Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf, said E.M. Forster, "liked writing with an intensity which few writers have attained or even desired". Writing was not an extra in her life, but the activity that allowed her to carry on living. In her career as a writer, Virginia Woolf, through her joint ownership of the Howgarth Press, had an usual degree of control over her own work. This made possible a career of extraordinary experimentation and formal inventiveness. No one of her works was like any other. She never settled on one way of writing because she never settled on one view about life. In her work, integration, meaning and belief are always counter-balanced by disintegration and scepticism. This book returns again and again to the questions of what Virginia Woolf herself took her purposes as a writer to be and to the changing and conflicting aims that she herself formulated in her essays as well as her fiction and her polemical works. She wrote as a woman, as a psychologist, as an "outsider" and social critic, as a poet and a visionary. The story of her career, of her choices and her experiments in form does not end with her celebrated modernist works "Mrs. Dalloway", "To the Lighthouse" and "The Waves". In this book some emphasis is placed elsewhere, on other, less finished achievements, such as "The Years", "A Sketch of the Past", "Between the Acts" and her "Diary", works in which formal elegance gives way, towrds the end of her life, to more untidy and unguarded works.