Classic Collection Essays on the Self

Virginia Woolf (25 January 1882 - 28 March 1941) was an English novelist, critic and publisher. She was born to an affluent and influential London family; her father, Sir Leslie Stephen (1832 - 194) was the founding editor of the Dictionary of National Biography. With other contemporaries, including T. S. Eliot, James Joyce and Katherine Mansfield, Woolf became a key figure within, and partisan advocate of, literary modernism. Her novels include Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), Orlando (1928) and Between the Acts (1941), and her campaigning non-fiction includes A Room of One's Own (1929) and Three Guineas (1938). She wrote extensive criticism, often for newspapers, and this was collected in works including The Common Reader (1925 and, second series, 1932) and The Death of the Moth and Other Essays (1942). As co-founder, with her husband Leonard Woolf, of the Hogarth Press, Woolf published many of her contemporaries, including T. S. Eliot. In 1941, Woolf committed suicide by drowning herself in the River Ouse, near her Sussex home. Joanna Kavenna is a British novelist and travel writer. Her works include The Ice Museum, Inglorious and The Birth of Love. Her short stories and essays have appeared in the New Yorker, the London Review of Books, Arc, the Guardian and the New York Times, among other publications. She has received the Alistair Horne Fellowship and the Orange Prize for New Writing, and in 213 was named as one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists.