Virginia Woolf: An Introduction

Catalog description

Virginia Woolf is a key Modernist and a major 20th-century writer. Her groundbreaking experimental writing includes nine novels, two important works of feminist theory, and numerous stories, essays, diaries, and letters. With the Bloomsbury group, including her sister, the artist Vanessa Bell, she rebelled against Victorian values. We will read three novels: Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), and Orlando (1928). Our studies will also include excerpts from her autobiographical essays, Moments of Being (1985), from A Writer's Diary (1957) and The Common Reader (1925, 1932); her works of feminist theory, A Room of One's Own (1928) and Three Guineas (1938), along with her foundational essays on Modernism, "Modern Fiction" (1919) and "Mr. Bennet and Mrs. Brown" (1924). Supplementary reading may include excerpts from The Cambridge Companion to the Bloomsbury Group (ed. Victoria Rosner, 2014), The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf (ed. Susanne Sellers, 2000), Hermione Lee's biography (1996), and Lyndall Gordon's Virginia Woolf: A Writer's Life (2001).