FOREWORD BY ALI SMITHWITH AN INTRODUCTION BY FRANCESCA WADEWho better to serve as a guide to great books and their authors than Virginia Woolf?In the early years of its existence, the Times Literary Supplement published some of the finest writers in English: T. S. Eliot, Henry James and E. M. Forster among them. But one of the paper-s defining voices was Virginia Woolf, who produced a string of superb essays between the two World Wars.The weirdness of Elizabethan plays, the pleasure of revisiting favourite novels, the supreme examples of Charlotte Bront-George Eliot and Henry James, Thomas Hardy and Joseph Conrad: all are here, in anonymously published pieces, in which may be glimpsed the thinking behind Woolf-s works of fiction and the enquiring, feminist spirit of A Room of One-s Own.Here is Woolf the critical essayist, offering, at one moment, a playful hypothesis and, at another, a judgement laid down with the authority of a twentieth-century Dr Johnson. Here is Woolf working out p
