It was so popular, in fact, that pocket-sized editions of the novel were published for soldiers as leisure reading during World War II. The fiction portion became Woolf's most popular novel during her lifetime, The Years, which charts social change from 1880 to the time of publication through the lives of the Pargiter family. The non-fiction portion became Three Guineas. When Woolf realised the idea of a 'novel–essay' wasn't working, she separated the two parts. This unfinished manuscript was published in 1977 as The Pargiters. The book was to alternate between fictive narrative chapters and non-fiction essay chapters, demonstrating Woolf's views on war and women in both types of writing at once. On 28 March 1941, a few months before the publication of her final novel, Between the Acts, Virginia Woolf committed suicide.Three Guineas is a book-length essay by Virginia Woolf, published in June 1938.Īlthough Three Guineas is a work of non-fiction, it was initially conceived as a 'novel–essay' which would tie up the loose ends left in her earlier work, A Room of One's Own. This intense creative productivity was often matched by periods of mental illness, from which she had suffered since her mother's death in 1895. She also maintained an astonishing output of literary criticism, short fiction, journalism and biography, including the playfully subversive Orlando (1928) and A Room of One's Own (1929) a passionate feminist essay. Between 19 Virginia Woolf produced what are now regarded as her finest masterpieces, from Mrs Dalloway (1925) to the poetic and highly experimental novel The Waves (1931).

It was during this time that she and Leonard Woolf founded The Hogarth Press with the publication of the co-authored Two Stories in 1917, hand-printed in the dining room of their house in Surrey. These first novels show the development of Virginia Woolf's distinctive and innovative narrative style.

Three years later, her first novel The Voyage Out was published, followed by Night and Day (1919) and Jacob's Room (1922). In 1912 Virginia married Leonard Woolf, a writer and social reformer. This informal collective of artists and writers which included Lytton Strachey and Roger Fry, exerted a powerful influence over early twentieth-century British culture. After his death in 1904 Virginia and her sister, the painter Vanessa Bell, moved to Bloomsbury and became the centre of 'The Bloomsbury Group'.

Virginia Woolf was born in London in 1882, the daughter of Sir Leslie Stephen, first editor of The Dictionary of National Biography.

A room of one's own and three guineas