'The window panes reflected apples, reflected roses; all the leaves were green in the glass'

Nowhere are Virginia Woolf's daring experimentations with style and form more evident than in her short stories, which shimmer and flash with their author's peculiar genius. Collected by Leonard Woolf and published after her death, this is a complete collection of Virginia Woolf's shorter fiction. It is a fascinating and vivid introduction for readers new to Woolf, and a necessary companion for devotees.

Includes 'A Haunted House', 'Kew Gardens', 'A Mark on the Wall' and 42 other pieces.

Edited, with introductions and notes by Susan Dick.
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY HELEN SIMPSON

'Destined to be standard for years to come' Times Literary Supplement

About the Author

Virginia Woolf was born in London in 1882, the daughter of Sir Leslie Stephen, first editor of The Dictionary of National Biography. After his death in 1904 Virginia and her sister, the painter Vanessa Bell, moved to Bloomsbury and became the centre of 'The Bloomsbury Group'. This informal collective of artists and writers which included Lytton Strachey and Roger Fry, exerted a powerful influence over early twentieth-century British culture.

In 1912 Virginia married Leonard Woolf, a writer and social reformer. Three years later, her first novel The Voyage Out was published, followed by Night and Day (1919) and Jacob's Room (1922). These first novels show the development of Virginia Woolf's distinctive and innovative narrative style. It was during this time that she and Leonard Woolf founded The Hogarth Press with the publication of the co-authored Two Stories in 1917, hand-printed in the dining room of their house in Surrey. Between 1925 and 1931 Virginia Woolf produced what are now regarded as her finest masterpieces, from Mrs Dalloway (1925) to the poetic and highly experimental novel The Waves (1931). She also maintained an astonishing output of literary criticism, short fiction, journalism and biography, including the playfully subversive Orlando (1928) and A Room of One's Own (1929) a passionate feminist essay. This intense creative productivity was often matched by periods of mental illness, from which she had suffered since her mother's death in 1895. On 28 March 1941, a few months before the publication of her final novel, Between the Acts, Virginia Woolf committed suicide.

Reviews
Here is the precursor of the experiments which are to fill her future novels, where the writer will evaporate and condense solid objects over her literary Bunsen burner in solutions of time or light -- Helen Simpson, from her introduction
With Joyce and Eliot, Woolf has shaped a literary century -- Jeanette Winterson * The Times *
They seem as perfect, and as functional for all their beauty, as spider webs. Indeed they were made for like purpose: to trap and dissect living morsels in the form of palpitating moments of time, instantaneous perceptions, brief visions of others -- Eudora Welty * New York Times Book Review) *
Virginia Woolf stands as the chief figure of modernism in England and must be included with Joyce and Proust in the realisation of experimental achievements that have completely broken with tradition * New York Times *
Virginia Woolf was one of the great innovators of that decade of literary Modernism, the 1920s. Novels such as Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse showed how experimental writing could reshape our sense of ordinary life. Taking unremarkable materials - preparations for a genteel party, a day on a bourgeois family holiday - they trace the flow of associations and ideas that we call "consciousness" * Guardian *



Book Information
ISBN 9780099442165
Author Virginia Woolf
Format Paperback
Page Count 336
Imprint Vintage Classics
Publisher Vintage Publishing
Weight(grams) 234g
Dimensions(mm) 198mm * 129mm * 20mm