Death of the Moth and Other Essays (1942)
The Death of the Moth (1942) is the third volume of Virginia Woolf’s essays published after the success of her earlier collections The Common Reader first series (1925) and The Common Reader second series (1932), both of which were published during her lifetime. Early preparations were made by Virginia for this collection, and then it appeared one year after her death, edited by her husband Leonard Woolf. At the point of assembling this collection Leonard thought that the totality of Virginia’s finished essays and reviews had been located, edited, and published. But subsequent researches and retrievals from newspaper archives were to produce the later collections The Moment and Other Essays (1947), The Captain’s Death Bed and Other Essays (1950), and Granite and Rainbow (1958).
The Moment and Other Essays (1947)
The Moment is the second volume of collected essays and reviews by Virginia that were published by her husband Leonard after her death in 1941. The Moment and Other Essays includes writing on literary criticism, biographical sketches, political polemics, and book reviews. Some of the essays were published for the first time; others had appeared in The Times Literary Supplement, The Nation, the New Statesman and Nation, Time and Tide, the New York Saturday Review, and John Lehmann’s New Writing. Virginia argues with Percy Lubbock’s notion of the novel’s ‘form’ — in The Craft of Fiction (1921) — that it is not something analogous to visual ‘shape’ in painting, but an arrangement of feelings with which we are left after the first reading of a text, and which might be re-arranged on a second or subsequent reading.
The Captain‘s Death Bed and Other Essays (1950)
The Captain’s Death Bed (1950) is the third volume of collected essays and reviews by Virginia published by her husband Leonard at the Hogarth Press after her death. They represent her work as a journalist, book reviewer, lecturer, and essayist over the last twenty years of her life – a period which saw the production of her most famous experimental novels – Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and The Waves. These pieces span the years 1924 to 1939. There are also some delightful surprises – essays on what was then modern technology – for instance, the cinema and flying. She views the early movie classics and immediately perceives that cinema has at its disposal a ‘secret language’ of symbols and metaphors which make laboured explanations of what is happening on screen unnecessary.
Granite and Rainbow (1958)
Granite and Rainbow is the final volume of Virginia Woolf’s essays to be collected, edited, and published by her husband Leonard Woolf after her death in 1941. Leonard Woolf discusses the difficulties of locating and verifying these examples of her non-fiction writing in the editor’s notes which preface these collections. The problem of identification was exacerbated by the fact that many of them had been published anonymously. Until relatively recently for instance, essays and book reviews in The Times Literary Supplement were not attributed to any author. Another reason for essays remaining undetected was that some of the earlier examples had been published under her maiden name of Virginia Stephen.
Granite and Rainbow was first published by the Hogarth Press in 1958. Since that time, any further non-fiction prose writings by Virginia Woolf that have come to light have been published in the six-volume edition of her complete essays edited. Between 1986 and 1994, Andrew McNellie, now , was the editor of the first four volumes of The Essays of Virginia Woolf, published as the critical edition by Hogarth Press and Stuart N. Clarke Woolf scholar edited volumes 5 and 6. Some of Woolf’s long form essays were and still are published separately as well as in collections.
Essays of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 1, 1904-1912
Volume one contains essays and nonfiction pieces dating from 1904, when she was twenty-three, to 1912, the year of her marriage to Leonard Woolf. “These are polished works of literary journalism-shrewd, deft, inquisitive, graceful, and often sparkling” (Library Journal).
Edited and with an Introduction by Andrew McNeillie; Index.
Essays of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 2, 1912-1918
The second volume of essays begin at the time of her marriage to Leonard Woolf and end just after the Armistice. More than half have not been collected previously. “In these essays we see both Woolf’s work and her self afresh” (Chicago Tribune).
Edited and with an Introduction by Andrew McNeillie; Index.
Essays of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 3, 1919-1924
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.
Edited and with an Introduction by Andrew McNeillie; Index.
Essays of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 4, 1925-1928
This fourth volume of Virginia Woolf’s essays and reviews showcase her maturing vitality and wonderfully reveals her prodigious reading, wit and original intelligence. Written while she worked on To The Lighthouse and Orlando, these pieces explore subjects ranging from the world’s greatest books to obscure English lives.
Edited and with an Introduction by Andrew McNeillie; Index.
Andrew McNeillie, series editor for volumes 1 to 4, is the literary editor for Oxford University Press and is the author of several well-received volumes of poetry.
