WITH AN INTRODUCTION, PLUS EXTENSIVE NOTES AND REFERENCES BY HERMIONE LEE

This volume combines two books which were among the greatest contributions to feminist literature this century. Together they form a brilliant attack on sexual inequality.A Room of One's Own, first published in 1929, is a witty, urbane and persuasive argument against the intellectual subjection of women, particularly women writers. The sequel,Three Guineas, is a passionate polemic which draws a startling comparison between the tyrannous hypocrisy of the Victorian patriarchal system and the evils of fascism.

Virginia Woolf was born in London in 1882, the daughter of Sir Leslie Stephen, first editor ofThe Dictionary of National Biography. After his death in 1904 Virginia and her sister, the painter Vanessa Bell, moved to Bloomsbury and became the centre of 'The Bloomsbury Group'. This informal collective of artists and writers which included Lytton Strachey and Roger Fry, exerted a powerful influence over early twentieth-century British culture. In 1912 Virginia married Leonard Woolf, a writer and social reformer. Three years later, her first novelThe Voyage Outwas published, followed byNight and Day(1919) andJacob's Room(1922). These first novels show the development of Virginia Woolf's distinctive and innovative narrative style. It was during this time that she and Leonard Woolf founded The Hogarth Press with the publication of the co-authoredTwo Storiesin 1917, hand-printed in the dining room of their house in Surrey. Between 1925 and 1931 Virginia Woolf produced what are now regarded as her finest masterpieces, fromMrs Dalloway(1925) to the poetic and highly experimental novelThe Waves(1931). She also maintained an astonishing output of literary criticism, short fiction, journalism and biography, including the playfully subversiveOrlando(1928) andA Room of One's Own(1929) a passionate feminist essay. This intense creative productivity was often matched by periods of mental illness, from which she had suffered since her mother's death in 1895. On 28 March 1941, a few months before the publication of her final novel,Between the Acts, Virginia Woolf committed suicide.

Woolf exposes the prejudices and constraints against which women writers struggled for centuries, and argues for a more equal literary establishment