Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf's Orlando 'The longest and most charming love letter in literature', playfully constructs the figure of Orlando as the fictional embodiment of Woolf's close friend and lover, Vita Sackville-West. Spanning three centuries, the novel opens as Orlando, a young nobleman in Elizabeth's England, awaits a visit from the Queen and traces his experience with first love as England under James I lies locked in the embrace of the Great Frost. At the midpoint of the novel, Orlando, now an ambassador in Constantinople, awakes to find that he is now a woman, and the novel indulges in farce and irony to consider the roles of women in the 18th and 19th centuries. As the novel ends in 1928, a year consonant with full suffrage for women. Orlando, now a wife and mother, stands poised at the brink of a future that holds new hope and promise for women.

The serene and maternal Mrs. Ramsay, the tragic yet absurd Mr. Ramsay, and their children and assorted guests are on holiday on the Isle of Skye. From the seemingly trivial postponement of a visit to a nearby lighthouse, Woolf constructs a remarkable, moving examination of the complex tensions and allegiances of family life and the conflict between men and women. As time winds its way through their lives, the Ramsays face, alone and simultaneously, the greatest of human challenges and its greatest triumph—the human capacity for change.

Virginia Woolf's first original and distinguished work, Jacob's Room is the story of a sensitive young man named Jacob Flanders. The life story, character and friends of Jacob are presented in a series for separate scenes and moments from his childhood, through college at Cambridge, love affairs in London, and travels in Greece, to his death in the war. Jacob's Room established Virginia Woolf's reputation as a highly poetic and symbolic writer who places emphasis not on plot or action but on the psychological realm of occupied by her characters.

As ondas, considerada uma das mais importantes obras de Virginia Woolf e do século XX, envolve o leitor nas inquietações e sensações íntimas de suas personagens principais. Os monólogos que conduzem a narrativa se desenrolam em um fluxo contínuo como o movimento das ondas e transformam este romance em um verdadeiro jogo experimental. Homossexualidade, adultério, amizade, amor e morte atravessam a fala dos protagonistas, que se exprimem e se retiram, cada um a seu tempo, embalando o leitor no ritmo das marés. Esta edição conta com a tradução da escritora Lya Luft, que verteu com maestria para a língua portuguesa toda a complexidade da genial escrita da autora.

Heralded as Virginia Woolf's greatest novel, this is a vivid portrait of a single day in a woman's life. When we meet her, Mrs. Clarissa Dalloway is preoccupied with the last-minute details of party preparation while in her mind she is something much more than a perfect society hostess. As she readies her house, she is flooded with remembrances of faraway times. And, met with the realities of the present, Clarissa reexamines the choices that brought her there, hesitantly looking ahead to the unfamiliar work of growing old.

A Room of One's Own is an extended essay by Virginia Woolf. First published on the 24th of October, 1929, the essay was based on a series of lectures she delivered at Newnham College and Girton College, two women's colleges at Cambridge University in October 1928. While this extended essay in fact employs a fictional narrator and narrative to explore women both as writers and characters in fiction, the manuscript for the delivery of the series of lectures, titled Women and Fiction, and hence the essay, are considered nonfiction. The essay is seen as a feminist text, and is noted in its argument for both a literal and figural space for women writers within a literary tradition dominated by patriarchy.

'I am reduced to a thing that wants Virginia. I composed a beautiful letter to you in the sleepless nightmare hours of the night, and it has all gone. I just miss you...' At a dinner party in 1922, Virginia Woolf met the renowned author, aristocrat - and sapphist - Vita Sackville-West. Virginia wrote in her diary that she didn't think much of Vita's conversation, but she did think very highly of her legs. It was to be the start of almost twenty years of flirtation, friendship, and literary collaboration. Their correspondence ended only with Virginia's tragic death in 1941. Intimate and playful, these selected letters and diary entries allow us to hear these women's constantly changing feelings for each other in their own words. Eavesdrop on the affair that inspired Virginia to write her most fantastical novel, Orlando, and glimpse into their extraordinary lives: from Vita's travels across the globe, to Virginia's parties with the Bloomsbury set; from their shared love of dogs and nature, to their grief at the beginning of the Second World War. Discover a relationship that - even a hundred years later - feels radical and relatable. WITH AN ORIGINAL INTRODUCTION FROM ALISON BECHDEL, AUTHOR OF FUN HOME AND CREATOR OF THE BECHDEL TEST.

