‘I w[oul]d like to write a dream story about the top of a mountain. Now why? About lying in the snow; about rings of colour; silence … & the solitude’ wrote Woolf in June 1937 as she laboured over the arguments of Three Guineas:

For Woolf, as for other novelists such as Dickens or Henry James, the short story was a playground or exercise yard, or else a sketchbook in which she renewed her search for ‘the essential thing’, developing through fiction her thoughts on the connections between experience, perception and imagination, and their expression in words or paintings. Because she used her stories to carry her thinking forward, their publication was comparatively unimportant to her: she published eight of them in Monday or Tuesday (1921), while others – for example, ‘The Evening Party’ or ‘Sympathy’, by no means her slightest – remained uncollected and unpublished during her lifetime. ‘Lappin and Lapinova’, dating from around 1918 as those did, was published in the United States in 1939 when she felt short of money.

Near the end of her life, probably in January 1941, Virginia Woolf tried once again to make her way to the Globe theatre, to net Shakespeare in a web of words; yet even before she began, she experienced a sense of defeat:

Any discussion of what lies behind the conversation in Woolf's novels must take into account the several modes of literary anteriority. There is the anteriority of earlier versions: if we picture writing as a chronological sequence, these will normally take the form of the various manuscripts or typescripts that precede the final text. There is also the quite different but equally significant anteriority of social or cultural context, which exerts its own pressure on what and how a writer writes. And then, behind speech, in yet another sense are ‘the things people don't say’. In Woolf's first novel, The Voyage Out, Terence Hewet voiced an ambition to write ‘a novel about Silence … the things people don't say. But the difficulty is immense’ (VO, 204). His (or his author's) concern with the as-yet-unsaid, or even the not-to-be-said remained a feature of Woolf's fiction from first to last – one might even see it as constituting her project, a project in which anteriority would be intimately linked to interiority (construed as a prior, and to-be-privileged mode of being). Such interiority, ‘that stream which people call, so oddly, consciousness’ (‘Middlebrow’, CE ii, 202) provided the basis for Woolf's first liberated writing for the Hogarth Press in 1917, her short story ‘The Mark on the Wall’.

As Eleanor Pargiter walks through Bloomsbury, glancing automatically into the basements, she notices

Can the man who smiles back at her be Leonard, in a uniquely framebreaking moment? In the first draft of this scene, Eleanor had glanced into a carpenter's shop. Woolf had deliberately changed this to a printing shop, although it is uncertain whether Leonard's trembling hand would have allowed him to ‘diss’ (distribute) type. This moment occurs in the ‘1921’ sequence, one of the ‘two enormous chunks’ that Woolf cut from The Years before publication. The passage is exceptional in several ways, not least in being one of the rare references to printing in Woolf's writings; yet, though she seldom discussed it, the impact of the Hogarth Press on her sense of what writing might be, as well as on her material practice of it, is widely acknowledged. Moreover, the Press introduced her to several key modernist writers, notably Katherine Mansfield and T. S. Eliot: their work was among the first to be published by the Woolfs.

‘I should like to write a very subtle work on the proper writing of lives. What it is that you can write – and what writing is. It comes over me that I know nothing of the art’, Virginia Stephen confided in her brother-in-law, Clive Bell, in 1908 (Letters i, 325). Many years later she would fulfil her ambition, writing subtle essays on ‘The New Biography’ (1927) and ‘The Art of Biography’ (1940), but her earliest writings are preoccupied with the problems posed by ‘the proper writing of lives’, exploring them through her writing practice and her comments on its possibilities and constraints. Biography could be seen as an exemplary form in combining history and imagination, fact and fantasy, constraint and freedom, but at the same time she did not subscribe to its rationale, indeed its exemplary nature in that other sense of holding up moral examples. From an early stage, she was committed to extending its range and increasing its flexibility, to writing against it as well as within it, as she would later do with fiction. In her second novel, Night and Day, fiction and biography are used to mirror one another, but, although she completed her novel, the biography that is being written within the book remains unfinished.

It is scarcely surprising that the young Virginia Stephen associated the possibilities of (and constraints upon) writing with the writing of biography, given her status as ‘Daughter of the DNB’. Her father, Sir Leslie Stephen, had gained his knighthood primarily for editing the Dictionary of National Biography. Not only in the household in which she grew up but in the wider family group, biography was accorded high status as a literary form, and widely practised: ‘when one of them dies the chances are that another of them writes his biography’ (ND, 27).

If a single theme runs through these essays, it is that of absence, the theme of so much modernist writing. As Woolf herself recognised, but never formulated to her own satisfaction, gaps and absences are what bring the very different processes of reading and writing together, for the writer works by filling the gaps with her imagination, and so, if rather differently, does the reader. Jane Austen, Woolf observed, ‘stimulates us to supply what is not there’ (Essays iv, 149). Readers coordinate the signs supplied by the text in order to ‘make a whole’ (in Woolf's phrase), in the process of assimilating the reading to their own inner world.

