With the move to Bloomsbury in 1904, Virginia Stephen declared her independence. Recovering from a breakdown after her father's death, she was determined to find her way. Between the ages of 22 and 30, she continued to practise writing in her letters and diary, but also travelled extensively for the first time and wrote a few essays and numerous book reviews, most of them anonymous. Although in summer 1907 she began drafting the novel that became The Voyage Out, Stephen became a professional writer through her non-fiction. Andrew McNeillie argues that if you were a young writer in the early 1900s and wanted to make some money, which Stephen did (‘I dont in the least want Mrs L's candid criticism; I want her cheque!’ [L1 154]; see also L1 155, 160), the best route was writing reviews (xi; see also Brosnan 43). But John Mepham points out that as Stephen moved into the world of letters through the book review, she ‘had no specialised education to call upon. She had no training in any discipline in the modern sense – no introduction to the conceptual foundations of any field of scholarship, no knowledge of methods of research’ (18). Like her education at home and her work as a teacher, then, her apprenticeship in letters was, in the main, a solitary pursuit.

To understand Virginia Woolf as an essayist, we must first understand the context within which Virginia Stephen began her work as a writer, the periodicals she wrote for and the lessons she learned from them. Building on lessons learned during her home and Morley schooling, Stephen learned how to establish and maintain a writer's discipline, prepare for and write a book review or an essay, and work with editors. During her writing apprenticeship, she did literary exercises in her journal, wrote about her travels, took notes, and most significant, published 158 reviews and essays, most of them in seven different periodicals: the Guardian's Women's Supplement, The Academy, the National Review, Cornhill, the Speaker, the Nation and the Times Literary Supplement.