Vintage Classics Woolf Series
Jacob's Room
Jacob's Room is Virginia Woolf's first truly experimental novel. It is a portrait of a young man, tracing his life from childhood, to Cambridge University, and to his early adult life in artistic London. Jacob always yearns for something greater, and embarks on a voyage to the Mediterranean before the war begins and his fate is forever altered. Impressionistic in style, the narrative is as inspired now as it was when it first appeared.
'A remarkable achievement' New Statesman
Mrs Dalloway (Vintage Classics Woolf Series)
In this vivid portrait of one day in a woman's life, Clarissa Dalloway is preoccupied with the last-minute details of a party she is to give that evening. As she readies her house she is flooded with memories and re-examines the choices she has made over the course of her life.
'Mrs Dalloway contains some of the most beautiful, complex, incisive and idiosyncratic sentences ever written in English, and that alone would be reason enough to read it. It is one of the most moving, revolutionary artworks of the twentieth century' Michael Cunningham, author of The Hours
Orlando (Vintage Classics Woolf Series)
Virginia Woolf's most unusual and fantastic creation, a funny, exuberant tale that examines the very nature of sexuality.
WITH INTRODUCTIONS BY PETER ACKROYD AND MARGARET REYNOLDS
As his tale begins, Orlando is a passionate young nobleman whose days are spent in rowdy revelry, filled with the colourful delights of Queen Elizabeth's court. By the close, he will have transformed into a modern, thirty-six-year-old woman and three centuries will have passed. Orlando will not only witness the making of history from its edge, but will find that his unique position as a woman who knows what it is to be a man will give him insight into matters of the heart.
The Vintage Classics Virginia Woolf series has been curated by Jeanette Winterson and Margaret Reynolds, and the texts used are based on the original Hogarth Press editions published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf.
**One of the BBC’s 100 Novels That Shaped Our World**
A Room of One's Own and Three Guineas (Vintage Classics Woolf Series)
'Brilliant interweaving of personal experience, imaginative musing and political clarity' Kate Mosse
This volume combines two books which were among the greatest contributions to feminist literature this century. Together they form a brilliant attack on sexual inequality. A Room of One's Own, first published in 1929, is a witty, urbane and persuasive argument against the intellectual subjection of women, particularly women writers. The sequel, Three Guineas, is a passionate polemic which draws a startling comparison between the tyrannous hypocrisy of the Victorian patriarchal system and the evils of fascism.
'Achingly relevant' Natasha Walter, Guardian
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY HERMIONE LEE
To The Lighthouse (Vintage Classics Woolf Series)
The lighthouse waits across the bay.
Between the promise and the journey lies the whole fragile life of a family.
Rediscover one of Virginia Woolf’s greatest works in this beautiful new gift edition from Vintage.
Mr and Mrs Ramsay and their eight children have always holidayed at their summer house in Skye, surrounded by family friends. The house is full of conversation, expectation, private irritation and small acts of tenderness. Yet the promised trip to the lighthouse does not take place.
Time passes, bringing war and death, and the summer home stands empty. Years later, the family return, altered by loss, to make the long-postponed visit.
This is Woolf at her most luminous and exacting, transforming domestic life into something vast. The novel’s power lies in the spaces between people: what they say, what they cannot say and what time allows them to understand too late.
'To The Lighthouse is one of the greatest elegies in the English language, a book which transcends time' Margaret Drabble
'Thrillingly introspective' The Independent
The Waves (Vintage Classics Woolf Series)
The Waves is an astonishingly beautiful and poetic novel from Virginia Woolf.
It begins with six children playing in a garden by the sea and follows their lives as they grow up, experience friendship and love, and confront grief at the death of their beloved friend Percival.
Rather than telling the story through conventional plot, Woolf creates a sequence of voices. The six characters speak in soliloquies, their thoughts rising and falling like waves as childhood becomes adulthood and the self is shaped by memory, loss and other people.
A modernist literary classic about consciousness, individuality and community, The Waves is one of Woolf’s most daring and moving works. It is a novel of interior life, friendship and grief, written with extraordinary formal control and emotional intensity.
Regarded by many as her greatest work, The Waves is also seen as Virginia Woolf’s response to the loss of her brother Thoby, who died when he was twenty-six.
'Virginia Woolf wanted to write about the vast unknown uncertain continent that is the world and us in it' Jeanette Winterson, from her introduction to The Waves
The Years (Vintage Classics Woolf Series)
The Years follows the lives of the Pargiters, a large middle-class London family, from an uncertain spring in 1880 to a party on a summer evening in the 1930s. We see them each endure and remember heart-break, loss, radical change and stifling conformity, marriage and regret. Written in 1937, this was the most popular of Virginia Woolf's novels during her lifetime, and is a powerful indictment of 'Victorianism' and its values.
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY SUSAN HILL
Flush
This edition includes the four original illustrations by Vanessa Bell and an afterword by Margaret Forster.
Cover designed by the award-winning Finnish designer Aino-Maija Metsola
