‘[L]onging to begin work’ as she recovers from a breakdown in September 1904 (L1 144), Virginia Stephen uses her editors’ assignments and guidance over the next eight years to learn the ‘knack’ of writing for papers and move from being a novice to an expert book reviewer and essayist. By the end of 1911, she has moved to 38 Brunswick Square with Adrian, welcomed Leonard Woolf into the household, and written and revised, though not for the last time, her Melymbrosia manuscript, which would become The Voyage Out. That year saw three essays, too, one of them two columns in the three-columned TLS on the Duke and Duchess of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, whom she would revisit as Virginia Woolf. From now on, her non-fiction weaves itself through all her work as a writer, sometimes prominently, sometimes not, but never absent.

By the time she writes ‘The Novels of George Gissing’, her last review essay as Virginia Stephen before her thirtieth birthday in 1912, she has produced a large body of work: between 7 December 1904 and 11 January 1912, Virginia Stephen published 158 book reviews, review essays, and essays, according to Andrew McNeillie, B. J. Kirkpatrick and Stuart N. Clarke (see Appendix 5, a chronological, descriptive table). Some doubtful or untraced periodical contributions also exist. She published the most in 1905 and 1907, thirty-seven pieces each, successfully breaking into newspapers at the same time as she was teaching at Morley. She reveals her enthusiasm for the writing life in a letter to Violet Dickinson on 1 October 1905: ‘Writing is a divine art, and the more I write and read the more I love it,’ and then adds she hopes Mrs Lyttelton will ‘send more work’ (L1 209). She published twenty-five reviews and essays in 1906 and thirty in 1908. Never shunning hard work, she did publish fewer book reviews and essays as she dedicated more time to drafting her novel: seventeen in 1909, five in 1910, three in 1911, and one in 1912 before marrying Leonard.

Fifteen of her 158 published pieces were essays – travel, personal, or responses to music or literature, 9.5 per cent – and 143 were reviews, 90.5 per cent, fifteen of those being review essays. As an apprentice, Stephen reviewed several genres, learning how other authors used and challenged genre and its demands.