Search results for ""author virginia woolf""

First masculine, then feminine, Orlando is a young sixteenth-century nobleman who gallops through the centuries, from Elizabethan England and imperial Turkey to Virginia Woolf's own time. Will he find happiness with the exotic Russian princess Sasha? Or is the dashing explorer Shelmerdine the ideal man? And what form will Orlando take on the journey a nobleman, traveller, writer? Man or . . . woman?Written for the charismatic, bisexual writer Vita Sackville-West, Orlando is one of Woolf's most popular and accessible novels, a playful mock biography of a chameleon-like historical figure that is both a wry commentary on gender and, in Woolf's own words, a ''writer's holiday'' that delights in its ambiguity and capriciousness.

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HarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of best-loved, essential classics.Every summer, the Ramsays visit their summer home on the beautiful Isle of Skye, surrounded by the excitement and chatter of family and friends, mirroring Virginia Woolf's own joyful holidays of her youth. But as time passes, and in its wake the First World War, the transience of life becomes ever more apparent through the vignette of the thoughts and observations of the novel's disparate cast.A landmark of high modernism and the most autobiographical of Virginia Woolf's novels, To the Lighthouse explores themes of loss, class structure and the question of perception, in a hauntingly beautiful memorial to the lost but not forgotten.Chosen by TIME magazine as one of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to the present.

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HarperCollins is proud to present its new range of best-loved, essential classics. ‘Orlando had become a woman – there is no denying it. But in every other respect, Orlando remained precisely as he had been. The change of sex, though it altered their future, did nothing whatever to alter their identity.’ Boisterous and defiant, Virginia Woolf’s queer classic subverts restraints of genre, time and gender. Traversing the complexities of human emotion and society’s obsession with conformity, the wild adventures of Woolf’s gender fluid hero begin in Elizabethan England and end in 1928 – yet Orlando ages just 36 years. A satirical romp that spans over three hundred years of history, Woolf’s fantastical biography was decades ahead of its time.

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Exam board: Edexcel, OCR, Cambridge Assessment International EducationLevel & Subject: AS and A Level English LiteratureFirst teaching: September 2015Next exams: 2024 This edition of Mrs Dalloway provides depth and context for A Level students, with the complete novel in an easy to read format, and a detailed introduction and bespoke glossary written by an experienced A Level teacher with academic expertise in the area. · Affordable high quality complete text of Mrs Dalloway, ideal for AS and A Level Literature· Perfectly pitched introductions provide the depth and demand required by AS and A Level· Explore the contemporary context, Virginia Woolf’s writing, the novel’s critical reception and subsequent interpretations for a deeper reading of the text· Expand your further reading with a list of key articles and critical and theoretical texts· Improve your understanding of the novel with unfamiliar concepts and culturally-specific terms defined in the glossary

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First published in 1923 but failing to gain the same fame as her groundbreaking collection Monday or Tuesday, Woolf's short story In the Orchard is perhaps her most experimental, painting the same picture in three very different ways.

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With an introduction by Adam Phillips Monday 17 July 1922. Back from Garsington, & too unsettled to write - I meant to say read; but then this does not count as writing. It is to me like scratching; or, if it goes well, like having a bath - which of course, I did not get at Garsington. 1920. The war is over, and Virginia Woolf is meeting friends old and new, from Maynard Keynes to Vita Sackville-West. She is reading and reviewing voraciously, and the Hogarth Press is thriving. Jacob's Room was published in 1922, and Woolf began work on what was to become Mrs Dalloway. This was a time of creative highs and lows, as well as a growing confidence as Woolf developed her distinctive literary voice.

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"Written after Woolf had finished her emotionally draining work on The Waves, Flush purports to be an autobiography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s eponymous cocker spaniel, charting the dog’s early days in the countryside, his adoption by the famous poet, his subsequent life in London and his travels with his owners to Italy. While the resulting narrative is light-hearted and playful on the surface, Woolf ingeniously uses the faux-naif impressions of her animal narrator to voice her social criticism on topics such as the class system and the relationship between man and woman. Much like its predecessor Orlando, Flush is a genre-defying blend of biography and fantasy, and an accessible yet stylistically innovative jeu d’esprit."

