Read complete books and articles on: Virginia Woolf

Woolf, Virginia (Stephen) - 1882–1941, English novelist and essayist; daughter of Sir Leslie Stephen. A successful innovator in the form of the novel, she is considered a significant force in 20th-century fiction. She was educated at home from the resources of her father's huge library. In 1912 she married Leonard Woolf, a critic and writer on economics, with whom she set up the Hogarth Press in 1917. Their home became a gathering place for a circle of artists, critics, and writers known as the Bloomsbury group. As a novelist Woolf's primary concern was to represent the flow of ordinary experience. Her emphasis was not on plot or characterization but on a character's consciousness, his thoughts and feelings, which she brilliantly illuminated by the stream of consciousness technique. She did not limit herself to one consciousness, however, but slipped from mind to mind, particularly in The Waves, probably her most experimental novel. Her prose style is poetic, heavily symbolic, and filled with superb visual images. Woolf's early works, The Voyage Out (1915) and Night and Day (1919), were traditional in method, but she became increasingly innovative in Jacob's Room (1922), Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), and The Waves (1931). Other experimental novels are Orlando (1928), The Years (1937), and Between the Acts (1941). She was a master of the critical essay, and some of her finest pieces are included in The Common Reader (1925), The Second Common Reader (1933), The Death of the Moth and Other Essays (1942), and The Moment and Other Essays (1948). A Room of One's Own (1929) and Three Guineas (1938) are feminist tracts. Her biography of Roger Fry (1940) is a careful study of a friend. Some of her short stories from Monday or Tuesday (1921) appear with others in A Haunted House (1944). Virginia Woolf suffered mental breakdowns in 1895 and 1915; she drowned herself in 1941 because she feared another breakdown from which she might not recover. Most of her posthumously published works were edited by her husband.

Bibliography

See her Writer's Diary, ed. by L. Woolf (1953) and Correspondence with Lytton Strachey, ed. by L. Woolf and J. Strachey (1956); diary, ed. by A. O. Bell (4 vol., 1979–83); letters ed. by N. Nicolson and J. Trautmann (6 vol., 1977–82); biographies by Q. Bell (2 vol., 1972), L. Gordon (1985), P. Rose (1978), M. Rosenthal (1987), and J. King (1995); studies by E. M. Forster (1942), J. Bennett (2d ed. 1964), R. Freedman (1980), and J. Marcus, ed. (1983). See also the autobiography of her husband, Leonard Sidney Woolf (5 vol., 1960–69).

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16 of the Best Books and Articles on: Virginia Woolf

as selected by Questia librarians

1.

Virginia Woolf: The Intellectual and the Public Sphere » Read Now
by Melba Cuddy-Keane. 237 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

Melba Cuddy-Keane relates Woolf's literary reviews and essays to early twentieth-century debates about the value of "highbrow" culture; the methods of instruction in universities and adult education; and the importance of an educated public for the realization of democratic goals. Combining a wealth...
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Melba Cuddy-Keane relates Woolf's literary reviews and essays to early twentieth-century debates about the value of "highbrow" culture; the methods of instruction in universities and adult education; and the importance of an educated public for the realization of democratic goals. Combining a wealth of historical detail with a penetrating analysis of Woolf's essays, this study will alter our views of Woolf, modernism, and intellectual endeavor.
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2.

The Moth and the Star: A Biography of Virginia Woolf » Read Now
by Aileen Pippett. 374 pgs.

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...THE MOTH AND THE STAR A Biography of Virginia Woolf The British Council Virginia Woolf THE MOTH AND THE STAR A Biography of Virginia Woolf by AILEEN PIPPETT LITTLE, BROWN...
3.

Outsiders Together: Virginia and Leonard Woolf » Read Now
by Natania Rosenfeld. 212 pgs.

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The marriage of Virginia and Leonard Woolf is best understood as a dialogue of two outsiders about ideas of social and political belonging and exclusion. These ideas infused the written work of both partners and carried over into literary modernism itself, in part through the influence of the...
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The marriage of Virginia and Leonard Woolf is best understood as a dialogue of two outsiders about ideas of social and political belonging and exclusion. These ideas infused the written work of both partners and carried over into literary modernism itself, in part through the influence of the Woolfs' groundbreaking publishing company, the Hogarth Press. In this book, the first to focus on Virginia Woolf's writings in conjunction with those of her husband, Natania Rosenfeld illuminates Leonard's sense of ambivalent social identity and its affinities to Virginia's complex ideas of subjectivity.
At the time of the Woolfs' marriage, Leonard was a penniless ex-colonial administrator, a fervent anti-imperialist, a committed socialist, a budding novelist, and an assimilated Jew who vacillated between fierce pride in his ethnicity and repudiation of it. Virginia was an "intellectual aristocrat," socially privileged by her class and family background but hobbled through gender. Leonard helped Virginia elucidate her own prejudices and elitism, and his political engagements intensified her identification with outsiders in British society. Rose
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4.

Virginia Woolf: Centennial Essays » Read Now
by Elaine K. Ginsberg, Laura Moss Gottlieb. 352 pgs.

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This book includes many of the best papers presented at the celebration of Virginia Woolf's hundredth birthday at the West Virginia University in 1982.
5.

Virginia Woolf: The Critical Heritage » Read Now
by Robin Majumdar, Allen McLaurin. 468 pgs.

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This set comprises of 40 volumes covering nineteenth and twentieth century European and American authors. These volumes will be available as a complete set, mini boxed sets (by theme) or as individual volumes. This second set compliments the first 68 volume set of Critical Heritage published by Routledge in October 1995.
6.

A Bibliography of Virginia Woolf » Read Now
by B. J. Kirkpatrick, Stuart N. Clarke. 492 pgs.

