An immaculately-observed social comedy that explores the boundaries between personal freedom and the demands of love
Katharine Hilbery is beautiful and privileged, but uncertain of her future. She must choose between becoming engaged to the oddly prosaic poet William Rodney, and her dangerous attraction to the passionate Ralph Denham. As she struggles to decide, the lives of two other women women's rights activist Mary Datchet and Katharine's mother, Margaret, struggling to weave together the documents, events and memories of her own father's life into a biography impinge on hers...

Virginia Woolf is one of the most influential figures in twentieth-century literature. She was original, passionate, vivid, dedicated to her art. Yet most writing about her still revolves around her social life and the Bloomsbury set.
In this fresh, absorbing book, Julia Briggs puts the writing back at the center of Woolf s life, reads that life through her work, and mines the novels themselves to create a compelling new form of biography. Analyzing Woolf s own commentary on the creative process through her letters, diaries, and essays, Julia Briggs has produced a book that is a...

This is the first biography to concentrate exclusively on Woolf's close and inspirational friendships with the key women in her life, including the caregivers of her Victorian childhood who instilled in her a lifelong struggle between creativity and convention: her taciturn sister, Vanessa Bell; enigmatic artist Dora Carrington; complex writer Katherine Mansfield; independent novelist Vita Sackville-West; and riotous, militant composer Ethel Smyth.

The pleasure and excitement of exploring Virginia Woolf's writings is at the heart of this book by a highly respected Woolf critic and biographer. Julia Briggs reconsiders Woolf's work - from some of her earliest fictional experiments to her late short story, 'The Symbol', and from the most to the least familiar of her novels - from a series of highly imaginative and unexpected angles. Individual essays analyse Woolf's neglected second novel, Night and Day and investigate her links with other writers (Byron, Shakespeare), her ambivalent attitudes to 'Englishness' and to censorship, her...

The pleasure and excitement of exploring Virginia Woolf's writings is at the heart of this book by a highly respected Woolf critic and biographer. Julia Briggs reconsiders Woolf's work - from some of her earliest fictional experiments to her late short story, 'The Symbol', and from the most to the least familiar of her novels - from a series of highly imaginative and unexpected angles. Individual essays analyse Woolf's neglected second novel, Night and Day and investigate her links with other writers (Byron, Shakespeare), her ambivalent attitudes to 'Englishness' and to censorship, her...

Like all the best biographies, this is not the story of one person, but of an era, clamorous with lost voices.