Virginia Woolf (1882–1941), one of the great twentieth-century authors, was at the center of the Bloomsbury Group and is a major figure in the history of literary feminism and modernism. She published her first novel, The Voyage Out, in 1915, and between 1925 and 1931 produced what are now regarded as her finest masterpieces, including Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), and The Waves (1931). She also maintained an astonishing output of literary criticism, short fiction, journalism, and biography, including the playfully subversive Orlando (1928) and the passionate feminist essay A Room of One’s Own (1929).
Andrea Lawlor (foreword) is the author of Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl, a modern homage to Orlando that was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Fiction. The winner of a Whiting Award, they teach writing at Mount Holyoke College.
Sandra M. Gilbert (1936-2024; introduction, notes) was Professor Emerita at the University of California, Davis, and co-author, with Susan Gubar, of the classic work of feminist literary criticism The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination.
