Virginia Woolf: Collected Essays, Volume 3

This is the third of a (yet uncompleted) series of collections of Virginia Woolf's essays edited by Andrew McNeillie. Of the projected series of a total of six books of Woolf's essays only four have been published so far. When this great undertaking has finished, we will at last have at our disposal the first COMPLETE publication of all the essays and reviews of one of the best-read women in the western world. This series is of immense significance to Woolf scholars,students and lovers, of which they are increasingly many, not only because all her essays will be collected in a neat series but also, and more importantly, because in all the books of the series, including this volume, there are/will be non-fiction pieces by Woolf which are no longer available to the 'common reader' as they can only be found in the archives of the newspapers, journals and magazines that Woolf wrote for in her times. Till recently, apart from her well-known essays 'A Room of One's Own' and 'Three Guineas', Woolf's talent and importance as a critic had not been fully appreciated. This volume, along the others in the series, is both one of the factors and the effects of the recent surge of interest in Woolf's critical art, and is an extremely valuable contribution in that it makes manifest the whole range of writing of a literary figure who excelled not just in fiction but was also an equally masterful essay writer and polemical commentator and reviewer of modern times.