Political and social change during Woolf's lifetime led her to address the role of the state and the individual. Michael H. Whitworth shows how ideas and images from contemporary novelists, philosophers, theorists, and scientists fuelled her writing, and how critics, film-makers, and novelists have reinterpreted her work for later generations.

Covering a wide range of historical, theoretical, critical and cultural contexts, this collection studies key issues in contemporary Woolf studies.

"As a paradigmatic modernist author, Virginia Woolf is celebrated for the ways her fiction illuminates modern and contemporary life. Woolf scholars have long debated how context - whether historical, cultural, or theoretical - is to be understood in relation to her work, and how her work produces new insights into context. Drawing on an international field of leading and emergent specialists, this collection provides an authoritative resource for contemporary Woolf scholarship that explores the distinct and overlapping dimensions of her writings. Rather than survey existing scholarship, these essays extend Woolf studies in new directions by examining how the author is contextualised today. The collection also highlights connections between Woolf and key cultural, political, and historical issues of the twentieth century such as avant-gardism in music and art, developments in journalism and the publishing industry, political struggles over race, gender, and class, and the bearings of colonialism, empire, and war. A valuable critical touchstone for researchers, the volume will also complement graduate scholarship in English literature, literary theory, context studies, and modernism and postcolonial studies"--

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.

Virginia Woolf and Her Female Contemporaries helps us comprehend the ways that women writers and artists contributed to and complicated modernism by contextualizing them alongside Woolf's work.

"The finest critical book on Virgina Woolf to date. Alex Zwerdling's large and subtle study places Virginia Woolf's world of class, politics, feminism, pacifism, and the family into firm historical perspective. The book leaves us with renewed appreciation for Woolf's work and for her mind." -Elaine Showalter, Princeton University "Buried beneath piles of criticism Virginia Woolf has at last been dug out by Alex Zwerdling. Virginia Woolf and the Real World is the most enlightened account of the real woman to appear for years." -Noel Annan, The Observer "A relief from the Bloomsbury fan dub: penetrating, learned, wide-ranging appreciation of Virginia Woolf in her social and political context, documenting what muscle and thought there was in her allegedly gossamer work." -Richard Mayne, Encounter "A well written book that deals with a field of Woolf studies that badly needs dear thinking and dear expression .... I think it a most useful work and in every way first rate." -Quentin Bell

In a landmark essay, Virginia Woolf rescued George Eliot from almost four decades of indifference and scorn when she wrote of the 'searching power and reflective richness' of Eliot's fiction. Novels such as Middlemarch and The Mill on the Floss reflect Eliot's complex and sometimes contradictory ideas about society, the artist, the role of women, and the interplay of science and religion. In this book Tim Dolin examines Eliot's life and work and the social and intellectual contexts in which they developed. He also explores the variety of ways in which 'George Eliot' has been recontextualized for modern readers, tourists, cinema-goers, and television viewers. The book includes a chronology of Eliot's life and times, suggestions for further reading, websites, illustrations, and a comprehensive index.