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Virginia Woolf's most unusual and fantastic creation, a funny, exuberant tale that examines the very nature of sexuality. **One of the BBC's 100 Novels That Shaped Our World** As his tale begins, Orlando is a passionate young nobleman whose days are spent in rowdy revelry, filled with the colourful delights of Queen Elizabeth's court. By the close, he will have transformed into a modern, thirty-six-year-old woman and three centuries will have passed. Orlando will not only witness the making of history from its edge, but will find that his unique position as a woman who knows what it is to be a man will give him insight into matters of the heart. WITH INTRODUCTIONS BY PETER ACKROYD AND MARGARET REYNOLDS

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Penguin Readers is an ELT graded reader series for learners of English as a foreign language. With carefully adapted text, new illustrations and language learning exercises, the print edition also includes instructions to access supporting material online.Titles include popular classics, exciting contemporary fiction, and thought-provoking non-fiction, introducing language learners to bestselling authors and compelling content.The eight levels of Penguin Readers follow the Common European Framework of Reference for language learning (CEFR). Exercises at the back of each Reader help language learners to practise grammar, vocabulary, and key exam skills. Before, during and after-reading questions test readers' story comprehension and develop vocabulary.Mrs Dalloway, a Level 7 Reader, is B2 in the CEFR framework. The longer text is made up of sentences with up to four clauses, introducing future perfect simple, mixed conditionals, past perfect continuous, mixed conditionals, more complex passive forms and modals for deduction in the past.On a June morning in 1923, Clarissa Dalloway is preparing for a party she is giving that evening. As she walks through London, her thoughts are of the past and her choice of husband. At the same time, and also in London, Septimus Smith is being driven mad by shell shock. At the party that evening, their stories come together.Visit the Penguin Readers websiteExclusively with the print edition, readers can unlock online resources including a digital book, audio edition, lesson plans and answer keys.

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Throughout history, some books have changed the world. They have transformed the way we see ourselves - and each other. They have inspired debate, dissent, war and revolution. They have enlightened, outraged, provoked and comforted. They have enriched lives - and destroyed them. Now Penguin brings you the works of the great thinkers, pioneers, radicals and visionaries whose ideas shook civilization, and helped make us who we are.

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To the Lighthouse, considered by many to be Virginia Woolf's finest novel, is a remarkably original work, showing the thoughts and actions of the members of a family and their guests on two separate occasions, ten years apart. The setting is Mr and Mrs Ramsay's house on a Scottish island, where they traditionally take their summer holidays, overlooking a bay with a lighthouse. An experimental work that pushes the limits of what we know about the world and ourselves, Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse is one of the most beautifully crafted of all novels written in the English language.This Macmillan Collector’s Library edition features an afterword by Sam Gilpin.Designed to appeal to the booklover, the Macmillan Collector's Library is a series of beautiful gift editions of much loved classic titles. Macmillan Collector's Library are books to love and treasure.

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The beautiful Everyman gift edition in hardback.The Lord Orlando's country seat has 365 rooms. An exquisitely beautiful youth, he is a favourite of the ageing Queen Elizabeth and enjoys all that Court and tavern have to offer. He falls passionately in love with the intriguing Sasha, an androgynous Russian princess, who jilts him. Stricken, he takes up Literature, penning huge quantities of poems and plays, 'all romantic, and all long'. A few decades later a still youthful Orlando is appointed ambassador to Constantinople by Charles II. Here he wakes up one day and finds he has the body of a woman. "Different sex, same person", she observes, unphased.In London, it is the eighteenth century, and she can hobnob with "men of genius" Pope and Swift, Johnson and Boswell. She has affairs with both women and men, but before long it is the nineteenth century, oppressively gloomy and moral and probably time to find a husband. Fortunately, in a Brontësque moment on a moor, the gender- nonconforming Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine, newly back from Cape Horn, gallops past and scoops her up into bliss.Woolf's most unusual and joyous novel was inspired by her affair with the dashing author and aristocrat, Vita Sackville West.