For Woolf, the concept of absence brought together a series of linked ideas. In emotional terms, it resulted from the experience of loss, and in particular the series of losses she had endured as an adolescent and a young woman – her half-sister Stella in 1897, her father in 1904, her favourite brother Thoby in 1906, and, most devastating of all, that of her mother when she was only thirteen, in 1895. Julia Duckworth Stephen was eventually memorialised as Mrs Ramsay in To the Lighthouse, where she unconsciously foresees her own absence as she reads Shakespeare's sonnet 98, ‘From you have I been absent in the spring’ (TTL, 131). Woolf published To the Lighthouse on 5 May 1927, the anniversary of the day her mother died, thirty-two years before.

Virginia Woolf's diary entry for 10 November 1917, with its riverside walk, its glimpse of despair and rapid recovery, is strongly redolent of her second novel, Night and Day, on which she was currently at work. This is a novel that fluctuates between the outer and inner life, between social comedy and alienation, between the solid houses and streets of London and the ceaseless flux of the river – for her husband, Leonard Woolf, an emblem ‘of the mystery and unreality of human things’.

By 1917, many illusions had been lost: the Great War was in its fourth year and scarcely nearer resolution. As a pacifist, Woolf was sickened by it and by the patriotic sentiment and the ‘violent and filthy passions’ it aroused (Letters ii, 71). She felt herself becoming ‘Steadily more feminist’, faced with ‘this preposterous masculine fiction’ (Letters ii, 76). To what extent the war had contributed to her breakdown of 1915 cannot be determined, but both her private experience of psychic illness and the public trauma of the war promoted a sense of inner and outer worlds being pulled violently apart.

Woolf did not require Einstein's theories to legitimate her sense of the relativity of time, the rapid or crawling passage of the hour. As a novelist centrally concerned with how to represent consciousness and subjectivity, she was intensely aware of time, both as an impersonal force and as a personal experience, as shared time and individual time, as the regulated and measurable time of clocks, public and private, and of seasons and stars. She was aware of time's asymmetrical relation to space, and of time in memory and thought, and also within the life of the body, moving from moment to moment towards that final obliteration of consciousness which is death. She was aware of time passed with family, friends or partners, of time as loss, and of time as history, whether personal, familial, cultural, social or political.

observes Ann, in ‘A Talk About Memoirs’ that Woolf wrote for the New Statesman in the spring of 1920 (Essays iii, 181). Weather, that topic so popular with the inhabitants of a damp northern island (or so it is said), leads directly into a wider aesthetic question: to what extent does climate determine art? More than thirty years later, the critic and art historian Nikolaus Pevsner would address that question in the course of considering The Englishness of English Art (1956). His book was partly a belated response to Roger Fry's dismissive Reflections on English Painting, published in 1934 (the year of his death). Pevsner was a European who had chosen to be English. Fry was an Englishman who had chosen to be European, and in chapter seven of her biography of Roger Fry, Woolf recalled his impatience with the inhabitants of ‘Birds Custard Island’, with their narrow views and misplaced enthusiasm for their weather:

Thanks to the synoptic edition of Ulysses, various studies of Yeats's revisions, Valerie Eliot's edition of The Waste Land manuscript and the transcription and publication of many of Virginia Woolf's manuscripts, we now read modernist texts with some awareness of the complex processes by which they came into being. Typically, these include a formalising or tightening of structure at some stage, sometimes along musical lines. Such processes could even be seen in terms of a ‘call to order’, after what Woolf (in the course of a discussion of Joyce) described as ‘the usual smash and splinters’ (Letters ii, 598). T. S. Eliot entitled the long poems he wrote between 1935 and 1941 The Four Quartets, yet their structural model was not so much the classical quartet (which usually consists of four parts, played by four instruments), although there were four poems, but rather the work which had established his reputation – the five-part structure, with a divided second section and a short lyrical fourth section that was The Waste Land. Yet, as its manuscript notoriously reveals, that structure was in turn the outcome of Pound's judicious editing of Eliot's original drafts. Though from one point of view accidentally arrived at, this five-part structure became the model for The Four Quartets – part of the process of building an ‘oeuvre’ as if it were an architectural monument that Mallarmé had proposed. Comparable processes of revision or restructuring can be identified in the work of Yeats and Joyce who opened up new layers of meaning and significance as they worked (though Auden’s rewriting or suppression of earlier poems in the light of his own changing convictions involves a rather different conception of the relationship between the artist and his work).

Near the end of A Room of One's Own, in a coda as cunning and surprising as any of Beethoven's, Virginia Woolf declares, ‘The truth is, I often like women. I like their unconventionality. I like their subtlety. I like their anonymity. I like – but I must not run on in this way.’ Or so the passage appears in the special limited edition published in the United States on 21 October 1929 and in Britain on 24 October, in the British and American first editions (also published 24 October), and in all subsequent American editions. Yet in the second British impression, published less than a month later, on 9 November 1929, Woolf liked ‘their unconventionality. I like their completeness. I like their anonymity’. This revised version continued to appear in all British editions of the text until January 1992, fifty years after her death, when Virginia Woolf's work came out of copyright in Britain. In new editions published by Penguin and Oxford World's Classics, editions that reset the text from the British first edition, Woolf reverted to liking women's ‘subtlety’.

