The best of Virginia Woolf's letters in one volumes
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.
About her letters there can be no division: they are among the best
ever written in the English language
*Sunday Telegraph*
Letters as well selected as these, and as brilliant, close the gap
between the author and the private person
*The Times*
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