Yirminci yüzyılda roman geleneğini köklü biçimde değiştiren yazarlar arasında önemli bir yeri olan Virginia Woolf’un Deniz Feneri adlı kitabı, en çok okunan ve en sevilen romanları arasında yer alıyor. Bu romanıyla Woolf kendini zamanının öteki yazarlarından ayıran biçem ve yöntemi geliştirmiş, kendi roman tekniğine uygun en iyi yapıtını vermiştir. Bilindiği gibi James Joyce ve Virginia Woolf, bireyin günlük yaşamını ‘bilinç akışı’ ile birlikte ve olduğu gibi, tüm karmaşıklığıyla yapıtlarına yansıtmayı amaç edinen, biçime özen gösteren yazarların başında gelirler. Ramsay ailesinin İskoçya’daki yazlıklarında geçirdikleri birkaç günü anlatan Deniz Feneri, yazarın kendi hayatından izler taşıyor. Bu arada, yazarın, güçlü İngiliz kadın hareketinden etkilendiğini ve zamanın önde gelen feminist yazarlarından olduğunu da gözardı etmemek gerekir. İlk kez 1927 yılında yayımlanan bu romanın baş kadın kişisi Mrs. Ramsay, o yılların okur yazar, varlıklı ya da orta sınıf kadınlarının feminizm adına yaptıklarını, düşündüklerini yansıtmaktadır. "Deniz Feneri, İngilizce’deki muazzam ağıtlardan biridir, zamanı aşan bir kitap." Margaret Drabble

Woolf’s first novel is a haunting book, full of light and shadow. It takes Mr. and Mrs. Ambrose and their niece, Rachel, on a sea voyage from London to a resort on the South American coast. “It is a strange, tragic, inspired book whose scene is a South America not found on any map and reached by a boat which would not float on any sea, an America whose spiritual boundaries touch Xanadu and Atlantis” (E. M. Forster).

In 1926 Virginia Woolf wrote an essay entitled, "How Should One Read a Book?" to deliver as a lecture at a private girls' school in Kent, England. In revised form it appears to have been first published in The Yale Review, October, 1926. Along with other essays, it first appeared in book form in Woolf's The Common Reader: Second Series in 1932.

In this poignant and humorous work, Virginia Woolf observes that though illness is part of every human being's experience, it has never been the subject of literature—like the more acceptable subjects of war and love. We cannot quote Shakespeare to describe a headache. We must, Woolf says, invent language to describe pain. And though illness enhances our perceptions, she observes that it reduces self-consciousness; it is "the great confessional." Woolf discusses the cultural taboos associated with illness and explores how illness changes the way we read. Poems clarify and astonish, Shakespeare exudes new brilliance, and so does melodramatic fiction! On Being Ill was published as an individual volume by Hogarth Press in 1930. While other Woolf essays, such as A Room of One's Own and Three Guineas, were first published by Hogarth as individual volumes and have since been widely available, On Being Ill has been overlooked. The Paris Press edition features original cover art by Woolf's sister, the painter Vanessa Bell. Hermione Lee's Introduction discusses this extraordinary work, and explores Woolf's revelations about poetry, language, and illness.

The most popular of Virginia Woolf's novels during her lifetime, The Years is a savage indictment of British society at the turn of the century, edited with an introduction and notes by Jeri Johnson in Penguin Modern Classics. The Years is the story of three generations 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. Growing up in a typically Victorian household, the Pargiter children must learn to find their footing in an alternative world, where the rules of etiquette have shifted from the drawing-room to the air-raid shelter. A work of fluid and dazzling lucidity, The Years eschews a simple line of development in favour of a varied and constantly changing style, emphasises the radical discontinuity of personal experiences and historical events. Virginia Woolf's penultimate novel celebrates the resilience of the individual self and, in her dazzlingly fluid and distinctive voice, she confidently paints a broad canvas across time, generation and class.

This story of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s cocker spaniel, Flush, enchants right from the opening pages. Although Flush has adventures of his own with bullying dogs, horrid maids, and robbers, he also provides the reader with a glimpse into Browning’s life. Introduction by Trekkie Ritchie.

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 with unexpected and intriguing consequences. Virginia Woolf's delicate second novel is both a love story and a social comedy, yet it also subtly undermines these traditions, questioning a woman's role and the very nature of experience.

