Books Written by Virginia Woolf

The Voyage Out

Duckworth · 26 March 1915 · her first novel

Rachel Vinrace, young and sheltered, sails on her father’s ship to South America and spends a season among the English guests of a hotel there, where she begins to find out who she is and falls in love. Towards the end she falls ill with a fever and dies. It is more conventional than what followed, but the seeds of everything she later did are here.

Night and Day

Duckworth · 24 October 1919

Katharine Hilbery, from a distinguished literary family, secretly prefers mathematics to poetry. She is engaged to the poet William Rodney, while the lawyer Ralph Denham falls for her and the suffrage campaigner Mary Datchet quietly loves Ralph. The novel asks whether love and marriage can go together, and whether marriage is needed for happiness at all. Her most traditional novel. A loose film version, Virginia Woolf’s Night and Day, directed by Tina Gharavi with Haley Bennett as Katharine, was released in the UK in June 2026.

Jacob’s Room

Hogarth Press · 1922 · her first novel from her own press

Jacob Flanders grows up, goes to Cambridge, falls in and out of love in London and travels to Greece. But Jacob himself is almost never there: we see him only through the people around him, most of them women, until he is a collection of other people’s impressions. This is the book in which she found the method she would use for the rest of her career.

The Common Reader

Hogarth Press · First Series 1925 · Second Series 1932

Two volumes of essays on writers from the Elizabethans to her contemporaries: Montaigne, Defoe, Austen, the Brontës, Hardy and dozens more. Many first appeared in the Times Literary Supplement and other papers and magazines, and were revised for these books. The “common reader” of the title is the person who reads for pleasure rather than as a critic or scholar. Start with the First Series; the Second rewards readers who have already met the first.

Hogarth Press · 14 May 1925 · written 1922–1924

One day in London in June 1923. Clarissa Dalloway, the wife of a Member of Parliament, is preparing for the party she will give that evening. Across the city Septimus Warren Smith, a shell-shocked veteran of the First World War, is moving towards a very different end. The two never meet. The novel moves between their minds and a dozen others, and dissolves the line between what happens outside and what is felt inside.

To the Lighthouse

Hogarth Press · 1927

Three unequal parts. “The Window” covers one afternoon and evening at the Ramsay family’s summer house in the Hebrides. “Time Passes” covers ten years in a few short chapters, and in them the First World War, the death of Mrs Ramsay, a daughter who dies in childbirth and a son killed in battle. “The Lighthouse” covers a single morning, when the trip that was put off in the first part finally happens. The Ramsays are based on Woolf’s own parents.

Orlando

Hogarth Press · 1928 · dedicated to Vita Sackville-West

Orlando starts as a young nobleman at the court of Elizabeth I and ends as a woman in 1928, having lived through four centuries without ageing past thirty-six. In the seventeenth century Orlando sleeps for seven days and wakes up a woman; Woolf does not explain it. The book is dressed as a real biography, with photographs, an index and a mock-solemn preface in which Woolf thanks half her circle of friends. It is also a love letter to Vita Sackville-West, and to her family home, Knole. The lightest and wittiest of her major novels, and the most direct about gender and identity.

A Room of One’s Own

Hogarth Press · 1929 · based on two lectures at Cambridge, 1928

Why have so few women written great literature? Across six chapters Woolf moves from the material conditions that kept women from writing — no money, no privacy, no room of their own — to what centuries of exclusion did to them, and imagines what a women’s tradition might yet produce. Argument, fiction and autobiography are woven together until you cannot tell them apart. Its central line, that a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction, has become one of the most quoted in feminist thought.

The Waves

Hogarth Press · 1931

Almost no plot. Six characters — Bernard, Susan, Rhoda, Neville, Jinny and Louis — speak in alternating monologues from childhood to old age, and a seventh, Percival, is never heard at all. Between the sections, short passages follow the sun over the sea from dawn to dark. Woolf called it not a novel but a “playpoem”. The most formally extreme of her books and the one that asks the most of a reader: read it slowly, the way you would read poetry.

Flush

Hogarth Press · 1933

The life of Flush, the cocker spaniel of the poet Elizabeth Barrett, from her sickroom in London to her secret marriage to Robert Browning and their escape to Italy, where Flush goes with them. Told from the dog’s point of view, and through his nose, it is a comedy with a point about Victorian fathers, class and freedom. Sometimes counted as a tenth novel.

The Years

Hogarth Press · 1937

The Pargiter family from 1880 to the mid-1930s, told in sections set in single years. The closest she came to a conventional family novel. It divides readers, but rewards the patient ones.

Three Guineas

Hogarth Press · 1938

Written as a reply to three letters asking for her support: one from a man who asks how war can be prevented, one appealing for a women’s college, and one from a society helping women into the professions. How to prevent war becomes, in her hands, inseparable from what shutting women out of public life has done. Angrier and more political than A Room of One’s Own, and controversial when it came out; now widely read as an early analysis of how patriarchy and militarism feed each other. Read it after A Room of One’s Own.

Between the Acts

Hogarth Press · 1941 · published after her death

A single day in June 1939 at a country house, Pointz Hall, where the village stages its yearly pageant of English history while war comes closer. It becomes a book about history, about art and its audience, and about whether people can still live together. She finished the manuscript in late 1940 but had not revised it for the printer when she died in March 1941; Leonard Woolf published it that year. Shorter and rawer than the others, and best read last.