Reading Virginia Woolf will change your life, may even save it. If you want to make sense of modern life, the works of Virginia Woolf remain essential reading. More than fifty years since her death, accounts of her life still set the pace for modern modes of living. Plunge (and this Introduction is intended to help you take the plunge) into Woolf's works – at any point – whether in her novels, her short stories, her essays, her polemical pamphlets, or her published letters, diaries, memoirs and journals – and you will be transported by her elegant, startling, buoyant sentences to a world where everything in modern life (cinema, sexuality, shopping, education, feminism, politics, war and so on) is explored and questioned and refashioned. ‘My brain’, she confides in one diary entry, ‘is ferociously active’ (D3 132); and Woolf's writing is infused with her formidably productive mental energy, with her appetite for modern life, modern people and modern art. Woolf's writing both records and shapes modern experience, modern consciousness; but it also opens up to scrutiny the process of writing itself, a process she herself frequently records, and also finds exhilarating.
She famously depicts fictional writing, in A Room of One's Own (1929), as ‘a spider's web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners’. Fictional works may, Woolf claims, ‘seem to hang there complete by themselves.