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Reading lists

The ultimate feminist books reading list

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Quizzes

Quiz: which fictional world do you belong in?

We've rounded up 20 great books we think everyone should read by 50

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20 books everyone should read in their fifties

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100 must-read classics, as chosen by our readers

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Brilliant non-fiction books you can read in a weekend

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9 of our favourite mothers in classic books

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Must-read books by women, as chosen by our readers

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20 books everyone should read before they’re 20

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Features

12 times Virginia Woolf understood the millennial condition

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The greatest walks in literature

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Why Mrs Dalloway is the perfect novel for our times

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Floral fiction: a book-lover’s guide to the best flowers in literature

Vintage Classic editions of Virginia Woolf

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Where to start with Virginia Woolf

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Virginia Woolf’s (not so) secret lesbian relationship – in her own words

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14 romantic quotes from the love letters of Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West

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‘No need to sparkle’: why we should all take Virginia Woolf’s advice in 2021

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Does fiction still need speech marks? A potted history of vanishing punctuation

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In defence of the exclamation mark!

Reading Remedy: what to read if you're losing track of time

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Reading Remedy: what to read if you’re losing track of time

Books to transport us to other lands and places

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Books to transport you to different places and times

VINTAGE Letters and Diaries to inspire you

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VINTAGE letters and diaries to inspire you

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The History of Hogarth Press

Nine brilliant pieces of gender-bending fiction

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9 brilliant pieces of gender bending fiction

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Woolf on film

Mrs Dalloway

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) was born in London. She became a central figure in The Bloomsbury Group, an informal collective of British writers, artists and thinkers. In 1912 Virginia married Leonard Woolf, a writer and social reformer. She wrote many works of literature which are now considered masterpieces, including Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando, and The Waves.

Celebrate the 100th birthday of a groundbreaking novel with this limited run special edition. 
 
Clarissa Dalloway is preparing to give a party. 
 
In this vivid portrait of one day in a woman's life, Clarissa 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. 
 
'Sheer magic' Eileen Atkins, Daily Mail 
 
'One of the most moving, revolutionary artworks of the twentieth century' Michael Cunningham, author of The Hours 
 
This special edition features the original cover created by Virginia Woolf's sister, Vanessa Bell, and the original text first published by The Hogarth Press.

To the Lighthouse

Celebrate a captivating novel with this limited run special edition featuring the original cover created by Virginia Woolf's sister, Vanessa Bell, and the original text first published by The Hogarth Press. 
 
Mr and Mrs Ramsay and their eight children have always holidayed at their summer house in Skye, surrounded by family friends. Holidays of noise, joy and bruised emotions: the stuff of everyday family life that might go on forever. But as time passes, bringing with it war and death, the summer home stands empty until one day, many years later, the family return to make the long-postponed visit to the lighthouse. 
 
'My mind was warped into a new shape by her prose and it will never be the same again' Greta Gerwig 
 
‘Woolf’s groundbreaking novel is still one of the best available accounts of self-mythologising middle-class family life’ Rachel Cusk 
 
‘I reread this book every once in a while, and every time I do I find it more capacious and startling. It’s so revolutionary and so exquisitely wrought that it keeps evolving on its own somehow, as if it’s alive’ Alison Bechdel

Penguin Classics

Orlando

A Penguin Classics Deluxe editon of Virginia Woolf’s pioneering novel, with a new foreword by Andrea Lawlor, author of Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl 
 
First masculine, then feminine, Orlando is a young sixteenth-century nobleman who gallops through the centuries, from Elizabethan England and imperial Turkey to Virginia Woolf’s own time. Will he find happiness with the exotic Russian princess Sasha? Or is the dashing explorer Shelmerdine the ideal man? And what form will Orlando take on the journey – a nobleman, traveller, writer? Man or . . . woman? 
 
Written for the charismatic, bisexual writer Vita Sackville-West, Orlando is one of Woolf’s most popular and accessible novels, a playful mock biography of a chameleon-like historical figure that is both a wry commentary on gender and, in Woolf’s own words, a 'writer’s holiday' that delights in its ambiguity and capriciousness.

A brilliant book that teaches you so much about identity and love &ndash; all these fundamental questions that we ask ourselves

I read this book and believed it was a hallucinogenic, interactive biography of my own life and future

Virginia Woolf (Author) 
Virginia Woolf, born in 1882, was the major novelist at the heart of the inter-war Bloomsbury Group. Her early novels include The Voyage Out, Night and Day and Jacob's Room. Between 1925 and 1931 she produced her finest masterpieces, including Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando and the experimental The Waves. Her later novels include The Years and Between the Acts, and she also maintained an astonishing output of literary criticism, journalism and biography, including the passionate feminist essay A Room of One's Own. Suffering from depression, she drowned herself in the River Ouse in 1941. 
 
