Reading List

Authors Like Virginia Woolf

In 1917 Virginia and Leonard Woolf bought a small hand press, set it up in the dining room of Hogarth House in Richmond, and began printing books themselves. The next year they hand-set Katherine Mansfield's Prelude; that April, Harriet Shaw Weaver brought them the unfinished manuscript of James Joyce's Ulysses, which they turned down. Woolf was working out, in those same years, what a novel could be if it followed the mind rather than the plot. Mrs Dalloway (1925), whose working title was The Hours, follows one June day in London; To the Lighthouse (1927) lets ten years pass in a few pages; A Room of One's Own (1929) makes the case for the money and privacy a woman needs to write at all. Readers come to her for that double gift: the inside of a consciousness rendered exactly, and an argument about women, art and freedom made with wit. The writers below share one or the other — the modernists she read and rivalled, and the novelists and essayists who have carried her experiment on since.

By Lisanne Swart · 10 authors · Modernism · Stream of consciousness · The feminist essay · Updated October 2026

Quick answer

If you love Virginia Woolf, start with Katherine Mansfield, the only writer Woolf admitted to being jealous of. For the stream of consciousness she shared with her contemporaries, read Dorothy Richardson and James Joyce. For Mrs Dalloway retold, Michael Cunningham's The Hours. And for her playfulness with form in a living writer, Ali Smith.

10 authors like Virginia Woolf

01
Her rival · Closest match

Katherine Mansfield

New Zealand · b. 1888 · Short story writer

Mansfield was born in Wellington in 1888 and settled in London, where she wrote almost entirely in the short story. The Woolfs' Hogarth Press printed her long story Prelude by hand in 1918; Bliss and Other Stories (1920) and The Garden Party and Other Stories (1922) made her name. She died of tuberculosis in France in January 1923, aged thirty-four.

The closest match in sensibility: a single moment, a party or a garden, held up to the light until a whole life shows through it. Woolf and Mansfield read each other with a wary admiration, and after Mansfield's death Woolf wrote that hers was “the only writing I have ever been jealous of”. Start with “The Garden Party” and then read the party scenes of Mrs Dalloway again.

— Lisanne

Every book by Katherine Mansfield →

02
Stream of consciousness, first

Dorothy Richardson

English · b. 1873 · Novelist

Richardson's Pilgrimage is a sequence of thirteen semi-autobiographical novels, beginning with Pointed Roofs in 1915 and ending with March Moonlight, published in 1967, ten years after her death. Reviewing it in The Egoist in 1918, May Sinclair applied the term “stream of consciousness” to fiction for the first time. Woolf, reviewing Revolving Lights in 1923, said Richardson had invented “the psychological sentence of the feminine gender”.

The writer who got there before Woolf and is now far less read. Richardson follows one woman, Miriam Henderson, through London lodgings, jobs and friendships with almost no plot and no narrator standing outside her. She is slower and less shapely than Woolf, but anyone curious about where Woolf's method came from should read at least Pointed Roofs.

— Lisanne
03
The other great modernist

James Joyce

Irish · b. 1882 · Novelist

Joyce was born in Dublin in 1882 and died in Zurich in 1941 — the same years as Woolf. Ulysses, which follows Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus through one Dublin day, 16 June 1904, was first published in Paris by Shakespeare and Company in 1922. Woolf admired Dubliners but was impatient with Ulysses, and the Hogarth Press had declined it in 1918.

Ulysses and Mrs Dalloway are the two great one-day novels of modernism, and reading them together is the best way to see what each writer wanted. Joyce is encyclopaedic, bawdy and endlessly inventive with language; Woolf is lighter, more lyrical and more interested in the gaps between people. Start with Dubliners.

— Lisanne

Every book by James Joyce →

04
Memory as the subject

Marcel Proust

French · b. 1871 · Novelist · Prix Goncourt 1919

In Search of Lost Time runs to seven volumes, published from Swann's Way in 1913 to the last in 1927, five years after Proust's death. The second volume, In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, won the Prix Goncourt in 1919. Its best-known scene, the madeleine dipped in tea that brings back a childhood at Combray, is the founding image of involuntary memory in fiction.