The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 5, 1929-1932
This fifth volume shows her thinking about the possibility of poeticising the novel (The Waves was the result) and in some of these pieces (‘Women and Fiction’, ‘Women and Leisure’) she considers the relationship between women, writing and society – the preoccupation that would become such a large part of her legacy.
Edited by Stuart N. Clarke; Index.
The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 6, 1933 to 1941
With this sixth volume The Hogarth Press completes a major literary undertaking – the publication of the complete essays of Virginia Woolf. In this, the last decade of her life, Woolf wrote distinguished literary essays on Turgenev, Goldsmith, Congreve, Gibbon and Horace Walpole. In addition, there are a number of more political essays, such as ‘Why Art To-Day Follows Politics’, and ‘Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid.
Edited by Stuart N. Clarke; Index.
Stuart N Clarke, series editor for volumes 5 and 6, has transcribed and edited Virginia Woolf’s Orlando: The Original Holograph Draft, was cocompiler with B. J. Kirkpatrick of the fourth edition of A Bibliography of Virginia Woolf, and edited Translations from the Russian by Virginia Woolf and S. S. Koteliansky. He is a founding member of the Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain and has edited its journal, the Virginia Woolf Bulletin, since its inception.
Her Biographies
Roger Fry: A Biography (1940)
The last book Virginia Woolf saw into print at Hogarth Press before her death, Roger Fry, is her one serious full-length biography. Virginia Woolf writes, publishes and provides the foreword for the biography of her best friend from the Bloomsbury group. Roger Fry, art critic and post–impressionist painter, held a pivotal place in Virginia’s life and literary career. His theories on aestheticism and art led Virginia to experiment with new writing techniques in an attempt to create a literary narrative which would be the pure reflection of reality. “I can’t help thinking,” she concluded, in spite of her difficulty in putting her theories of biography into practice, “I’ve caught a good deal of that iridescent man in my oh so laborious butterfly net.”
Publication date: 1940
Publisher: Hogarth Press
Flush: A Biography
Flush was an English cocker spaniel who belonged to the nineteenth-century poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Virginia Woolf learned of him from the love letters Elizabeth wrote to her future husband, fellow poet Robert Browning, and found ‘the figure of their dog made me laugh so, I couldn’t resist making him a Life.’ The resulting ‘biography’ combines sensuous imaginative description with sharp social comment, and brings Woolf’s unsentimental humour and insight to the fore. We see Flush as loyal confidant to Elizabeth on her sickbed at Wimpole Street, and from his jealous perspective we witness her courtship by Browning, their elopement and new life in Italy. The perfect accessible introduction to Woolf’s genius, a unique blend of fact and fiction, Flush is perhaps best read in the company of a canine companion.
Publication date: 1933
Publisher: Hogarth Press
Her Literary Criticism
Woolf’s prolific career in literary criticism situates her in the common critical practices of her day and crystallizes basic tenets and a critical theory of sorts from her critical journalism published 1904–1928. Woolf’s appeals to writers to invest all their energy in improving their skills in character portrayal to adequately depict all classes and genders in order to invent a new kind of psychological fiction.
The Common Reader – First Series (1925)
The Common Reader, collection of essays by Virginia Woolf, published in two series, the first in 1925 and the second in 1932. The title indicates Woolf’s intention that her essays be read by the educated but non-scholarly “common reader,” who examines books for personal enjoyment. Woolf outlines her literary philosophy in the introductory essay to the first series, The Common Reader, and in the concluding essay to the second series, “How Should One Read a Book?“
Publisher: Hogarth Press
The Common Reader – Second Series (1932)
The second collection of essays in the Common Readers’ series was published in 1932 when Woolf’s stature as an author had substantially increased. 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. Most of the essays in these collections appeared originally in such publications as the Times Literary Supplement, The Nation, Athenæum, New Statesman, Life and Letters, Dial, Vogue, and The Yale Review.
Publisher: Hogarth Press
Genius and Ink (2019)
For the avid reader of English literature, this is a perfect introduction to Woolf’s thoughts on a select band of writers – Bronte, Eliot, Evelyn, James Montaigne, Conrad, Hardy, Burney and Browning – and her profound view of the importance of reading and literature. They first appeared anonymously as reviews in the Times Literary Supplement, which Woolf contributed to for over 30 years as one of its star reviewers. More essays than reviews of individual works, more overviews of writers’ lives and works, they take you as much into the discriminating and highly receptive mind of Woolf as they do into their subjects. In each essay she follows the line of her thought with great charm, style, and rigour, counterpoising ideas and pushing them as far as they’ll reasonably go; one feels one’s on a mini-intellectual journey into the heart of the author, into his or her work and reputation. She lays out something of her own approach to life – perhaps most spiritually in her essay on Montaigne, when she delves into the soul – and the result is always invigorating.