One of the most distinguished critics and innovative authors of the twentieth century, Virginia Woolf published two novels before this collection appeared in 1921. However, it was these early stories that first earned her a reputation as a writer with "the liveliest imagination and most delicate style of her time." Influenced by Joyce, Proust, and the theories of William James, Bergson, and Freud, she strove to write a new fiction that emphasized the continuous flow of consciousness, time's passage as both a series of sequential moments and a longer flow of years and centuries, and the essential indefinability of character.Readers can discover these and other aspects of her influential style in the eight stories collected here, among them a delightful, feminist put-down of the male intellect in "A Society" and a brilliant and sensitive portrayal of nature in "Kew Gardens." Also included are "An Unwritten Novel," "The String Quartet," "A Haunted House," "Blue & Green," "The Mark on the Wall," and the title story.In recent years, Woolf's fiction, feminism, and high-minded sensibilities have earned her an ever-growing audience of readers. This splendid collection offers those readers not only the inestimable pleasures of the stories themselves, but an excellent entrée into the larger body of Woolf's work.

The author received three separate requests for a gift of one guinea-one for a women’s college building fund, one for a society promoting the employment of professional women, and one to help prevent war and “protect culture, and intellectual liberty.” This book is a threefold answer to these requests-and a statement of feminine purpose.

An invaluable guide to the art and mind of Virginia Woolf, drawn from the personal record she kept over a period of twenty-seven years. Included are entries that refer to her own writing, and those that are relevant to the raw material of her work, and, finally, comments on the books she was reading. The first entry included here is dated 1918 and the last, three weeks before her death in 1941. Between these points of time unfolds the private world—the anguish, the triumph, the creative vision—of one of the great writers of the twentieth century. “ A Writer’s Diary . . . is Virginia Woolf . . . The whole vibrates with the ups and downs of a passionate relationship . . . in the intensities, variations, alarms and excursions, panics and exaltations of her relationship to her art.”— New York Times Book Review Edited and with a Preface by Leonard Woolf.

"The Mark on the Wall" is the first published story by Virginia Woolf. It was published in 1917 as part of the first collection of short stories written by Virginia Woolf and her husband, Leonard Woolf, called Two Stories. It was later published in New York in 1921 as part of another collection entitled Monday or Tuesday. The Mark on the Wall is written in the first person, as a "stream of consciousness" monologue. The narrator notices a mark on the wall, and muses on the workings of the mind. Themes of religion, self-reflection, nature, and uncertainty are explored. The narrator reminisces about the development of thought patterns, beginning in childhood.

In 1927, at The Hogarth Press, Virginia Woolf produced and published a limited edition of what was to become one of her best-loved stories. The book's jacket design and page illustrations were by her sister, artist Vanessa Bell. More than sixty years later, The Hogarth Press at Chatto & Windus has published a lovely facsimile of that prized edition of 'Kew Gardens'. The lush and haunting story circles around Kew Gardens one hot day in July, as various odd and interesting couples walk by and talk, exchanging words but letting thoughts and memories float languorously above the glossy leaves and exotic blooms, while at their feet, a determined snail makes its way slowly across a mountainous flower bed. Elegantly produced, a precise replica of that 1927 special edition, with Vanessa Bell's jacket and decorative drawings, this is a rare treat for Bloomsbury devotees and all who love beautiful books.

An e-publication of a single short story. The download link is below.

A highly acclaimed collection of twenty-eight essays, sketches, and short stories presenting nearly every facet of the author's work. "Up to the author's highest standard in a literary form that was most congenial to her" (Times Literary Supplement (London)). "Exquisitely written" (New Yorker); "The riches of this book are overwhelming" (Christian Science Monitor). Editorial Note by Leonard Woolf.

In Woolf's last novel, the action takes place on one summer's day at a country house in the heart of England, where the villagers are presenting their annual pageant. A lyrical, moving valedictory.

'The London Scene' is a collection of essays written by one of London's most acclaimed writers. Virginia Woolf was born and lived much of her life in the city, using it as the backdrop for many of her works. The essays cover London Docks, Oxford Street Tide, Great Men's Houses, Abbeys and Cathedrals, "This is the House of Commons", and Portrait of a Londoner. The essays were first published in the 'Good Housekeeping' magazine, beginning in the spring of 1931 and then bi-monthly through to December 1932. There is also a chapter on 'The History of The London Scene', which when first published in America was entitled 'The London Scene: Five Essays.' 'The Portrait of a Londoner' was the essay not included and, indeed, this edition has that essay included in the collection for the first time.

The plot is about a group of girls who form a society. They vow that none of them will marry or have children until they can determine what men have been doing all the this time and whether it was worth it for women to spend their youth in bearing an raising them

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."