Woolf read Proust in the early 1920s and wrote to Roger Fry, “Oh if I could write like that!” Both build novels out of the way the past breaks into the present, and both find whole societies in a single dinner party. Proust is far longer and more analytic; Swann's Way is enough to know if he is for you.

— Lisanne
05
The next generation, in the same rooms

Elizabeth Bowen

Anglo-Irish · b. 1899 · Novelist

Bowen was born in Dublin in 1899 and in 1930 inherited Bowen's Court, her family's house in County Cork, where Woolf was among the writers who came to stay. The Death of the Heart (1938) follows an orphaned sixteen-year-old in a cold London household; The Heat of the Day (1949) is a love story set in Blitz-era London. Eva Trout won the James Tait Black Prize in 1969.

Bowen took Woolf's attention to small social moments and gave it more plot and more menace. Her sentences are as finely made, and her subject is the same — what goes unsaid between people in a drawing room — but she is sharper about betrayal. The Death of the Heart is the place to start.

— Lisanne
06
A Room of One's Own, at full length

Simone de Beauvoir

French · b. 1908 · Philosopher and novelist · Prix Goncourt 1954

Beauvoir's The Second Sex (1949) is a founding text of modern feminism, and The Mandarins, about a circle of left-wing Paris intellectuals after the war, won the Prix Goncourt in 1954. Her memoirs begin with Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (1958). In 1943 she lost her teaching post after a complaint by a former student's mother, and later accounts documented relationships with young former students.

A Room of One's Own asks why there was no female Shakespeare; The Second Sex takes the same question and answers it across history, biology and philosophy. Beauvoir is systematic where Woolf is witty and oblique, but they share the conviction that a woman's freedom starts with money, time and a mind of her own.

— Lisanne

Every book by Simone de Beauvoir →

07
The form broken open

Doris Lessing

British · b. 1919 · Novelist · Nobel 2007

Lessing was born in Persia in 1919, grew up in Southern Rhodesia and moved to London in 1949. The Golden Notebook, her most experimental novel, follows a writer, Anna Wulf, who splits her life across four notebooks. She won the Nobel Prize in 2007 as “that epicist of the female experience”.

The Golden Notebook is the postwar novel that most clearly continues Woolf's argument that a woman's life needs a new shape on the page. Lessing is more political and less lyrical, and her subject is breakdown rather than a single day, but the ambition is the same: to make the form of the book carry the fragmentation of the mind inside it.

— Lisanne

Every book by Doris Lessing →

08
Mrs Dalloway, retold

Michael Cunningham

American · b. 1952 · Novelist · Pulitzer 1999

Cunningham was born in Cincinnati in 1952. The Hours, which takes its title from Woolf's working title for Mrs Dalloway, braids three single days: Woolf writing the novel in Richmond in 1923, a housewife in Los Angeles in 1949, and a woman in New York in the late 1990s planning a party. It won the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1999 and was filmed in 2002.

The most direct homage to Woolf in contemporary fiction, and a good book in its own right. Cunningham borrows her single-day structure and her long, moving sentences, and he puts Woolf herself on the page. Read it after Mrs Dalloway, not before: half its pleasure is in the echoes.

— Lisanne
09
The interior, made austere

Rachel Cusk

British · b. 1967 · Novelist

Cusk was born in Saskatoon, Canada, in 1967 and grew up partly in Los Angeles before her family settled in England. Her Outline trilogy follows Faye, a writer whose own life is glimpsed almost entirely through what other people tell her. Second Place (2021) and Parade (2024) continued her experiments with form; the French translation of Second Place won the Prix Femina étranger.

Cusk turns Woolf's method inside out: instead of following one mind, she lets a narrator almost disappear while everyone around her talks. What she keeps is Woolf's question of how a woman artist lives and works, and the conviction that the conventional novel cannot hold that question. Outline is the place to start.

