Flush was an English cocker spaniel who belonged to the nineteenth-century poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

A commercial and critical success when it was first published in 1931, and now considered by some to be Virginia Woolf's most ambitious novel. This new edition includes pictures and a section on Virginia Woolf's life and works. Through a series of connected monologues, The Waves tells the story of six very different friends - Bernard, Louis, Neville, Jinny, Susan and Rhoda - as they progress from childhood to middle age. Interspersed with evocative descriptions of the seaside at different times of day, the poignant personal histories coalesce into a poetic tapestry of human experience. A...

"Based on two lectures given at Cambridge colleges and first published by the Hogarth Press in 1929, A Room of One's Own is an extended essay about the predicament of female writers and a stirring call for autonomy and recognition. As well as settling scores with reactionary critics and laying the foundations of a history of women's literature, the text is also a triumph of imagination, with a celebrated passage envisaging the fate of a fictional sister of Shakespeare's. A seminal, widely studied feminist polemic that touches on both literature and politics, A Room of One's Own is...

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction

Ranging from the silent fate of Shakespeares gifted (imaginary) sister to Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë and the effects of poverty and sexual constraint on female creativity, A Room of Ones Own, based on a lecture given at Girton College, Cambridge, is one of the great feminist polemics. Published almost a decade later, Three Guineas breaks new ground in its discussion of men, militarism and womens attitudes towards war. These two pieces reveal Virginia Woolfs fiery spirit, sophisticated wit and genius as an essayist.

Once described as the longest and most charming love-letter in literature, the Virginia Woolfs Orlando is edited by Brenda Lyons with an introduction and notes by Sandra M. Gilbert in Penguin Classics.

Written for Virginia Woolfs intimate friend, the charismatic writer Vita Sackville-West, Orlando is a playful mock biography of a chameleonic historical figure, immortal and ageless, who changes sex and identity on a whim. First masculine, then feminine, Orlando begins life as a young sixteenth-century nobleman, then gallops through three centuries to end up as a woman writer in Virginia...

'She had the perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very, dangerous to live even one day' Clarissa Dalloway, elegant and vivacious, is preparing for a party and remembering those she once loved. In another part of London, Septimus Warren Smith is suffering from shell-shock and on the brink of madness. Smith's day interweaves with that of Clarissa and her friends, their lives converging as the party reaches its glittering climax. Virginia Woolf's masterly novel, in which she perfected...

'Let us pretend that we can make out a plain and logical story, so that when one matter is despatched - love for instance - we go on, in an orderly manner, to the next' Tracing the lives of a group of friends, The Waves follows their development from childhood to middle age. While social events, individual achievements and disappointments form its narrative, the novel is most remarkable for the rich poetic language that expresses the inner life of its characters: their aspirations, their triumphs and regrets, their awareness of unity and isolation. Separately and together, they...

'There must be another life, here and now, she repeated. This is too short, too broken. We know nothing, even about ourselves' The Years is the story of the Pargiter family - their intimacies and estrangements, anxieties and triumphs - mapped out against the bustling rhythms of London's streets during the first decades of the twentieth century, as their Victorian upbringing gives way to a new world, where the rules of etiquette have shifted from the drawing room to the air-raid shelter. Virginia Woolf's penultimate novel is a celebration of the resilience of the individual amid...

'Life, from being made up of little separate incidents which one lived one by one, became curled and whole like a wave which bore one up with it and threw one down with it, there, with a dash on the beach' For years now the Ramsays have spent every summer in their holiday home in Scotland, and they expect these summers will go on forever; but, as the First World War looms, the integrity of family and society will be fatally challenged. To the Lighthouse is at once a vivid impressionistic depiction of their family holiday, and a meditation on marriage, on parenthood and childhood,...

'The future shadowed their present, like the sun coming through the many-veined transparent vine leaf: a criss-cross of lines making no pattern' It is June in 1939, and the inhabitants of a country house prepare for the annual village pageant that will be held in its grounds that day. It will tell the stories of English history, as it does every year. Yet the coming of war broods over the whole community, changing the meaning of past and present, and heralding a new act. Through her characters' passionate musings and private dramas, and through the enigmatic figure of the pageant's...