In the wake of World War I and the 1918 flu pandemic, Clarissa Dalloway, elegant and vivacious, is preparing for a party and remembering those she once loved. In another part of London, Septimus Smith is suffering from shell shock and is on the brink of madness. Their days interweave and their lives converge as the party reaches its glittering climax. Over the course of a single day, from first light to the dark of night, Woolf achieves an uncanny simulacrum of consciousness, bringing past, present, and future together, and recording, impression by impression, minute by minute, the feel of life itself.

HarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of best-loved, essential classics. Clarissa Dalloway is a woman of high-society - vivacious, hospitable and sociable on the surface, yet underneath troubled and dissatisfied with her life in post-war Britain. This disillusionment is an emotion that bubbles under the surface of all of Woolf's characters in Mrs Dalloway. Centred around one day in June where Clarissa is preparing for and holding a party, her interior monologue mingles with those of the other central characters in a stream of consciousness, entwining, yet never actually overriding the pervading sense of isolation that haunts each person. One of Virginia Woolf's most accomplished novels, Mrs Dalloway is widely regarded as one of the most revolutionary works of the 20th century in its style and the themes that it tackles. The sense that Clarissa has married the wrong person, her past love for another female friend and the death of an intended party guest all serve to amplify this stultifying existence.

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.

In the wake of World War I and the 1918 flu pandemic, Clarissa Dalloway, elegant and vivacious, is preparing for a party and remembering those she once loved. In another part of London, Septimus Smith is suffering from shell shock and is on the brink of madness. Their days interweave and their lives converge as the party reaches its glittering climax.   Over the course of a single day, Woolf achieves an uncanny simulacrum of consciousness, bringing past, present, and future together, and recording, minute by minute, the feel of life itself.    

The Ramsays spend their summers on the Isle of Skye, where they happily entertain friends and family and make idle plans to visit the nearby lighthouse. Over the course of the book, the lighthouse becomes a silent witness to the ebbs and flows, the births and deaths, that punctuate the individual lives of the Ramsays.  

Penned in 1925 during the aftermath of a nervous breakdown, On Being Ill is a groundbreaking essay by the Modernist giant Virginia Woolf that seeks to establish illness as a topic for discussion in literature. Delving into considerations of the loneliness and vulnerability experienced by those suffering from illness, as well as aspects of privilege others might have, the essay resounds with an honesty and clarity that still rings true today. 'Novels, one would have thought, would have been devoted to influenza, epic poems to typhoid, odes to pneumonia, lyrics to toothache. But no - with a few exceptions... literature does its best to maintain that its concern is with the mind; that the body is a sheet of plain glass through which the soul looks straight and clear, and, save for one or two passions such as desire and greed, is null, and negligible and non-existent.'

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.

HarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of best-loved, essential classics. There was a star riding through clouds one night, and I said to the star, 'Consume me' Six friends traverse the uneven road of life together in Virginia Woolf's most unconventional classic. Bernard, Jinny, Louis, Neville, Rhoda and Susan first meet as children by the sea, and their lives are forever changed. A poetic novel written in a lyrical way only Woolf could master, these narrators face both triumph and tragedy that touches them all. Throughout their lives, they examine the relationship between past and present, and the meaning of life itself. A landmark of innovative fiction and the most experimental of Virginia Woolf's novels, The Waves is still regarded as one of the greatest works ever written in the English language.

HarperCollins is proud to present its incredible range of best-loved, essential classics.

First delivered as a speech to schoolgirls in Kent in 1926, this enchanting short essay by the towering Modernist writer Virginia Woolf celebrates the importance of the written word. With a measured but ardent tone, Woolf weaves together thought and quote, verse and prose into a moving tract on the power literature can have over its reader, in a way which still resounds with truth today. 'I have sometimes dreamt, at least, that when the Day of Judgement dawns and the great conquerors and lawyers and statesmen come to receive their rewards - their crowns, their laurels, their names carved indelibly upon imperishable marble - the Almighty will turn to Peter and will say, not without a certain envy when he sees us coming with our books under our arms, "Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them here. They have loved reading."'

Moments of Being contains Virginia Woolf's only autobiographical writing: "By far the most important book about Virginia Woolf...that has appeared since her death" [Angus Wilson, Observer (London)]. Edited and with an Introduction by Jeanne Schulkind; Index.

