A Haunted House

Virginia Woolf stands as the chief figure of modernism in England and must be included with Joyce and Proust in the realisation of experimental achievements that have completely broken with tradition

New York Times

Virginia Woolf was one of the great innovators of that decade of literary Modernism, the 1920s. Novels such as Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse showed how experimental writing could reshape our sense of ordinary life. Taking unremarkable materials - preparations for a genteel party, a day on a bourgeois family holiday - they trace the flow of associations and ideas that we call "consciousness"

Guardian

They seem as perfect, and as functional for all their beauty, as spider webs. Indeed they were made for like purpose: to trap and dissect living morsels in the form of palpitating moments of time, instantaneous perceptions, brief visions of others

Eudora Welty, New York Times Book Review)

With Joyce and Eliot, Woolf has shaped a literary century

Jeanette Winterson, The Times

Here is the precursor of the experiments which are to fill her future novels, where the writer will evaporate and condense solid objects over her literary Bunsen burner in solutions of time or light

Helen Simpson, from her introduction