Publisher: Times Literary Supplement Books
Her Autobiographical Essays
Moments of Being is a set of essays by Virginia Woolf that describes the people, events, and impressions that shaped her life from birth until her early thirties. Woolf’s recollections focus on the tense relationships of her blended family, the effects of the deaths of her mother and half sister, and the attempts of various characters to pursue their intellectual lives. The essays were written separately between 1907 and 1940 and then collected and published in Moments of Being after her death.
“22 Hyde Park Gate”, “Old Bloomsbury” and “Am I a Snob?” were written for the Memoir Club, a group formed in 1920 by Molly MacCarthy which met to present honest autobiographical papers.
Moments of Being consists of five autobiographical essays:
Reminiscences (1907)
“Reminiscences” was written early in Virginia Woolf’s writing career, when she was deliberately setting herself a series of exercises and tests in order to develop her writing skills. One of these was to describe her childhood. Woolf’s feelings for her sister Vanessa were among the most significant in her life. The complex web of relationships of the people that inhabited the home where most of “Reminiscences” is set is examined.
22 Hyde Park Gate (1921)
Virginia Woolf describes her childhood home, 22 Hyde Park Gate, London, England. She recalls that there were many visitors to the family’s drawing room. She also shares her recollections of family members. She notes that her half brother George Duckworth (1868–1934) lacked intelligence but fit right into Victorian culture of late 19th-century England. George steered away from literature which is Woolf’s primary interest. He was instead driven to succeed in society.
Old Bloomsbury (1922)
“Old Bloomsbury” is the second of three sections of Moments of Being that Virginia Woolf wrote to be read before the Bloomsbury Memoir Group of writers who lived in London, England. The essay begins by mentioning how her half brother George Duckworth (1868–1934) sexually abused her which is a topic Woolf also discusses earlier in Moments of Being.
Am I a Snob? (1936)
“Am I a Snob?” is the third of three sections of Moments of Being that Virginia Woolf wrote to be read before the Bloomsbury Memoir Group of writers who lived in London, England. “Am I a Snob?” is related to the previous section, “Old Bloomsbury,” because it discusses the social and intellectual circle that Woolf moved in. However, while “Old Bloomsbury” focuses on the intellectual independence of Woolf’s circle, “Am I a Snob?” focuses on the group’s excesses and shortcomings.
“22 Hyde Park Gate”, “Old Bloomsbury” and “Am I a Snob?” were written for the Memoir Club, a group formed in 1920 by Molly MacCarthy which met to present honest autobiographical papers.
Her Letters
“Magnificant,” was the verdict of the Publishers Weekly when the first volume of Virginia Woolf’s letters appeared, and critics found the succeeding volumes equally impressive.
Virginia Woolf was a correspondent of genius–high-spirited, inventive, witty — whether commenting on a domestic crisis or the state of the nation, a social outing or peregrination of the writer’s mind. She wrote to charm and entertain her friends, with the added seductiveness of gossip and cheerful malice.
“She lives in her letters,” Joanne Trautmann Banks writes, and offers fresh perspectives on her life. “The Virginia Woolf who creates herself in her letters is different from the one who slowly emerges from her novels, short stories and essays. This Virginia is simultaneously more vulnerable and more admirable… her laughter is heard even more clearly.”
The Flight of the Mind: The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Volume One (1888 – 1912)
A collection of Virginia Woolf’s correspondence from age six to the eve of her marriage twenty-four years later. “Engagingly fresh and spontaneous as young Virginia’s letters are…the excitement in this collection arises from [her] growing awareness of herself as a writer” (Chicago Sun-Times).
Introduction by Nigel Nicolson (son of Vita Sackville West); Index; photographs.
Publication date: May 1977
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
The Question of Things Happening: The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Volume Two (1913 – 1922)
Over six hundred letters covering the first decade of the Woolfs’ marriage; the publication of The Voyage Out, Night and Day, and Jacob’s Room; the founding of Hogarth Press; the years of World War I; Virginia’s two periods of insanity and an attempted suicide.
Edited by Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann;
Introduction by Nigel Nicolson; Index; photographs.
