Essays Of Virginia Woolf

The Essays #4

by Virginia Woolf, Andrew McNeillie (Editor)

This fourth volume of the first complete edition of Virginia Woolf's essays and reviews celebrates 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. THE COMMON READER, First Series, in which she influentially revives women's place in history, comprises a quarter of the volume. Contributions to American journals for the first time in her career outnumber those to the Times Literary Supplement, and so her pieces in the Nation & Athenaeum, under Leonard Woolf's literary editorship. The volume also includes her moving introduction to the Modern Library Edition of MRS. DALLOWAY, not previously published. In his superb notes, McNeillie this time adds variations in her essays as they appeared in different for example, the lines later omitted from her essay on Joseph "our range of delights. persuade us that the whole business of life is better worth while." Virginia Woolf's creativity and industry in these three years bespeak astonishing gifts, remarkable robustness, and a passion for "the whole business of life" that inspires.

Genres: Essays, Nonfiction, Literary Fiction, English Literature

576 pages, Hardcover

First published May 1, 1967

About the author

(Adeline) Virginia Woolf was an English novelist and essayist regarded as one of the foremost modernist literary figures of the twentieth century.

During the interwar period, Woolf was a significant figure in London literary society and a member of the Bloomsbury Group. Her most famous works include the novels Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), and Orlando (1928), and the book-length essay A Room of One's Own (1929) with its famous dictum, "a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction."

Reviews

[J · Rating 4 out of 5]

For how beautiful her prose can be, Woolf's essays and reviews are just as strong. She is concise, witty, and damn clever. Reading about someone else's thoughts on the state of literature is seldom so pleasurably easy. I am usually not comfortable making superlative statements, but Woolf really is a master of the form. It's easy to forget just how ridiculously prolific she was in her day, there are three other volumes of these things!

[Massiel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved it!