Description: Unbeknown to many, Virginia Woolf spent the first twenty years of her career writing essays and book reviews. So well-known is Woolf for her fiction that her readers may easily overlook the fact that she is the author of over five hundred works of non-fiction, and that for nearly half of her writing career Woolf was primarily a book reviewer and essayist. Virginia Woolf and the Essay is one of the first critical studies of these essays and reviews. The collection begins with an introduction that surveys the historical reception of Virginia Woolf's essays, and then sketches out a methodological study of Woolf's essays by placing them within historical, literary historical, reader-oriented, generic, and feminist contexts. Although these essays have been overlooked in the past, this groundbreaking collection restores them m their significant position within the literary tradition. As the prominent scholars in this original volume prove, Woolf's essays are as fresh and delightful, as complex and inviting, to us now as they were to her original readers, and they are fast-becoming the next major area of interest in Woolf studies.

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