In 1962 Bernard Blackstone added a postscript to his monograph on Virginia Woolf in which he wrote: ‘It must be admitted that Virginia Woolf's stock has fallen in the post-war years.’ Blackstone was writing before a number of events and turns in the history of literary studies caused an extraordinary rise in Woolf 's ‘stock’. Her œuvre has expanded substantially: in addition to the novels, we now have in print her short stories, letters, diaries, autobiographical sketches, and a vast body of reviews and essays which command as much critical interest as her fiction. The publication of her autobiographical writings – diaries, letters, memoirs – has not only fuelled a large and evergrowing body of biographical studies, but her recording of her culture and her times has revealed a writer radically at odds with the image of the detached ‘Bloomsbury aesthete’. She has become a different writer from the one read at mid-twentieth century.

The massive change in the reception of her work has also come about as a result of feminist criticism and theory. Woolf is undoubtedly the central figure in the English-speaking countries for feminist literary criticism, and A Room of One's Own remains a key text for an understanding of women's place in literary tradition and history. Her feminism no longer seems anachronistic or irrelevant in the face of Fascism and war, as it did to many of her male (and some of her female) contemporaries; her writings of the 1930s make a crucial link between the oppression of women and the authoritarian structures of Fascist societies. Many elements of her work have been central to feminist theory and politics of the later twentieth century: her explorations of the gendered relationship between the private and the public sphere; her model of the mother–daughter relationship as a paradigm for a female literary tradition; her accounts of men's and women's different relationships to their culture.

Each epoch creates writers in its own image. Literary criticism also has a tendency to reinvent the wheel; the contemporary critic who excitedly discovers Virginia Woolf as a writer of the modern city, for example, may well overlook the fact that this facet of her work was obvious to her earlier commentators.