Hermione Lee

Later reprints often appeared as The Common Reader, First Series. VW took her title from a formulation of Samuel Johnson 's, meaning that non-specialist, non-academic reader to whose taste, said Johnson, he was always...

Hermione Lee calls this VW 's novel of friendships, her Bloomsbury novel, and in the context of its six characters she recalls Woolf's tracing Bloomsbury to six people who were remarkable for nothing but...

Freshwater was the name of Julia Margaret Cameron 's estate on the Isle of Wight, where Anne Thackeray Ritchie had a cottage. The Stephen children had stayed there. This farcical presentation of Victorian life...

VW worked long and hard on the lengthy novel which finally became The Years. Its genesis goes back to her speech of 21 January 1931 at the London and National Society for Women's Service

Her first Christian name, never used, was given in memory of her mother's sister, who died shortly before Virginia's birth.Ginia was her earliest family nickname. She later gave herself many more, using different...

Virginia was thirteen: this death ended her childhood and provoked her first nervous breakdown. She said later that her mother's death was the greatest disaster that could happen, and she remained preoccupied by her...

VW did not discuss this incident specifically until the last years of her life. Hermione Lee , who considers the matter as fully as possible, argues that it would be rash to ignore or belittle...

Both Virginia and Vanessa felt that they were uneducated, and VWfelt intellectually deprived, regretting all her life that she had never competed with other children. She also, however, commented caustically on the advantage...

(Vanessa launched a parallel meeting for artists on Fridays: the Friday Club .) VW wrote that the Thursday evenings were the germ of all that has since come to be called—in newspapers, in novels, in...