Virginia Woolf and the Aesthetics of Modernism

Abstract

By 1920, Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) was an established novelist already attracting serious critical attention, an accomplished critic, and a fledgling publisher. In the two decades that followed she remained a successful, bestselling author, whose reading public bought and read her work without the benefits, or otherwise, of academic mediation. The Hogarth Press, which she founded with her husband, Leonard Woolf, published most of Woolf’s writings, and therefore she had significant control of the production of her own work and considerable artistic freedom. She was also responsible for publishing numerous other key modernist works, including T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and many of the first English translations of Sigmund Freud, as well as works by Gertrude Stein, Nancy Cunard, Katherine Mansfield, and several other important (women) writers of the period.