Virginia Woolf's stream-of-consciousness masterpiece follows Clarissa Dalloway through the course of a day as she prepares to host a party in the evening. The beautiful June day brings back memories from her happy schoolgirl years. She wonders about her choice of husband--was she wrong to have married reliable Richard Dalloway, refusing the exciting Peter Walsh, and what was the place of her schoolgirl love? The story travels back and forth in time, densely weaving the texture of an intelligent, upper class woman's life lived within the strictures of post-WW I England.

Woolfs influential novel explores the depth of meaning in a seemingly ordinary day of one womans life. Includes contextual material.

First published in 1925, this traces a day in the life of society hostess, Clarissa Dalloway. It is Woolf's first complete rendering of her stream of consciousness mode, which displays the inner workings of the mind as it considers the surface and darker depths of reality.

HarperCollins is proud to present its new range of best-loved, essential classics. 'Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind...' Based on a lecture given at Cambridge and first published in 1929, 'A Room of One's Own' interweaves Woolf's personal experience as a female writer with themes ranging from Austen and Bronte to Shakespeare's gifted (and imaginary) sister. 'Three Guineas', Woolf's most impassioned polemic, came almost a decade later and broke new ground by challenging the very notions of war and...

HarperCollins is proud to present its new range of best-loved, essential classics. 'The flower bloomed and faded. The sun rose and sank. The lover loved and went. And what the poets said in rhyme, the young translated into practice.' Written for her lover Vita Sackville-West, 'Orlando' is Woolf's playfully subversive take on a biography, here tracing the fantastical life of Orlando. As the novel spans centuries and continents, gender and identity, we follow Orlando's adventures in love - from being a lord in the Elizabethan court to a lady in 1920s London. First published in 1928, this tale...

Originally published in 1928 this classic story by Virginia Woolf was modelled on her friend Vita Sackville-West's personality. Orlando chooses her own sexual identity as she lives through three centuries as both a man and a woman.

Mrs Dalloway, created from a series of short stories, is one of Virginia Woolf's best-known novels. Thematically it conveys a rich and genuine humanity, in part through Woolf's use of interior perspectives. This edition provides a substantial introduction, which discusses the composition history of the novel and shows how Woolf's reading, writing, and personal life as well as the world around her contributed to the book. Explanatory notes review decades of scholarship while identifying numerous allusions to Homer, Shakespeare, Tennyson and others. A complete list of textual variants shows...

An exclusive collection of Virginia Woolf's most entertaining, thought-provoking and infectiously witty essays.
Virginia Woolf began writing reviews for the "Guardian" 'to make a few pence' from her father's death in 1904, and continued until the last decade of her life. The result is a phenomenal collection of articles, of which this selection offers a fascinating glimpse, which display the gifts of a dazzling social and literary critic as well as the development of a brilliant and influential novelist. From reflections on class and education, to slyly ironic reviews, musings on the...

A Room of One's Own is Virginia Woolf's most powerful feminist essay, justifying the need for women to possess intellectual freedom and financial independence. Based on a lecture given at Girton College, Cambridge, the essay is one of the great feminist polemics, ranging in its themes from Jane Austen and Carlotte Bronte to the silent fate of Shakespeare's gifted (imaginary) sister and the effects of poverty and sexual constraint on female creativity. Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) is regarded as a major twentieth-century author and essayist, a key figure in literary history as a feminist and...