Virginia Woolf

Rachel Vinrace embarks for South America on her father's ship and is launched on a course of self-discovery in a kind of modern mythical voyage. The mismatched jumble of passengers provide Woolf with an opportunity to satirise Edwardian life. The novel introduces Clarissa Dalloway, the central character of Woolf's later novel, Mrs....

The events of the story occupy a single June day in Central London as wealthy and fashionable society hostess Clarissa Dalloway is preparing for a party she is to give that evening. Through Mrs Dalloway's thoughts and memories, and the voices of others who have touched on her life and will attend her party, Virginia Woolf shows her genius as a...

Set in the summer home of an English family, the novel unfolds through shifting perspectives of each character's stream of consciousness, recalling childhood emotions and highlights of adult relationships. Shifts occur even mid-sentence, and in some sense they resemble the rotating beam of the lighthouse. A landmark of high modernism and one...

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, and...

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 book...