Publication Date: April 1978
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
A Change of Perspective: The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Volume Three (1923 – 1928)
Now in her forties and in love, Woolf writes two of her greatest novels during this period. This volume shows the author in her most vivid, busiest and probably happiest days. Not only did she write three of her most famous books but also she became close friends with Vita Sackville West who became a very important person in her life. The letters, to Vita, Nessa, Clive, Quentin, Lytton and the rest of her closed friends are funny, tender, insightful… A great read to combine with the diaries which are also great in a different kind of way. I highly recommended it for those who want to know the person behind the genius, her insecurities, her loves, her worries and amusements.
Edited by Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann
Introduction by Nigel Nicolson; Index; photographs.
Publication date: May 1980
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
A Reflection of the Other Person: The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Volume Four (1929 – 1931)
These years were dominated by one woman and one book. The woman was Ethel Smyth; the book was The Waves. This volume’s “unerringly human and confessional tone makes Woolf, at last, a real person” (San Francisco Chronicle).
Edited by Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann
Introduction by Nigel Nicolson; Index; photographs.
Publication date: May 1981
Publisher: Mariner Books, a division of Harper Collins (they purchased Harcourt Brace’s backlist including its Harvest Imprint, the publisher of the first three volumes of Woolf’s diary
The Sickle Side of the Moon: The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Volume Five (1932 – 1935)
The penultimate volume of Woolf’s letters, when the author was between the ages of 50 and 53, covers the composition of The Years and the death of Lytton Strachey and Roger Fry. “Her wit flashes, often unexpectedly, in letters of almost every kind” (New Yorker).
Edited by Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann;
Introduction by Nigel Nicolson; Index.
Publication date: May 1982
Publisher: Mariner Books, a division of Harper Collins
Leave the Letters Till We’re Dead: The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Volume Six (1936 – 1941)
The final volume of Virginia Woolf’s remarkable letters. Her letters to Vanessa and Vita are the standouts of this volume, and of course her three final letters, two versions to Leonard and one to Vanessa.
Edited by Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann.
Publication date: October 1980
Publisher: Mariner Books, a division of Harper Collins
Love Letters of Virginia Woolf & Vita Sakville-West
At a dinner party in 1922, Virginia Woolf met the renowned author, aristocrat – and sapphist – Vita Sackville-West. Virginia wrote in her diary that she didn’t think much of Vita’s conversation, but she did think very highly of her legs. It was to be the start of almost twenty years of flirtation, friendship, and literary collaboration. Their correspondence ended only with Virginia’s death in 1941.
Intimate and playful, these selected letters and diary entries allow us to hear these women’s constantly changing feelings for each other in their own words. Eavesdrop on the affair that inspired Virginia to write her most fantastical novel, Orlando, and discover a relationship that – even a hundred years later – feels radical and relatable.
Her Diary
Virginia Woolf was not only a masterful author, editor, publisher, letter-writer and little-known children’s book author, but also a dedicated diarist on par with Susan Sontag and Anaïs Nin. Although she kept some sporadic early journals, Woolf didn’t begin serious journaling until 1915, when she was 33. Once she did, she continued doggedly until her last entry in 1941, four days before her death, leaving behind 26 volumes written in her own hand.
In an entry from April 20th, 1919, Woolf makes a case for the creative benefits of keeping a diary and argues for it as an essential tool for honing one’s writing style:
I got out this diary and read, as one always does read one’s own writing, with a kind of guilty intensity. I confess that the rough and random style of it, often so ungrammatical, and crying for a word altered, afflicted me somewhat. I am trying to tell whichever self it is that reads this hereafter that I can write very much better; and take no time over this; and forbid her to let the eye of man behold it.
And now I may add my little compliment to the effect that it has a slapdash and vigour and sometimes hits an unexpected bull’s eye. But what is more to the point is …my belief that the habit of writing thus for my own eye only is good practice. It loosens the ligaments. Never mind the misses and the stumbles. Going at such a pace as I do I must make the most direct and instant shots at my object, and thus have to lay hands on words, choose them and shoot them with no more pause than is needed to put my pen in the ink.
The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Volume One: 1915-1919
Woolf is fascinating, even when describing the most mundane details of daily life. Her writing style is as beautiful here as in her fiction, and so the diary is well worth reading for that alone. Plus, nearly every page contains a reference to Lytton Strachey, Dora Carrington, or some other Bloomsbury luminary. She isn’t always completely truthful or straightforward, but she is always supremely entertaining. “Nothing yet published about her so totally contradicts the legend of Virginia Woolf…. This is a first chance to meet the writer in her own unguarded words and to observe the root impulses of her art without the distractions of a commentary” (New York Times).