The Ramsays spend their summers on the Isle of Skye, where they happily entertain friends and family and make idle plans to visit the nearby lighthouse. Over the course of the book, the lighthouse becomes a silent witness to the ebbs and flows, the births and deaths, that punctuate the individual lives of the Ramsays.  

With an introduction by Virginia Nicholson Saturday 2 February 1918. The first walk we've had for ever so long. Damp, mild vaporous day. Funeral bells tolling as we went out, & marriage as we came in. The streets lined with people waiting their meat. Aeroplanes droning invisible. Our usual evening, alone happily, knee deep in papers. This diary begins in January 1915. Virginia Woolf was about to publish her first novel, The Voyage Out. By the end of 1919 she had published many essays and reviews, as well as a second novel, Night and Day. Her diary was the counterpoint to that public writing: here she could record details of daily life, think about friends and reading, writing and her state of mind. This diary offers a unique insight into the life and mind of one of Britain's most influential writers, and the circle she was part of which came to be known as Bloomsbury. This new Granta edition includes Woolf's 'Asheham Diary' for the first time.

A Room of One's Own (1929) has become a classic feminist essay and perhaps Virginia Woolf's best known work; The Voyage Out (1915) is highly significant as her first novel. Both focus on the place of women within the power structures of modern society. The essay lays bare the woman artist's struggle for a voice, since throughout history she has been denied the social and economic independence assumed by men. Woolf's prescription is clear: if a woman is to find creative expression equal to a man's, she must have an independent income, and a room of her own. This is both an acute analysis and a spirited rallying cry; it remains surprisingly resonant and relevant in the 21st century. The novel explores these issues more personally, through the character of Rachel Vinrace, a young woman whose 'voyage out' to South America opens up powerful encounters with her fellow-travellers, men and women. As she begins to understand her place in the world, she finds the happiness of love, but also sees its brute power. Woolf has a sharp eye for the comedy of English manners in a foreign milieu; but the final undertow of the novel is tragic as, in some of her finest writing, she calls up the essential isolation of the human spirit.

In the first volume of her critical essays, Virginia Woolf discusses the greatest authors of the literary canon – Jane Austen, George Eliot and Geoffrey Chaucer among others – with the everyday, ‘common reader’ in mind. With wit and insight, Woolf also revisits classic novels and examines scholarly subjects, from the Greek language to the Modern Essay, to the Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights.

First published in 1925, The Common Reader is a stunning work from one of the most perceptive minds of the twentieth century, a collection which continues to nurture the joys of literature and reading to this day.

Exam board: Edexcel, OCR, Cambridge Assessment International Education Level & Subject: AS and A Level English Literature First teaching: September 2015 First examination: June 2017, 2020 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

HarperCollins is proud to present its new range of best-loved, essential classics. 'Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind...' Based on a lecture given at Cambridge and first published in 1929, 'A Room of One's Own' interweaves Woolf's personal experience as a female writer with themes ranging from Austen and Bronte to Shakespeare's gifted (and imaginary) sister. 'Three Guineas', Woolf's most impassioned polemic, came almost a decade later and broke new ground by challenging the very notions of war and masculinity. This volume combines two inspirational, witty and urbane essays from one of literature's pre-eminent voices; collectively they constitute a brilliant and lucid attack on sexual inequality.

'One of the most moving, revolutionary artworks of the twentieth century' Michael Cunningham Clarissa Dalloway, elegant and vivacious, is preparing for a party and remembering those she once loved. In another part of London, Septimus Warren Smith is suffering from shell-shock and on the brink of madness. Smith's day interweaves with that of Clarissa and her friends, their lives converging as the party reaches its glittering climax. Virginia Woolf's masterly novel, in which she perfected the interior monologue, brings past, present and future together on one momentous day in June 1923.

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.

When Mrs Ramsay tells her guests at her summer house on the Isle of Skye that they will be able to visit the nearby lighthouse the following day, little does she know that this trip will only be completed ten years later by her husband, and that a gulf of war, grief and loss will have opened in the meantime. As each character tries to readjust their memories and emotions with the shifts of time and reality, this long-delayed excursion will also prove to be a journey of self-discovery and fulfilment for them. Rich in symbolism, daring in style, elegiac in tone and encapsulating Virginia Woolf's ideas on life, art and human relationships, To the Lighthouse is a landmark of twentieth-century literature and one of the high points of early Modernism.