A member of the influential 'Bloomsbury Group', Virginia Woolf transformed twentieth-century literature with her poetic and haunting prose, in novels that include the playful Orlando and the revolutionary stream-of-consciousness To the Lighthouse. Penguin first published Woolf in 1938, and this collection of essays and short stories reveals to the full the poignant eloquence of this uniquely brilliant Modernist writer.

No one perhaps has ever felt passionately towards a lead pencil. But there are circumstances in which it can become supremely desirable to possess one; moments when we are set upon having an object, an excuse for walking half across London between tea and dinner. As the foxhunter hunts in order to preserve the breed of foxes, and the golfer plays in order that open spaces may be preserved from the builders, so when the desire comes upon us to go street rambling the pencil does for a pretext, and getting up we say: 'Really I must buy a pencil,' as if under cover of this excuse we could indulge safely in the greatest pleasure of town life in winter - rambling the streets of London.
The hour should be the evening and the season winter, for in winter the champagne brightness of the air and the sociability of the streets are grateful. We are not then taunted as in the summer by the longing for shade and solitude and sweet airs from the hayfields. The evening hour, too, gives us the irresponsibility which darkness and lamplight bestow. We are no longer quite ourselves. As we step out of the house on a fine evening between four and six, we shed the self our friends know us by and become part of that vast republican army of anonymous trampers, whose society is so agreeable after the solitude of one's own room.

If you like this book, you may also like these:

Street Haunting - Virginia Woolf
1914: Why the World Went to War - Niall Ferguson
The Country of the Blind - H.G. Wells