First delivered as a speech to schoolgirls in Kent in 1926, this enchanting short essay by the towering Modernist writer Virginia Woolf celebrates the importance of the written word.
With a measured but ardent tone, Woolf weaves together thought and quote, verse and prose into a moving tract on the power literature can have over its reader, in a way which still resounds with truth today.
Virginia Woolf (1882тАУ1941) was a Modernist writer, widely considered to be one of the most important of the twentieth century. She and her husband Leonard bought a hand-printing press in 1917, and they set up Hogarth Press in their house in Richmond, which published much of VirginiaтАЩs work, as well as those of friends and fellow luminaries. She was a member of the Bloomsbury Set тАУ an artistic, philosophic and literary group which included John Maynard Keynes, E.M. Forster and Lytton Strachey. Today she is best remembered for her novels тАУ in particular To the Lighthouse and Mrs Dalloway тАУ and her essay A Room of OneтАЩs Own.