The complete collection of Virginia Woolf's shorter fiction, including her most famous stories such as 'Kew Gardens' and 'A Haunted House'.
Virginia Woolf was born in London in 1882, the daughter of Sir
Leslie Stephen, first editor of The Dictionary of National
Biography. After his death in 1904 Virginia and her sister, the
painter Vanessa Bell, moved to Bloomsbury and became the centre of
'The Bloomsbury Group'. This informal collective of artists and
writers which included Lytton Strachey and Roger Fry, exerted a
powerful influence over early twentieth-century British
culture.
In 1912 Virginia married Leonard Woolf, a writer and social
reformer. Three years later, her first novel The Voyage Out was
published, followed by Night and Day (1919) and Jacob's Room
(1922). These first novels show the development of Virginia Woolf's
distinctive and innovative narrative style. It was during this time
that she and Leonard Woolf founded The Hogarth Press with the
publication of the co-authored Two Stories in 1917, hand-printed in
the dining room of their house in Surrey. Between 1925 and 1931
Virginia Woolf produced what are now regarded as her finest
masterpieces, from Mrs Dalloway (1925) to the poetic and highly
experimental novel The Waves (1931). She also maintained an
astonishing output of literary criticism, short fiction, journalism
and biography, including the playfully subversive Orlando (1928)
and A Room of One's Own (1929) a passionate feminist essay. This
intense creative productivity was often matched by periods of
mental illness, from which she had suffered since her mother's
death in 1895. On 28 March 1941, a few months before the
publication of her final novel, Between the Acts, Virginia Woolf
committed suicide.
"Woolf was an innovator who redfined the novel and pointed the way towards its future possibilities" -- Jeanette Winterson "Virginia Woolf stands as the chief figure of modernism in England and must be included with Joyce and Proust in the realisation of experimental achievements that have completely broken with tradition" New York Times "Virginia Woolf was one of the great innovators of that decade of literary Modernism, the 1920s. Novels such as Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse showed how experimental writing could reshape our sense of ordinary life. Taking unremarkable materials - preparations for a genteel party, a day on a bourgeois family holiday - they trace the flow of associations and ideas that we call "consciousness" Guardian
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