Based on a lecture given at Girton College Cambridge.

On a June morning in 1923, Clarissa Dalloway is preparing for a party and remembering her past. Elsewhere in London, Septimus Smith is suffering from shell-shock and on the brink of madness. Their days interweave and their lives converge as the party reaches its glittering climax.

For years now, the Ramsays have spent every summer in their holiday home in Scotland, and they expect these summers will go on forever. This novel captures the intensity of childhood longing and delight, and the shifting complexity of adult relationships.

This selection brings together thirty of Woolf's best essays across a wide range of subjects including writing and reading, the role and reputation of women writers, the art of biography, and the London scene. They are enchanting in their own right, and indispensable to an understanding of this great writer.

'Fear no more the heat of the sun.' Mrs Dalloway, Virginia Woolf's fourth novel, offers the reader an impression of a single June day in London in 1923. Clarissa Dalloway, the wife of a Conservative member of parliament, is preparing to give an evening party, while the shell-shocked Septimus Warren Smith hears the birds in Regent's Park chattering in Greek. There seems to be nothing, except ...

Virginia Woolf's exuberant 'biography' tells the story of the cross-dressing, sex-changing Orlando who begins life as a young noble in the sixteenth century and moves through numerous historical and geographical worlds to finish as a modern woman writer in the 1920s. The book is in part a happy tribute to the 'life' that her love for Vita Sackville-West had breathed into Virginia Woolf's own day-t

Virginia Woolf's blazing polemic on female creativity, the role of writers and the silent fate of Shakespeare's imaginary sister remains a powerful reminder of a woman's need for financial independence and intellectual freedom.

The Germans were over this house last night and the night before that. Here they are again. It is a queer experience, lying in the dark and listening to the zoom of a hornet, which may at any moment sting you to death. It is a sound that interrupts cool and consecutive thinking about peace.

'To the Lighthouse' was Virginia Woolf's fifth novel, and was the first book to win her a large public. The story of an English middle class family in the years leading up to the First World War, it has remained the most popular of all her works.

A captivating fusion of elegy, autobiography, socio-political critique and visionary thrust, To the Lighthouse is the most accomplished of all Woolf's novels. This new edition includes a full contextualizing introduction and notes by David Bradshaw.

In A Room of One's Own and Three Guineas, Virginia Woolf considers with energy and wit the implications of the historical exclusion of women from education and from economic independence. In A Room of One's Own (1929), she examines the work of past women writers, and looks ahead to a time when women's creativity will not be hampered by poverty, or by oppression. In Three Guineas (1938), however, .

Clarissa Dalloway is preoccupied with the last-minute details of party she is to give that evening. As she readies her house she is flooded with memories and, met with the realities of the present, she re-examines the choices she has made over the course of her life.

Virginia Woolf displays genuine humanity and concern for the experiences that enrich and stultify existence. Society hostess, Clarissa Dalloway is giving a party and her thoughts on that one day, and the interior monologues of others with interwoven lives reveal the characters of the central protagonists.

Features around 30 writers who talk about their lives and work. This title includes historic recordings of the first generation of writers whose voices survive through to senior figures of the present day including Rudyard Kipling, Virginia Woolf, Ian Fleming and Harold Pinter.

Five stories from influential women writers from the close of the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th century. It features The Garden Party and Daughters of the Late Colonel by Mansfield, Lilacs and Ma'ame Pelagie by Kate Chopin and A Mark on the Wall by Virginia Woolf.

A biographical fantasy, inspired by the author's friend, Vita Sackville-West, which traces the history of the youthful, beautiful and aristocratic Orlando through four centuries in both male and female manifestations.

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Tracing the lives of a group of friends, this novel follows their development from childhood to youth and middle age. Separately and together, they query the relationship of past to present, and the meaning of life itself.

Between the Acts is Virginia Woolf's last novel, and in her own opinion it was 'more quintessential' than any of her others. Set in the summer of 1939 on the day of the annual village pageant at Pointz Hall, the book weaves together the musings of several disparate characters and their reactions to the imminence of a war which is to change the pattern of history. Before the book was published in .