Overview

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.

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9780008391584

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Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) was born in London, the daughter of Sir Leslie Stephen, first editor of the Dictionary of National Biography. From 1915 when she published her first novel, The Voyage Out, Woolf maintained an astonishing output of fiction, literary criticism, essays, and biography. In 1912 she married Leonard Woolf, and in 1917 they founded the Hogarth Press. Woolf suffered a series of mental breakdowns throughout her life, and on March 28, 1941, she committed suicide. Ali Smith is the author of many works of fiction, including the novel Hotel World, which was short-listed for both the Orange Prize and the Booker Prize as well as winning the Encore Award and the Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year Award. The Accidental won the Whitbread Award and was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize and the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction. Her story collections include Free Love, which won a Saltire Society First Book of the Year Award and a Scottish Arts Council Award. Francesca Wade has written for publications including the London Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement, Financial Times, New Statesman, and Prospect. She is editor of The White Review and a winner of the Biographers' Club Tony Lothian Prize. She lives in London.

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