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This Norton Critical Edition includes: The 1925 first American edition text, introduced and annotated by Anne Fernald. A map of Mrs. Dalloway’s London. An unusually rich selection of contextual materials, including diary entries and letters related to the composition of the novel, essays, short stories and biographical excerpts, and the only introduction that Virginia Woolf wrote to any of her novels. The voices of other writers are also included, allowing readers to consider the literary passages that influenced Woolf’s art and historical moment. Eight reviews of Mrs. Dalloway, from publication to the present day. A chronology and a selected bibliography. About the Series Read by more than 12 million students over fifty-five years, Norton Critical Editions set the standard for apparatus that is right for undergraduate readers. The three-part format—annotated text, contexts and criticism—helps students to better understand, analyse and appreciate the literature, while opening a wide range of teaching possibilities for instructors. Whether in print or in digital format, Norton Critical Editions provide all the resources students need.

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'Fear no more the heat of the sun.' Mrs Dalloway, Virginia Woolf's fourth novel, offers the reader an impression of a single June day in London in 1923. Clarissa Dalloway, the wife of a Conservative member of parliament, is preparing to give an evening party, while the shell-shocked Septimus Warren Smith hears the birds in Regent's Park chattering in Greek. There seems to be nothing, except perhaps London, to link Clarissa and Septimus. She is middle-aged and prosperous, with a sheltered happy life behind her; Smith is young, poor, and driven to hatred of himself and the whole human race. Yet both share a terror of existence, and sense the pull of death. The world of Mrs Dalloway is evoked in Woolf's famous stream of consciousness style, in a lyrical and haunting language which has made this, from its publication in 1925, one of her most popular novels. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

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A generous “Contexts” section provides extracts from Woolf’s diaries and letters as well as comments on the novel from her fellow writers and friends, among them E. M. Forster and T. S. Eliot. Also included are the short stories “The Mark on the Wall,” “Kew Gardens,” and “An Unwritten Novel,” which Woolf viewed as early experiments with the innovative method used in Jacob’s Room. An additional short story, “A Woman’s College from Outside,” which Woolf originally intended to be Chapter 10 of Jacob’s Room, is also included. Finally, Woolf’s classic essay “Modern Novels,” written shortly before she began work on Jacob’s Room, provides insight into her aesthetic and technique. “Criticism” is divided into two sections: “Contemporary Reception and Reviews” contains personal responses to the novel, from Lytton Strachey and E. M. Forster, as well as eleven reviews from contemporary periodicals. “Critical Essays” offers insightful interpretations by Judy Little, Alex Zwerdling, Kate Flint, Kathleen Wall, and Edward L. Bishop. A Selected Bibliography is also included.

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This prestigious new edition of the most controversial of Woolf's works includes an illuminating introduction and full annotations by the editor.

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In this extraordinary essay, Virginia Woolf examines the limitations of womanhood in the early twentieth century. With the startling prose and poetic licence of a novelist, she makes a bid for freedom, emphasizing that the lack of an independent income, and the titular ‘room of one’s own’, prevents most women from reaching their full literary potential. As relevant in its insight and indignation today as it was when first delivered in those hallowed lecture theatres, A Room of One’s Own remains both a beautiful work of literature and an incisive analysis of women and their place in the world.Part of the Macmillan Collector’s Library; a series of stunning, clothbound, pocket-sized classics with gold foiled edges and ribbon markers. These beautiful books make perfect gifts or a treat for any book lover. This edition of A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf features an afterword by the British art historian Frances Spalding.

