Known for her novels, and for the dubious fame of being a doyenne of the 'Bloomsbury Set', in her time Virginia Woolf was highly respected as a major essayist and critic with a special interest and commitment to contemporary literature, and women's writing in particular. This spectacular collection of essays and other writings does justice to those efforts, offering unique appraisals of Aphra Behn, Mary Wollstonecraft, the Duchess of Newcastle, Dorothy Richardson, Charlotte Bronte, and Katherine Mansfield, amongst many others. Gathered too, and using previously unpublished (sometimes even unsigned) journal extracts, are what will now become timeless commentaries on 'Women and Fiction', 'Professions for Women' and 'The Intellectual Status of Women'. More than half a century after the publication of A Room Of One's Own, distinguished scholar Michele Barrett cohesively brings together work which, throughout the years, has been scattered throughout many texts and many volumes. . . affording these very valuable writings the collective distinction they deserve at last.
VIRGINIA WOOLF (1882-1941) was one of the major literary figures of the twentieth century. An admired literary critic, she authored many essays, letters, journals, and short stories in addition to her groundbreaking novels.
Her first novel, The Voyage Out, appeared in 1915, and she then worked through the transitional Night and Day (1919) to the highly experimental and impressionistic Jacob's Room (1922). From then on her fiction became a series of brilliant and extraordinarily varied experiments, each one searching for a fresh way of presenting the relationship between individual lives and the forces of society and history. She was particularly concerned with women's experience, not only in her novels but also in her essays and her two books of feminist polemic, A Room of One's Own (1929) and Three Guineas (1938). Her major novels include Mrs. Dalloway (1925), the historical fantasy Orlando (1928), written for Vita Sackville-West, the extraordinarily poetic vision of The Waves (1931), the family saga of The Years (1937), and Between the Acts (1941).
Author biography courtesy of Penguin Group (USA).
| Introduction | 1 | |
| Notes and Sources | 36 | |
| Women and Fiction | 43 | |
| Women and Leisure | 53 | |
| The Intellectual Status of Women | 55 | |
| Professions for Women | 57 | |
| Men and Women | 64 | |
| Women Novelists | 68 | |
| Indiscretions | 72 | |
| The Duchess of Newcastle | 79 | |
| Aphra Behn | 89 | |
| A Scribbling Dame (Eliza Haywood) | 92 | |
| Mary Wollstonecraft | 96 | |
| Jane Austen Practising | 104 | |
| Jane Austen | 109 | |
| Haworth, November 1904 | 121 | |
| 'Jane Eyre' and 'Wuthering Heights' | 126 | |
| 'Aurora Leigh' | 133 | |
| Mrs Gaskell | 145 | |
| George Eliot | 150 | |
| 'I am Christina Rossetti' | 161 | |
| The Compromise (Mrs Humphry Ward) | 169 | |
| Wilcoxiana (Ella Wheeler Wilcox) | 173 | |
| Olive Schreiner | 180 | |
| A Terribly Sensitive Mind (Katherine Mansfield) | 184 | |
| Dorothy Richardson | 188 | |
| Royalty | 193 |
Overview
Known for her novels, and for the dubious fame of being a doyenne of the 'Bloomsbury Set', in her time Virginia Woolf was highly respected as a major essayist and critic with a special interest and commitment to contemporary literature, and women's writing in particular. This spectacular collection of essays and other writings does justice to those efforts, offering unique appraisals of Aphra Behn, Mary Wollstonecraft, the Duchess of Newcastle, Dorothy Richardson, Charlotte Bronte, and Katherine Mansfield, ...