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This acclaimed bibliography of Virginia Woolf, prepared with the late Leonard Woolf's agreement and co-operation, has been greatly expanded since its first publication in 1957 and the revised editions of 1967 and 1980. The need for a fourth revised edition is the result both of the explosion of new...
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This acclaimed bibliography of Virginia Woolf, prepared with the late Leonard Woolf's agreement and co-operation, has been greatly expanded since its first publication in 1957 and the revised editions of 1967 and 1980. The need for a fourth revised edition is the result both of the explosion of new editions of existing books, and of the appearance of much previously unpublished material. Section A, Books and Pamphlets, has increased from 54 to 79 items; Section AA, Composite Editions, is a new section with nine items; Section C, Contributions to Periodicals, has increased by 78 items, including 56 unsigned reviews; Section D, Translations, has increased from 207 to 557 items; Section F, Letters, is new in that it now itemizes only uncollected letters. Studies of variant editions and texts are noted in the entry for the work concerned. The bibliography is an essential tool for all interested in Woolf.
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7.

Feminist Destinations and Further Essays on Virginia Woolf » Read Now
by Rachel Bowlby. 278 pgs.

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Rachel Bowlby's classic Feminist Destinations now appears in an updated edition with five new chapters. The additional material looks at Virginia Woolf in new frames -- as a woman essayist; as a city writer and critic of modern culture; as a writer in love. This new collection represents this noted...
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Rachel Bowlby's classic Feminist Destinations now appears in an updated edition with five new chapters. The additional material looks at Virginia Woolf in new frames -- as a woman essayist; as a city writer and critic of modern culture; as a writer in love. This new collection represents this noted feminist critic's complete writings on Virginia Woolf, and demonstrates how Woolf's writing, in its many forms and fashions, continues to provide rich matter for discussing the histories and futures of women, writing, and culture.
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8.

Virginia Woolf: Feminism, Creativity, and the Unconscious » Read Now
by John R. Maze. 220 pgs.

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John R. Maze provides a radical psychoanalytic reading of the life-historical and psychopathological themes underlying the intellectual and emotional force of Virginia Woolf's novels. Her repeated, progressive attempts at literary self-analysis yielded many years of original, insightful, and...
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John R. Maze provides a radical psychoanalytic reading of the life-historical and psychopathological themes underlying the intellectual and emotional force of Virginia Woolf's novels. Her repeated, progressive attempts at literary self-analysis yielded many years of original, insightful, and influential creativity, but were subverted in the end by intractable unconscious self-destructive impulses.
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9.

Glass Roof: Virginia Woolf as Novelist » Read Now
by James Hafley. 195 pgs.

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...GLASS ROOF THE GLASS ROOF Virginia Woolf as Novelist By James Hafley...essays concerning the novels of Virginia Woolf increases, so also does the number...5 Winifred Holtby...
10.

Major Literary Characters: Clarissa Dalloway » Read Now
by Harold Bloom. 203 pgs.

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11.

Ambiguous Discourse: Feminist Narratology and British Women Writers (Includes discussion of Virginia Woolf in multiple chapters) » Read Now
by Kathy Mezei. 296 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library
12.

Time and Reality: Studies in Contemporary Fiction (Chap. Three "The Moment and Virginia Woolf") » Read Now
by Margaret Church. 302 pgs.

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13.

Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf: A Public of Two » Read Now
by Angela Smith. 242 pgs.

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Long after the death of Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923), Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) described being haunted by Mansfied in dreams. Through detailed comparative readings of their fiction, letters, and diaries, Angela Smith explores the intense affinity between the two writers. Writing at a time when...
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Long after the death of Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923), Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) described being haunted by Mansfied in dreams. Through detailed comparative readings of their fiction, letters, and diaries, Angela Smith explores the intense affinity between the two writers. Writing at a time when the First World War and the changing attitudes towards empire problematized definitions of foreignness, the fiction of both Mansfield and Woolf is characterized by moments in which the perceiving consciousness sees the familiar made strange, the domestic made menacing.
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14.

The Artist as Outsider in the Novels of Toni Morrison and Virginia Woolf » Read Now
by Lisa Williams. 198 pgs.

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On first consideration, Nobel prize winning African-American author Toni Morrison might seem to have little in common with Virginia Woolf, the British writer who challenged Victorian concepts of womanhood. But interestingly enough, Morrison wrote her masters thesis on Woolf and William Faulkner, and...
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On first consideration, Nobel prize winning African-American author Toni Morrison might seem to have little in common with Virginia Woolf, the British writer who challenged Victorian concepts of womanhood. But interestingly enough, Morrison wrote her masters thesis on Woolf and William Faulkner, and in that thesis, she gives special attention to issues of isolation. For Woolf, Morrison notes, isolation brings a sense of freedom that the attached can never comprehend. In her own novels, Morrison redefines Woolf's concept of isolation in terms of American racism, and both Woolf and Morrison examine the obstacles the female artist must overcome before she can create art. This volume looks at the similarities that link Morrison and Woolf together despite their racial, ethnic, national, and historical differences. At the same time, it analyzes how differing structures of domination define their art.
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15.

To the Lighthouse » Read Now
by Virginia Woolf. 314 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

...To the Lighthouse BY VIRGINIA WOOLF Fiction THE VOYAGE...ESSAYS To THE LIGHTHOUSE by VIRGINIA WOOLF HBMC New York HARCOURT, BRACE...INC. RENEWED, 1955, BY LEONARD WOOLF All...
16.

The Voyage Out » Read Now
by Virginia Woolf. 378 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

...THE VOYAGE OUT -2- THE VOYAGE OUT VIRGINIA WOOLF BLUE RIBBON BOOKS, Inc. NEW YORK COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY PRINTED AND BOUND BY THE CORNWALL PRESS...