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As Katharine Hilbery, the granddaughter of a famous man of letters buried in Poets’ Corner, is helping her mother write the biography of their illustrious progenitor, she becomes engaged to William Rodney, a budding writer with an exaggerated opinion of his own poetical talent. Meanwhile, the suffragette Mary Datchet is in love with Ralph Denham, a lawyer and reviewer from a lowly background, who in turn feels more attracted to Katharine. As the stories and the romantic interests of these four young people evolve and intertwine, a picture emerges of a society still obsessed with class and hung up on the social mores of the Victorian era. By far the most accessible and traditional of all Virginia Woolf’s novels, Night and Day is a powerful evocation of a fast-changing world, and, though conventional in style, addresses many of the author’s recurring preoccupations, such as the role of women in society and the difficulties in reconciling love and marriage.

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Discover the most popular of Woolf's books during her lifetime - a powerful portrait of a family coping with changes wrought by the new twentieth century. The Years follows the lives of the Pargiters, a large middle-class London family, from an uncertain spring in 1880 to a party on a summer evening in the 1930s. We see them each endure and remember heart-break, loss, radical change and stifling conformity, marriage and regret. Written in 1937, this was the most popular of Virginia Woolf's novels during her lifetime, and is a powerful indictment of 'Victorianism' and its values. WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY SUSAN HILL

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'Clear, bright, burnished ... the moods that it expresses are a true kind of poetry' The New York TimesTracing the lives of a group of friends, The Waves follows their development from childhood to middle age. While social events, individual achievements and disappointments form its narrative, the novel is most remarkable for the rich poetic language that expresses the inner life of its characters: their aspirations, their triumphs and regrets, their awareness of unity and isolation, and their questioning of the meaning of life itself. Perhaps more than any of Woolf's novels, The Waves conveys the endless complexities of human experience.Edited with an Introduction and Notes by Kate Flint

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'A brilliant fantasia of all Time's problems, age and youth, change and permanence, truth and illusion' The Times Literary SupplementThe Years is the story of the Pargiter family - their intimacies and estrangements, anxieties and triumphs - mapped out against the bustling rhythms of London's streets during the first decades of the twentieth century, as their Victorian upbringing gives way to a new world, where the rules of etiquette have shifted from the drawing room to the air-raid shelter. Virginia Woolf's penultimate novel is a celebration of the resilience of the individual amid time, change, life, death and renewal.Edited with an Introduction and Notes by Jeri Johnson

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'I, who would wish to feel close over me the protective waves of the ordinary, catch with the tail of my eye some far horizon.' Intensely visionary yet absorbed with the everyday; experimental, daring and challenging, The Waves is regarded by many as Virginia Woolf's greatest achievement. It follows a set of six friends from childhood to middle age as they experience the world around them and explore who they are and what it means to be alive. As the contours of their lives are revealed, a unique novel is slowly unveiled. Enfolded within Woolf's lyrical and mysterious language, the mundane takes on a startling new significance while distant pasts are no less in play than the clamorous sounds and kaleidoscopic sights of the modern city. Yet precisely where the alluringly enigmatic pages of The Waves are leading, and what deeper meanings are held within its undulant chapters and shimmering interludes, are questions that have never ceased to enthral readers and critics alike. In this new edition David Bradshaw considers the spellbinding oddness and originality of The Waves, helping the reader to negotiate a way though this most poetic and haunting of novels. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

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'Intellectual freedom depends on material things. Poetry depends on intellectual freedom. And women have always been poor...' In these two classic essays of feminist literature, Woolf argues passionately for women's intellectual freedom and their role in challenging the drive towards fascism and conflict. In A Room of One's Own she explores centuries of limitations placed on women, as well as celebrating the creative achievements of the women writers who overcame these obstacles. In this first history of women's writing, she describes the importance of education, financial independence, and equality of opportunity to creative freedom. Three Guineas was written under the threat of fascism and impending war. A radical articulation of Woolf's pacifist politics, it investigates the causes of gender inequalities and the ways in which women's historic outsider position make them crucial in the prevention of war. Both these works started life as talks to groups of young women, and their engaging wit and informality establish Woolf as one of the twentieth-century's greatest essayists. Their arguments continue to reverberate in feminist discourse to this day. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

