Virginia Woolf

In 1907, when she was twenty-five and not yet a published novelist, Virginia Stephen had everything still to prove. She felt herself to be at a crossroads: ‘I shall be miserable, or happy; a wordy sentimental creature, or a writer of such English as shall one day burn the pages.’

Today her prose is still blazing; perhaps it burns brighter than ever. For this is the story of how a determined young woman with a notebook became one of the greatest writers of all time. It is a story that sparkles with wit and friendship, language and love, wicked jokes and passionate appreciation of ordinary things. Hers was a life lived with intensity from moment to moment and shaped into the lasting patterns of art. It was also a courageous life, defiant of convention and marred by mental illness.

Alexandra Harris uses vivid flashes of detail to evoke Woolf’s changing backgrounds and preoccupations. We move from the close-packed rhythms of a Victorian childhood to the experiments of ‘Bloomsbury’. We see her ‘drawn on and on’ to tackle ever more challenging forms of writing.

Cultural historian and writer Alexandra Harris is a brilliant, original and wonderfully engaging new voice whose first book, Romantic Moderns, was published to huge acclaim. Born in Sussex in 1981, Harris was educated at the University of Oxford and the Courtauld Institute, London, and is currently Lecturer in English at the University of Liverpool.