Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf is one of the most important writers of the twentieth century.

Part of the Bloomsbury set, she lived surrounded by other artists and writers, and her novels and essays have inspired generations of readers and writers ever since their publication.

Her personal struggles with depression and mental illness, and her feminist beliefs come across strongly in her work, illuminating an important period in British social history, not just for women’s rights, but for a whole nation scarred by the effects of two world wars.

Winifred Holtby gives us Woolf the critic, the essayist and the experimental novelist in this critical memoir which is of particular interest as the work of one intelligent, though very different, novelist commenting on another.

Holtby’s careful reading of Woolf’s work is set in the context of the debate between modernist and traditional writing in the 1920s and 1930s.

Although Holtby greatly admires Woolf’s art, she considers its limitations as an elite form that ignores the material conditions of everyday life and the consequent social responsibility expected of the novel.

Choosing to write about Woolf as ‘the author whose art seemed most of all removed from anything I could ever attempt, and whose experience was most alien to my own,’ Holtby has written a candid appreciation of the complex, groundbreaking work of a contemporary writer at the height of her career.

Winifred Holtby (1898-1935) was an English novelist and journalist. She is also the author of the ‘South Riding’ series.

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