Virginia Woolf is known primarily as a novelist rather than as an essayist, although she was a prolific writer of essays. Indeed, one of her advocates has gone so far as to say that her reputation as a novelist has led to her neglect as an essayist, especially as a writer of literary critical essays. If literary critical essays are to be counted as personal essays (and they are, of course, as personal as any other essay), then by sheer volume of output Woolf is a major essayist of the twentieth or of any other century. Her own definition of the personal essay is qualitative rather than quantitative, claiming that the essay is designed to give pleasure to the reader.

Adeline Virginia Stephen was born in London on 25 January 1882 to Leslie Stephen, editor of the Cornhill magazine and the Dictionary of National Biography, and his second wife, Julia...