A posthumous collection of twenty-five essays on the art of fiction and the art of biography. "These are aristocrats among essays...witty, beautifully mannered and mellow" (Rumer Godden, New York Herald Tribune). Editorial Note by Leonard Woolf. Part 1: The art of fiction. The narrow bridge of art ; Hours in a library ; Impassioned prose ; Life and the novelist ; On rereading Meredith ; The anatomy of fiction ; Gothic romance ; The supernatural in fiction ; Henry James' ghost stories ; A terribly sensitive mind ; Women and fiction ; An essay in criticism ; Phases of fiction Part 2: The art of biography. The new biography ; A talk about memoirs ; Sir Walter Raleigh ; Sterne ; Eliza and Sterne ; Horace Walpole ; A friend of Johnson ; Fanny Burney's half-sister ; Money and love ; The dream ; The fleeting portrait : 1. Waxworks at the Abbey, 2. The Royal Academy ; Poe's Helen ; Visits to Walt Whitman ; Oliver Wendell Holmes
Author
(Adeline) Virginia Woolf was an English novelist and essayist regarded as one of the foremost modernist literary figures of the twentieth century. During the interwar period, Woolf was a significant figure in London literary society and a member of the Bloomsbury Group. Her most famous works include the novels Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), and Orlando (1928), and the book-length essay A Room of One's Own (1929) with its famous dictum, "a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction."
