An open library of thought
Free thought needs a room, an income and a tradition.
Works, testimonies and further readings are distinguished. Dates refer to composition or first publication, as specified in each entry.
These records present three essay books: A Room of One’s Own, Three Guineas and The Common Reader. The novels, short stories, the second series of The Common Reader, the diaries, letters and memoir pieces such as A Sketch of the Past are not yet indexed; this is a selection, not a complete bibliography.
011929
Woolf spoke at Newnham and Girton, the women’s colleges of Cambridge, in October 1928, and the Hogarth Press published the revised text in 1929. Its ironic, digressive form is part of the argument; critics have also examined its assumptions about class and race.
021938
Published by the Hogarth Press in June 1938, during the Spanish Civil War, it included photographs of men in official dress and long documentary notes. Some contemporaries, including Q. D. Leavis, attacked it as the view of a sheltered and privileged class; later readers have treated it as a major pacifist and feminist essay.
031925
Published in 1925, the same spring as Mrs Dalloway, it gathers and revises pieces first written for the Times Literary Supplement and other journals; a second series followed in 1932. Its essay Modern Fiction, first written in 1919, criticizes the ‘materialist’ novel of Wells, Bennett and Galsworthy.