The first comprehensive analysis of Virginia Woolf's literary biographyOffers the first study of Virginia Woolf's representation of nineteenth-century women writers' livesSituates Woolf's journalism as a post-Victorian body of work at odds with her Modernist fictionTraces Woolf's impact on the afterlives of canonical and marginalized novelists of the nineteenth centuryThis book examines Virginia Woolf's influence on the literary afterlives of nineteenth-century women of letters including Jane Austen, Mary Russell Mitford, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, Margaret Oliphant and Mary Augusta Ward through her journalism. Woolf's responses to her literary predecessors provide new insights into her self-positioning within the literary canon and the interplay of biographical innovation and Victorian legacies in her non-fiction. This study demonstrates that Victorian narratives and tropes of female professionalism continue to shape Woolf's representations of nineteenth-century women writers even at the heyday of her Modernist fame. It contextualizes the overt feminism of A Room of One's Own within Woolf's more ambiguous literary biography to argue for its status as a transitional, post-Victorian body of work.

The first comprehensive analysis of Virginia Woolf's literary biography This book examines Virginia Woolf's influence on the literary afterlives of nineteenth-century women of letters through her journalism, including case studies of Jane Austen, Mary Russell Mitford, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, Margaret Oliphant and Mary Augusta Ward. Woolf's responses to her literary predecessors provide new insights into her self-positioning within the literary canon and the interplay of biographical innovation and Victorian legacies in her non-fiction. This study demonstrates that Victorian narratives and tropes of female professionalism continue to shape Woolf's representations of nineteenth-century women writers even in her heyday of her Modernist fame. It contextualises the overt feminism of A Room of One's Own within Woolf's more ambiguous literary biography to argue for its status as a transitional, post-Victorian body of work. Anne Reus is an Independent Scholar. Her research interests are women's writing and life writing in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She has published on Margaret Oliphant, Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Virginia Woolf and she is co-editor of Virginia Woolf and Heritage (2017).

Virginia Woolf's playful exploration of a satirical »Oxbridge« became one of the world's most groundbreaking writings on women, writing, fiction, and gender. A Room of One's Own [1929] can be read as one or as six different essays, narrated from an intimate first-person perspective. Actual history blends with narrative and memoir. But perhaps most revolutionary was its address: the book is written by a woman for women. Male readers are compelled to read through women's eyes in a total inversion of the traditional male gaze. VIRGINIA WOOLF [1882–1941] was an English author. With novels like Jacob’s Room [1922], Mrs Dalloway [1925], To the Lighthouse [1927], and Orlando [1928], she became a leading figure of modernism and is considered one of the most important English-language authors of the 20th century. As a thinker, with essays like A Room of One’s Own [1929], Woolf has influenced the women’s movement in many countries.

In Virginia Woolf and the Nineteenth-Century Domestic Novel, Emily Blair explores how nineteenth-century descriptions of femininity saturate both Woolf's fiction and her modernist manifestos. Moving between the Victorian and modernist periods, Blair looks at a range of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century sources, including the literature of conduct and household management, as well as autobiography, essay, poetry, and fiction. She argues for a reevaluation of Woolf's persistent yet vexed fascination with English domesticity and female creativity by juxtaposing the novels of Elizabeth Gaskell and Margaret Oliphant, two popular Victorian novelists, against Woolf's own novels and essays. Blair then traces unacknowledged lines of influence and complex interpretations that Woolf attempted to disavow. While reconsidering Woolf's analysis of women and fiction, Blair simultaneously deepens our appreciation of Woolf's work and advances our understanding of feminine aesthetics.

A Room of One's Own is an extended essay based on two lectures that Woolf delivered at Newnham College and Girton College, two women's colleges at the University of Cambridge, in 1928. In this work, Woolf explores the societal and material conditions required for women to write and produce literature. The central thesis of A Room of One's Own is encapsulated in Woolf's assertion that "a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction." Woolf argues that women have been systematically denied the financial independence and private space necessary to create literary works. She examines the history of women in literature and highlights the difficulties they faced in pursuing their artistic ambitions.

A reprint of the 1986 work in which Homans (English, Yale) explores the variety of ways in which 19th c. women writers attempted to reclaim their own experiences as paradigms for writing. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

This collection situates Woolf in relation to the past, exploring her rich and varied heritage from a variety of fields while also assessing her own literary and biographical legacy.