As the general editor of the Penguin reprints, I was one of those responsible for the decision to return to the text of the first British edition on the grounds that this would be a practical way of shedding the accumulated errors of later editions. This decision seemed further justified by the widespread assumption that, though Woolf revised her work extensively in the stages before and sometimes during publication, she lost interest in it thereafter, so that any post-publication changes that occurred were probably non-authorial. Since 1992, however, I have become steadily less confident of this assumption: an example such as I began with must call it in question, while the assumption has itself functioned to deter further investigation into Woolf’s post-publication revisions.

As the narrator of ‘The Mark on the Wall’ implies, the unexpected disappearance of material objects can highlight their normal durability, and, for Woolf, things were too often harder and more enduring than human beings. Things frequently outlast us, becoming mementos of human brevity, of the ephemeral nature of our lives. The famous question she asked in her diary at the beginning of 1929, ‘Now is life very solid, or very shifting?’, suggests that, while life itself can feel one way or the other, ultimately it is ‘things’, ‘solid objects’, that survive us, while we remain trapped in the inevitable processes of time, change, decay, loss and death – ‘one flying after another, so quick so quick’ (Diary iii, 218).

Minta, in To the Lighthouse, loses her pearl brooch on the beach, and Paul attempts to mark the place with his stick, determined to come back next morning at low tide and find it for her before the waves carry it away, to leave it lying among the roots of seaweed.

In A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf describes the novel as ‘leaving a shape on the mind's eye, built now in squares, now pagoda shaped, now throwing out wings and arcades, now solidly compact and domed like the Cathedral of Santa Sofia at Constantinople’ (ROO, 64). She had learned from Roger Fry and her brother-in-law Clive Bell to think of her own art, as well as the plastic arts, in terms of ‘significant form’. Indeed, in his account of the subject, Bell had posed the question,

Was Woolf thinking, as she wrote these words, of Orlando, her most recent novel, in which the third chapter is actually set in Constantinople, or was it To the Lighthouse that seemed to her so ‘solidly compact and domed’? Yet for Woolf, Santa Sofia was not merely ‘very solid’, it was also ‘very shifting’ (Diary iii, 218):

That was how the great mosque (or cathedral) had appeared to her when she first visited it with Vanessa and Violet Dickinson in October 1906. And as Lyndall Gordon has shown, it became for her a metaphor for ‘delicacy of treatment with strength of form’. That paradox of weight and weightlessness, of granite and rainbow, dominates Woolf’s sense of To the Lighthouse, just as it dominates Lily Briscoe’s artistic aims, so that her portrait of Mrs Ramsay parallels the novel itself.

In the sixty years since her death, Virginia Woolf's England has vanished. Many English country houses and homes, both large and small – Knole and Sissinghurst, Charleston Farmhouse and Monk's House – have been adopted by societies committed to preserving them for the heritage industry, and they have been redesigned for the enjoyment of visitors, a process of democratisation that has altered their identity for ever. The fabric of English society has also radically changed. We aspire to be a multi-racial, multi-cultural society, for whom the concept of ‘Englishness’ is at best an empty myth, the invention of an imaginary past; at worst an occasion for prejudice and political reaction. It has become a potential embarrassment, almost a dirty word. As Raphael Samuel observed, ‘British history makes “Englishness” problematical and invites us to see it as one among a number of competing ethnicities.’ As for English literature, its teaching is now ‘associated with the missionary position in sexuality, parochialism in high politics and tea-shop gentility in the world of letters.’ This outworn concept of Englishness, tied to lost ideals of continuity and community, evolved partly as a reaction to the speed of change, resisting the process even as it responded to it. Yet the conflict that has accumulated around the various meanings of Englishness had begun well before Woolf's death. Her responses to it were themselves conflicted, but also subtle, amusing and acute.

In their various ways, all Woolf's works – novels, short stories and essays – contribute to an ongoing debate about the nature and the purpose of writing; but she was equally preoccupied with the nature of reading, and especially so between the publication of Night and Day in the autumn of 1919 and that of Mrs Dalloway and The Common Reader in the spring of 1925. Struggling to come to terms with an older literary tradition associated with her father and to let go of the dead leaves of the past, she began to search for new and more open ways to practise reading as well as writing. She wanted to understand how reading worked and how it related to the wider interpretation of signs.

Woolf had always loved and needed reading: she wrote essays on ‘Hours in a Library’ (the title of her father's best-known book), ‘Reading’, ‘On Re-reading Novels’, ‘How It Strikes a Contemporary’ (the title of a Robert Browning poem), ‘How Should One Read a Book?’ and ‘All About Books’ (Essays ii, 55; iii, 141, 336; 353; iv, 388; CE ii, 263). She discussed it in her fiction, diaries and letters, and kept careful records of what she read. At least twenty-six notebooks are devoted to her reading, and many other documents include further notes on it.