Virginia Woolf

He left everything just as it was.... Did he think he would come back?Jacob's Room was the first book in Virginia Woolf's unique, experimental style, making it an important text of early Modernism. Ostensibly, the story is about the life of Jacob Flanders, the title character, who is evoked purely by other characters' perceptions and memories of...

The Voyage Out (1915) is the story of a rite of passage. When Rachel Vinrace embarks for South America on her father's ship she is launched on a course of self-discovery in a modern version of the mythic voyage.  Virginia Woolf knew all too well the forms that she was supposed to follow when writing of a young lady's entrance into the world,...

Set on a hot London day in June 1923, Mrs Dalloway explores both the raw hold of the past and the brighter potential of the future. Clarissa Dalloway is the wife of an MP and an assured socialite, yet as she prepares for her party the links between her and the shell-shocked Septimus Warren Smith become ever more apparent. Mrs Dalloway is a...

'I am making up "e;To the Lighthouse"e; - 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...

Katherine Hilbery, torn between past and present, is a figure reflecting Woolf's own struggle with history. Both have illustrious literary ancestors: in Katherine's case, her poet grandfather, and in Woolf's, her father Leslie Stephen, writer, philosopher, and editor. Both desire to break away from the demands of the previous generation without...

Jacob's Room is Virginia Woolf's first truly experimental novel. It is a portrait of a young man, who is both representative and victim of the social values which led Edwardian society into war. Jacob's life is traced from the time he is a small boy playing on the beach, through his years in Cambridge, then in artistic London, and finally making a...