Edited and with a Preface by Anne Olivier Bell (wife of Quentin Bell)
Introduction by Quentin Bell (VW’s nephew); Index.
- Publication date: May 15, 1979
- Publisher: Mariner Books
The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Volume Two: 1920-1924
The second volume covers a crucial period in Woolf’s development as a writer. It’s a wonderful revealing account of an extraordinary woman, born in the 19th century and giving us incredible details of life and culture at that time. The list of people she knew and socialized with is mind blowing, the Huxleys, B. Shaw, Maynard Keynes, TS Eliot, Ezra Pound, Thomas Hardy, the list goes on and on. The times she lived through, from the Boer War to WW2, and changes she helped bring about and sustain are worth the read alone. She was way ahead of her time, yet firmly rooted in it. “Her sensibility, her sensitiveness, her humor, her drama… above all her catalytic gifts as a writer seem almost too much for one remarkable woman.” (Christian Science Monitor).
Edited by Anne Olivier Bell, assisted by Andrew McNeillie; Index.
Publication date: January 1, 1978
Publisher: Hogarth Press
The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Volume Three: 1925-1930
An account of Woolf’s life during the period in which To the Lighthouse and The Waves were written. It seems odd to give stars to a diary, but if any diary is deserving of five stars, it’s Woolf’s. This volume, which covers her happiest and most productive years, is a particular joy. She writes with beauty and wit, even when she’s just writing for herself. Her fears, her amusements, her obliquely referenced love affair with Vita Sackville-West, her preoccupations with the success of her greatest novels (all produced within this time span, more or less) are still intriguing to us nine decades later. “Her steel-trap mind and elegant prose…make this a most valuable and pleasurable book” (Publishers Weekly). “Volume three is as witty and intelligent as its predecessors” (Atlantic Monthly).
Edited by Anne Olivier Bell, assisted by Andrew McNeillie; Index.
Publication date: September 14, 1981
Publisher: Mariner Books
The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Volume Four: 1931-1935
The penultimate volume of Woolf’s diaries, “A book of extraordinary vitality, wit, and beauty” (New York Times Book Review)., volume 4 details the mature period of The Years and moments of personal sadness brought by the deaths of Lytton Strachey, Dora Carrington, and Roger Fry. Despite the setbacks that came with self-doubt and depression, Woolf’s life, as recorded in the diary, is a series of courageous and luminous adventures, new books to read and write, new friends to meet, new boundaries to cross. (She and Leonard were saving their money for a trip to China.) At the same time, she never lost her sense of wonder and gratitude for what was familiar and close at hand- old friends, old books, her beloved Sussex Downs, and, most of all, Leonard, her husband: ”…what an immense relief to talk to him! … What an egress to open air & cold daylight: how dignified: yes, & I have him every day….” Despite its burdens, life, she thought, was a gift. It was her own extraordinary gift to ”say to the moment, this very moment, stay, you are so fair….” And this is her own best explanation of why she kept a diary and wrote novels, for ”What a pity that it should all be lost.”
Edited by Anne Olivier Bell, assisted by Andrew McNeillie; Index.
pub date: 1978
Publisher: Harvest Books
The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Volume Five: 1936-1941
Virginia Woolf was fifty-four on January 25, 1936, some three weeks after this final volume of her diary opens. Its last page was written four days before she drowned herself on March 28, 1941. This volume confirms how fiercely she loved life, and what a great relationship she had with Leonard. Yes, she was a sometimes nasty, petty, racist, anti-Semitic, snob. But her diaries also give an unparalleled sense of an era and a set of intellectuals who still matter. Very thought-provoking and informative book – absolute necessity for any admirer of Virginia Woolf.
Edited by Anne Olivier Bell, assisted by Andrew McNeillie; Index; maps.
Publication date: 1985
Publisher: Harvest Books
A Writer’s Diary: Events Recorded from 1918-1941
Virginia Woolf’s A Writer’s Diary, first published in 1953, consists of extracts from the diaries she kept from 1918-41, gathered together by her husband Leonard Woolf to show her in the act of writing, when ‘she reveals, more nakedly perhaps than any other writer has done, the exquisite pleasure and pains… of artistic creation.’
Because this is a writer’s diary – when Leonard Woolf went through the thirty manuscript volumes, which would then be published in full in five printed volumes between 1977 and 1984, he only selected passages that related to her intellectual life. He was reluctant to publish more personal diary entries while the people she wrote about — mainly Bloomsbury members and Hogarth Press authors — were still alive. Some entries were not flattering.
Edited by and with a preface from her husband, Leonard Woolf
