Virginia Woolf’s first fully realized work of fiction—published in its final, revised form for the first time
A beguiling trio of fantastical and farcical anti-fairy tales about a giantess who builds a magical “cottage of one’s own,” battles a silver-scaled sea monster, and defies governesses and gravity alike
In 1907, eight years before she published her first novel, a twenty-five-year-old Virginia Woolf drafted three interconnected comic stories chronicling the adventures of a giantess named Violet—a teasing tribute to Woolf’s friend Mary Violet Dickinson. But it was only in 2022 that Woolf scholar Urmila Seshagiri discovered a final, revised typescript of the stories. The typescript revealed that Woolf had finished this mock-biography, making it her first fully realized literary experiment and a work that anticipates her later masterpieces. Published here for the first time in its final form, The Life of Vio
