The prospect of accounting for the many contexts relevant to reading Virginia Woolf brings to mind her famous simile, in ‘Kew Gardens’ (1919), for the city of London: ‘a vast nest of Chinese boxes all of wrought steel turning ceaselessly one within another’. This chapter can identify and open only some of the main boxes, but it begins a process that will continue with reading Woolf's works. Exploration of contexts becomes a matter of secondary as well as primary sources, and this chapter will offer guidance to the key publications for each context.

As an acclaimed high modernist writer, Woolf has not always been discussed in terms of context. Indeed, certain approaches to the context of modernism would encourage a purely formalist understanding of such writing. Yet what is so important about Woolf is that her immediate, intimate, intellectual context in Bloomsbury was itself the theoretical cradle of British formalism, and by extension, of formalist modernism. But Bloomsbury was also important as much for its practitioners as its theorists. Bloomsbury artists, such as Woolf's sister Vanessa Bell, for example, contributed much to Woolf's aesthetic development; and this contribution extended to her material context. She lived in the avant-garde domestic interiors her Bloomsbury colleagues created, and used furniture and fabrics designed and made by Bloomsbury's Omega Workshops.

If we consider Woolf's work in the context of feminist politics, on the other hand, we find that one of her most important contributions to feminist thought is itself directly concerned with context: A Room of One's Own (1929) puts the case for the development of private and public contexts conducive to the flourishing of women's writing.