Virginia Woolf

The annotated, authorised edition of Virginia Woolf's celebrated Mrs. Dalloway, named one of Time's 100 Best Novels, features commentary by Women's Studies professor Bonnie Kime Scott. In this pioneering stream of consciousness novel, a vivid portrait of a single day in a woman's life unfolds. Mrs. Clarissa Dalloway is preoccupied with the last-minute details of preparation for a party, yet...

"Come, come! I'm sick to death of this particular self. I want another." As this centuries-spanning tale begins, Orlando is a passionate sixteen-year-old nobleman whose days are spent in rowdy revelry, filled with the colourful 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...

On Being Ill is introduced with the sentiment: "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....

"I am made and remade continually. Different people draw different words from me." Innovative and deeply poetic, this landmark work of literary fiction, 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...

Virginia Woolf's pioneering work of feminism is "probably the most influential piece of non-fictional writing by a woman in the twentieth century" (Hermione Lee). This edition features 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...

"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...

"For there she was." Mrs Dalloway follows a single day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, an upper-class woman in London, in June 1923, as she prepares for a party. Clarissa's thoughts and actions are interwoven with the trauma and bereavement of Septimus Smith, a poor young man suffering from shell-shock, in a contrasting narrative that provides poignant insights into...

The Waves is often regarded as Virginia Woolf's masterpiece of experimental fiction, standing with those few works of twentieth-century literature that have created unique forms of their own. In deeply poetic prose, Woolf traces the lives of six children from infancy to death who fleetingly unite around the unseen figure of a seventh child, Percival. Allusive and mysterious, The Waves...

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...

Relish a brief encounter with Virginia Woolf, modernist pioneer, in this radiant prose-poem of gardens, voices, and shifting perspectives. In a single afternoon's walk, Virginia Woolf captures the infinite life of a garden... A couple pause among the flowerbeds, their thoughts drifting apart. A woman's mind fixes on a small, troubling mark on the wall. A chance meeting becomes an...

Mr and Mrs Ramsay and their eight children have always holidayed at their summer house in Skye, surrounded by family friends. But as time passes, bringing with it war and death, the summer home stands empty until one day, many years later, the family return to make the long-postponed visit to the lighthouse. To The Lighthouse captures the transient nature...

Virginia Woolf's dazzling, time-defying novel of love, identity and transformation, brought to life with breathtaking interior art by Varvara Alay. Different though the sexes are, they intermix. In every human being, a vacillation from one sex to the other takes place, and often it is only the clothes that keep the male or female likeness, while underneath the sex is...

Helen and Ridley Ambrose are preparing to set off for an exotic resort off the coast of South America on the Euphrosyne, a ship belonging to Helen’s brother-in-law, Willoughby Vinacre. Also travelling with them is his daughter, Rachel — a quiet, unremarkable girl raised in the London suburbs by her spinster aunts after the death of her mother. Along the...

This Norton Critical Edition includes: The 1925 first American edition text, introduced and annotated by Anne Fernald. A map of Mrs. Dalloway's London. An unusually rich selection of contextual materials, including diary entries and letters related to the composition of the novel, essays, short stories, and biographical excerpts, and the only introduction that Virginia Woolf wrote to any of her...

Based on two talks given by the author and first published in September 1929, Virginia Woolf's seminal essay revolves around the central claim that a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction. Outlining the importance of education and financial independence, Woolf draws up a history of women writers and demonstrates how...

'He thought her beautiful, believed her impeccably wise; dreamed of her, wrote poems to her, which, ignoring the subject, she corrected in red ink.' Mrs Dalloway is a novel that features two main characters and two different worldviews. On the one hand, there is Clarissa Dalloway, who, being labelled as Mrs, symbolizes her marital and social confinement. On the other,...

The fictional portrait of Woolf's close friend and lover Vita Sackville-West, the hero Orlando is a young nobleman in Elizabethan England, a dreamy and romantic youth who wakes up one day to find himself transformed, astonishingly, into a woman. Over the span of three centuries, Orlando will fall in love many times and rub shoulders with the great artists and...

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 is on the brink of madness. Their days interweave and their lives converge as the party reaches its glittering...

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 is on the brink of madness. Their days interweave and their lives converge as the party reaches its glittering...

'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...

An enthralling exploration of the human experience, from the author of To The Lighthouse. 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....

I am making up To the Lighthouse - the sea is to be heard all through it Inspired by the lost bliss of her childhood summers in Cornwall, Virginia Woolf produced one of the masterworks of English literature in To the Lighthouse. It concerns the Ramsay family and their summer guests on the Isle of Skye before and after the...

Virginia Woolf’s classic modernist novel, To the Lighthouse, draws from her own life and experiences. Hailed as one of the greatest works of modernist fiction, Virginia Woolf’s semi-autobiographical novel about the Ramsay family explores the themes of perspective, interpersonal relationships, and the complexity of human experience. Woolf’s use of shifting points of view in the narrative highlights how each person...

Now you can live a day in the life of a young woman in 1920s London. Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway follows one day of upper-class housewife Clarissa Dalloway's life as she plans and hosts a dinner party at her house. Along the way, she meets with people from both her past—a former suitor whose proposal she rejected and whom she...

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. The story spans encounters with queens, kings, novelists, playwrights, and poets, and explores a struggle...

New edition of the Penguin Essential about the events of one June day in 1923... Mrs Dalloway tells the story of Clarissa Dalloway, the glittering wife of a Member of Parliament, on a June morning in 1923. She is preparing for a party she is giving that evening. As she walks through London, buying flowers and observing life, her thoughts...

Written after Woolf had finished her emotionally draining work on The Waves, Flush purports to be an autobiography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s eponymous cocker spaniel, charting the dog’s early days in the countryside, his adoption by the famous poet, his subsequent life in London and his travels with his owners to Italy. While the resulting narrative is light-hearted and playful...

This Norton Critical Edition includes: The American edition of the novel, first published by Harcourt Brace in 1927, introduced and annotated by Margaret Homans. A 1924-28 chronology of To the Lighthouse's composition, revision, publication, and reception. A rich selection of background materials, thematically organised for ease of reference. Topics include: "Autobiographical Writings," "Family and Other Contemporary Contexts and Sources," "Essays...

Originally hand-printed at her Hogarth Press in Richmond, Monday or Tuesday is the only collection of short stories that Virginia Woolf published during her lifetime. It provides a fascinating insight into the early stages of development of themes that would blossom in her later masterpieces. From the impressionist description of four groups of people walking by a flowerbed in the...

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 Every summer, Mr. and Mrs. Ramsey and their eight children vacation on Scotland's idyllic Isle of Skye, surrounded by artist friends. They expect...

A collectible hardcover edition of Virginia Woolf's pioneering novel about a time-travelling 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." -...

The complete collection of Virginia Woolf's shorter fiction, including her most famous stories such as Kew Gardens and A Haunted House. 'The window panes reflected apples, reflected roses; all the leaves were green in the glass.' Nowhere are Virginia Woolf's daring experimentations with style and form more evident than in her short stories, which shimmer and flash with their author's...