Katharine Hilbery is beautiful and privileged, but uncertain of her future. She must choose between becoming engaged to the oddly prosaic poet William Rodney, and her dangerous attraction to the passionate Ralph Denham. As she struggles to decide, the lives of two other women – women’s rights activist Mary Datchet and Katharine’s mother, Margaret, struggling to weave together the documents, events and memories of her own father’s life into a biography – impinge on hers with unexpected and intriguing consequences. Virginia Woolf’s delicate second novel is both a love story and a social comedy, yet it also subtly undermines these traditions, questioning a woman’s role and the very nature of experience.
About the author
Adeline Virginia Woolf (née Stephen; 25 January 1882 – 28 March 1941) was an English writer who is considered one of the foremost modernists of the twentieth century and a pioneer in the use of stream of consciousness as a narrative device. Born in an affluent household in Kensington, London, she attended the King’s College London and was acquainted with the early reformers of women’s higher education.