Virginia Woolf

""Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself." It's one of the most famous opening lines in literature, that of Virginia Woolf's beloved masterpiece of time, memory, and the city. 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 on the brink of madness....

In A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf imagines that Shakespeare had a sister: a sister equal to Shakespeare in talent, equal in genius, but whose legacy is radically different. This imaginary woman never writes a word and dies by her own hand, her genius unexpressed. But if only she had found the means to create, urges Woolf, she would have reached the same heights as her immortal sibling. In this classic essay, Virginia Woolf takes on the establishment,...

Contemporary fiction. 'I walk'd about on the shore, lifting up my hands, and my whole being, as I may say, wrapt up in the contemplation of my deliverance . . . reflecting upon all my comrades that were drown'd, and that there should not be one soul sav'd but my self . . . ' Who has not dreamed of life on an exotic isle, far away from civilization? Here is the novel which has inspired countless imitations by lesser writers, none of which equal the...

One of Woolf's most experimental novels, this book presents six characters in monologue against the vivid background of the sea.

Jacob Flanders, a sensitive young man raised in Edwardian England, discovers as an adult that his life is lacking, but his search for fulfillment is sidetracked by the outbreak of World War I.

In Virginia Woolf's lyrical, inventive last novel, the action takes place on one summer's day at a country house in the heart of England on the eve of World War II. "Love. Hate. Peace. Three emotions made the ply of human life." Between the Acts takes place on a June day in 1939 at Pointz Hall, the Oliver family's country house in the heart of England. In the garden, everyone from the village has gathered to present the annual pageant ??-?? scenes...

The famous literary romance of Elizabeth Barret and Robert Browning given a funny and poignant slant - being told from the viewpoint of Elizabeth's adored spaniel, Flush, who bore his mistress's virtual imprisonment as an invalid in her father's house, and shared her dramatic flight abroad and subsequent happy married life. Flush belonged to Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and followed its mistress from her confinement in her father's house in Wimpole...

From the oval-shaped flower-bed there rose perhaps a hundred stalks spreading into heart-shaped or tongue-shaped leaves half way up and unfurling at the tip red or blue or yellow petals marked with spots of colour raised upon the surface; and from the red, blue or yellow gloom of the throat emerged a straight bar, rough with gold dust and slightly clubbed at the end. The petals were voluminous enough to be stirred by the summer breeze, and when they...

This is Woolf's first and most popular volume of essays. This collection has more than twenty-five selections, including such important statements as "Modern Fiction" and "The Modern Essay."