Andrea Lawlor (Foreword By) 
Andrea Lawlor is the author of Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl: a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Fiction. The winner of a Whiting Award, they teach writing at Mount Holyoke College.

First masculine, then feminine, Orlando is a young sixteenth-century nobleman who gallops through the centuries, from Elizabethan England and imperial Turkey to Virginia Woolf’s own time. Will he find happiness with the exotic Russian princess Sasha? Or is the dashing explorer Shelmerdine the ideal man? And what form will Orlando take on the journey – a nobleman, traveller, writer? Man or . . . woman? 
 
Written for the charismatic, bisexual writer Vita Sackville-West, Orlando is one of Woolf’s most popular and accessible novels, a playful mock biography of a chameleon-like historical figure that is both a wry commentary on gender and, in Woolf’s own words, a 'writer’s holiday' that delights in its ambiguity and capriciousness.

The New Dress

Virginia Woolf, born in 1882, was the major novelist at the heart of the inter-war Bloomsbury Group. Her early novels include The Voyage Out, Night and Day and Jacob's Room. Between 1925 and 1931 she produced her finest masterpieces, including Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando and the experimental The Waves. Her later novels include The Years and Between the Acts, and she also maintained an astonishing output of literary criticism, journalism and biography, including the passionate feminist essay A Room of One's Own. Suffering from depression, she drowned herself in the River Ouse in 1941.

‘Waking, I cry “Oh, is this your – buried treasure? The light in the heart.”’ 
 
In these exquisite stories from the genius of English modernism, everyday objects acquire profound significance: a lump of buried green glass leads to a lifetime of obsession; a mark on the wall prompts a questioning of reality itself; a pale-yellow silk dress provokes a painful self-reckoning. Beautiful, strange and pioneering, each piece is a small precious stone to be held to the light and savoured.

A Room of One’s Own

Virginia Woolf (Author) 
Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) was born in London. She became a central figure in The Bloomsbury Group, an informal collective of British writers, artists and thinkers. In 1912 Virginia married Leonard Woolf, a writer and social reformer. She wrote many works of literature which are now considered masterpieces, including Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando, and The Waves. 
 
Merve Emre (Introducer) 
EDITOR BIOGRAPHY 
MERVE EMRE is a professor at Wesleyan University, where she is also the Director of the Shapiro Center for Creative Writing and Criticism. She is the author of Paraliterary: The Making of Bad Readers in Postwar America. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, Bookforum, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, The New Republic, The Baffler, n+1, and the Los Angeles Review of Books.

A Contemporary Classics hardcover edition of Virginia Woolf’s classic plea for a 
world in which women are free to use their gifts. In this influential extended essay and using powerful images and memorable thought experiments -such as a fictional sister of William Shakespeare, who is as talented as her brother but limited in ways he was not -Woolf analyses the many ways in which women have been held back throughout history and still are in her own time.

Orlando has sometimes been dismissed as a romp. As a less important book than Mrs Dalloway or To the Lighthouse. This is to misread it. It was far ahead of its time in terms of gender politics and gender progress

Virginia Woolf (Author) 
Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) was born in London. She became a central figure in The Bloomsbury Group, an informal collective of British writers, artists and thinkers. In 1912 Virginia married Leonard Woolf, a writer and social reformer. She wrote many works of literature which are now considered masterpieces, including Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando, and The Waves.

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.

Virginia Woolf

One realises afresh the full meaning of originality, the magic of the mind which plays around concrete facts as though they were all spirit. And when it is finished it is with a renewed sense of zest and stimulus that one takes up life again and looks anew at objects which before were only ordinary.

Celebrate a vital work of feminism with this limited run special edition featuring the original cover created by Virginia Woolf's sister, Vanessa Bell, and the original text first published by The Hogarth Press. 
 
This book is among the greatest contributions to feminist literature of the past century - a brilliant attack on sexual inequality. A Room of One's Own 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. 
 
'Brilliant interweaving of personal experience, imaginative musing and political clarity' Kate Mosse 
 
'Achingly relevant' Natasha Walter, Guardian 
 
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY HERMIONE LEE

A Room of One's Own

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Rediscover Virginia Woolf's greatest works with our bundle of beautiful gift editions from Vintage Classics, available from the Penguin Shop.

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Praise for A Room of One's Own

One realises afresh the full meaning of originality, the magic of the mind which plays around concrete facts as though they were all spirit. And when it is finished it is with a renewed sense of zest and stimulus th ...

Books by Virginia Woolf

Series by Virginia Woolf

Everyman’s Library Contemporary Classics168 Books

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Vintage Classics Woolf Series7 Books

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Articles featuring Virginia Woolf