Explores Virginia Woolf's writings. Individual essays analyse Woolf's neglected second novel, "Night and Day", and her preoccupation with the significance of history in her novels of the 1930s. They investigate Woolf's links with other writers (Byron, Shakespeare), her ambivalent attitudes to 'Englishness' and to censorship, and more
Virginia Woolf reads Shakespeare: or, her silence on Master William -- 'The proper writing of lives'': biography versus fiction in Woolf's early work -- Night and day: the marriage of dreams and realities -- Reading people, reading texts: 'Byron and Mr Briggs' -- 'Modernism's lost hope': Virginia Woolf, Hope Mirrlees and the printing of Paris -- The search for form (i): Fry, formalism and fiction -- The search for form (ii): revision and the numbers of time -- 'This moment I stand on': Virginia Woolf and the spaces in time -- 'Like a shell on a sandhill': Woolf's images of emptiness -- Constantinople: at the crossroads of the imagination -- The conversation behind the conversation: speaking the unspeakaable -- 'Sudden intensities': frame and focus in Woolf's later short stories -- 'Almost ashamed of England being so English': Woolf and ideas of Englishness -- Between the texts: Woolf's acts of revision
