Chapter 3 - Works
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
Summary
Virginia Woolf's oeuvre is sizable. Most of her writings, across several genres, are in print, including a growing number of holograph, draft and facsimile editions of key works. While the latter are probably not of immediate interest to those starting to read Woolf, it is the case that her letters, diaries, memoirs and essays may well be studied along with her novels and short stories. But it is Woolf's achievement as a novelist that firstly marks her out as a major modern writer. This chapter will focus mainly on the ten novels in chronological order from The Voyage Out (1915) to Between the Acts (1941), and a selection of stories, then turn to Woolf's key works of literary criticism, concentrating mainly on A Room of One's Own (1929) and a selection of essays. Woolf's autobiographical writings are drawn on throughout this book, particularly where they are relevant to Woolf's biography or to those works prioritised for introductory discussion. But they might nevertheless be understood as important works in themselves, not only as resources for illustrating the life or compositional processes. The first section of this chapter focuses on Woolf's fiction, the second section on her nonfiction.
Woolf's writing demands close scrutiny by its readers. Before turning to the works themselves, let us briefly note how we might approach them, and what some of the basic, common approaches to studying Woolf have been.
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- Information
- The Cambridge Introduction to Virginia Woolf , pp. 37 - 122Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2006