— Lisanne

Every book by Rachel Cusk →

10
Woolf's playfulness, now

Ali Smith

Scottish · b. 1962 · Novelist · Women's Prize 2015

Smith was born in Inverness in 1962. How to Be Both (2014), two linked stories that can be read in either order — a Renaissance painter and a grieving Cambridge teenager — won the Women's Prize, the Goldsmiths Prize and the Costa Novel Award. Her seasonal quartet, Autumn to Summer (2016–2020), was written and published at speed in response to the news, and Gliff (2024) won the International Dublin Literary Award in 2026.

The living writer closest to the Woolf of Orlando and The Waves: restless with form, funny, and unbothered by the line between one self and another. Smith's sentences pun and drift the way Woolf's essays do, and like Woolf she writes about art as a way of surviving the present. Start with How to Be Both.

— Lisanne

Where to start if you loved Virginia Woolf

If you want Mrs Dalloway's moment, read Katherine Mansfield.

The Garden Party: a whole life seen through one afternoon.

If you want the method at its source, read Dorothy Richardson.

Pointed Roofs, the first volume of Pilgrimage.

If you want Woolf in a novel, read Michael Cunningham.

The Hours — after Mrs Dalloway, not before.

If you want A Room of One's Own at full length, read Simone de Beauvoir.

The Second Sex, then her memoirs.

Frequently asked questions about authors like Virginia Woolf

Who should I read if I love Virginia Woolf?

Katherine Mansfield first: Woolf's contemporary, published by the Hogarth Press, and the only writer Woolf said she was jealous of. Dorothy Richardson and James Joyce were working with stream of consciousness in the same years, and Marcel Proust was the novelist Woolf most wished she could write like. Among later writers, Michael Cunningham, Rachel Cusk and Ali Smith are the closest.

What books are like Mrs Dalloway?

Michael Cunningham's The Hours (1998) rewrites it across three women's days and takes its title from Woolf's working title. James Joyce's Ulysses (1922) is the other great one-day novel of modernism. Katherine Mansfield's story “The Garden Party” and Elizabeth Bowen's The Death of the Heart (1938) share its attention to parties and to what goes unsaid.

What books are like A Room of One's Own?

Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex (1949) takes the same question — what has kept women from making art and having freedom — and answers it at length. Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook (1962) puts the argument into a novel about a woman writer. Woolf's own Three Guineas (1938) is the sharper sequel.

Was Virginia Woolf influenced by James Joyce?

They were exact contemporaries, both born in 1882 and both dying in 1941, and both were rethinking the novel around consciousness in the same years. Woolf read Ulysses and was mostly irritated by it, and the Hogarth Press turned the manuscript down in 1918. Critics usually treat the two as parallel rather than one influencing the other.

Were Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield friends?

Friends and rivals. They met in 1917, the Woolfs' Hogarth Press printed Mansfield's Prelude in 1918, and Mansfield reviewed Woolf's Night and Day sharply in 1919. After Mansfield died in January 1923, Woolf wrote in her diary that Mansfield's was “the only writing I have ever been jealous of”.

Who invented stream of consciousness?

The phrase comes from the psychologist William James, in The Principles of Psychology (1890). May Sinclair first applied it to fiction in 1918, in a review of Dorothy Richardson's Pilgrimage. Richardson, Joyce and Woolf are the three English-language novelists most associated with the technique.

Where should I start with Virginia Woolf?

Mrs Dalloway (1925) is the usual way in: one day in London, and short. To the Lighthouse (1927) is often called her masterpiece, Orlando (1928) is the most playful, and A Room of One's Own (1929) is the essay to read first. See the full guide to her books, in order.

Footnotes

  1. Virginia Woolf — Wikipedia
  2. Hogarth Press Archive — University of Reading
  3. 100 Years of Ulysses by James Joyce — National Trust Collections
  4. Envy & Inspiration: The Friendship of Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield — Literary Ladies Guide
  5. Dorothy Richardson — Wikipedia
  6. The Hours (novel) — Wikipedia
  7. In Search of Lost Time — Wikipedia
  8. Ali Smith — Wikipedia

List last reviewed 15 October 2026.

Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021. Every comparison here is a judgement about method and subject, not an algorithmic match. See more on her personal bookshelf.

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