Virginia Woolf

Though its fame as an icon of twentieth-century literature rests primarily on the brilliance of its narrative technique and the impressionistic beauty of its prose, To the Lighthouse is above all the story of a quest, and as such it possesses a brave and magical universality. Observed across the years at their vacation house facing the gales of the North Atlantic, Mrs. Ramsay and her family seek to recapture meaning from the flux of things and the...

Virginia Woolf's classic plea for a world in which women are free to use their gifts is as powerful and resonant as ever. In this influential extended essay, she outlines what women need in order to fully make use of their innate abilities. Using provocative images and memorable thought experiments--including the fictional Judith Shakespeare, who is as talented as her brother William but limited in ways he was not--Woolf decries the means by which...

We meet young free-spirited Rachel Vinrace aboard her father's ship, the Euphrosyne, departing London for South America. Surrounded by a clutch of genteel companions -- among them her aunt Helen, who judges Rachel to be "vacillating," "emotional," and "more than normally incompetent for her years" -- Rachel displays a startling maturity when she finds her engagement to the writer Terence Hewet listing toward disaster.

The lives of two friends are contrasted in Edwardian London. Katharine Hillbery is the bored, frustrated granddaughter of an eminent English poet. She lives at her parents' home and is engaged to a prig who exemplifies the stultifying life from which she wishes to be free, until she meets a possible avenue of escape in the person of Ralph Denham. Mary Dathcet, on the other hand, represents an alternative to marriage -- she has been to college, lives...