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'A good essay must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in, not out.' According to Virginia Woolf, the goal of the essay 'is simply that it should give pleasure...It should lay us under a spell with its first word, and we should only wake, refreshed, with its last.' One of the best practitioners of the art she analysed so rewardingly, Woolf displayed her essay-writing skills across a wide range of subjects, with all the craftsmanship, substance, and rich allure of her novels. This selection brings together thirty of her best essays, including the famous 'Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown', a clarion call for modern fiction. She discusses the arts of writing and of reading, and the particular role and reputation of women writers. She writes movingly about her father and the art of biography, and of the London scene in the early decades of the twentieth century. Overall, these pieces are as indispensable to an understanding of this great writer as they are enchanting in their own right. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

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The Voyage Out (1915) is the story of a rite of passage. When Rachel Vinrace embarks for South America on her father's ship she is launched on a course of self-discovery in a modern version of the mythic voyage. Virginia Woolf knew all too well the forms that she was supposed to follow when writing of a young lady's entrance into the world, and she struggled to subvert the conventions, wittily and assiduously, rewriting and revising the novel many times. The finished work is not, on the face of it, a `portrait of the artist'. However, through The Voyage Out readers will discover Woolf as an emerging and original artist: not identified with the heroine, but present everywhere in the social satire and the lyricism and patterning of consciousness. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

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'What do we seek through millions of pages? Still hopefully turning the pages -- oh, here is Jacob's room.' Who is Jacob Flanders? Virginia Woolf's third novel, published in 1922 alongside James Joyce's Ulysses and T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, follows this elusive title character from a sunlit childhood on the Cornwall coast to adventures in Cambridge, London, and Athens. Women fall in love with Jacob; young men desire his company and conversation. But Woolf keeps her scornful, charming protagonist at a distance, enveloping Jacob in mystery as he enters adulthood and the Great War thunders across Europe. A daring work that reimagines every element of the traditional novel, Jacob's Room tells a new story for a new century. In 1922, Lytton Strachey pronounced Jacob's Room 'a most wonderful achievement—more like poetry, it seems to me, than anything else, and as such I prophesy immortal.' One hundred years after its publication, Woolf's first full-length work of experimental fiction pulls us into the inexhaustible mysteries of intimacy and mortality.

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Virginia Woolf turned to her diary as to an intimate friend, to whom she could freely and spontaneously confide her thoughts on public events or the joys and trials of domestic life. Between 1st January 1915 and her death in 1941 she regularly recorded her thoughts with unfailing grace, courage, honesty and wit. The result is one of the greatest diaries in the English language.

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'Where are we to begin? How are we to bring order into this multitudinous chaos and so get the deepest and widest pleasure from what we read?'Published for the first time as a standalone volume, Virginia Woolf's short, impassioned essay, How Should One Read a Book? celebrates the enduring importance of great literature. In this timeless manifesto on the written word, rediscover the joy of reading and the power of a good book to change the world.One of the most significant modernist writers of the 20th Century, Virginia Woolf and her visionary essays are as relevant today as they were nearly one hundred years ago.Features a new introduction by Sheila Heti.

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A gorgeous clothbound edition of Woolf's fantastical and enchanting novel, designed by the acclaimed Coralie-Bickford Smith. Orlando has always been an outsider...His longing for passion, adventure and fulfilment takes him out of his own time. Chasing a dream through the centuries, he bounds from Elizabethan England and imperial Turkey to the modern world. Will he find happiness with the exotic Russian Princess Sasha? Or is the dashing explorer Shelmerdine the ideal man? And what form will Orlando take on the journey - a nobleman, traveller, writer? Man or... woman?A wry commentary on gender and history, Orlando is also, in Woolf's own words, a light-hearted 'writer's holiday' which delights in ambiguity and capriciousness. This clothbound Penguin edition is edited by Brenda Lyons with an introduction and notes by Sandra M. Gilbert. 'I read this book and believed it was a hallucinogenic, interactive biography of my own life and future'Tilda Swinton

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