Includes bibliographical references.

This selection brings together thirty of Woolf's best essays across a wide range of subjects including writing and reading, the role and reputation of women writers, the art of biography, and the London scene. They are enchanting in their own right, and indispensable to an understanding of this great writer. - ;'A good essay must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in, not out.' According to Virginia Woolf, the goal of the essay 'is simply that it should give pleasure ... It should lay us under a spell with its first word, and we should only wake, refreshed, with it.