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In Edwardian London, Katharine Hilbery, granddaughter of a great Victorian poet, helps her mother write his biography by day and secretly studies mathematics…
In Edwardian London, Katharine Hilbery, granddaughter of a great Victorian poet, helps her mother write his biography by day and secretly studies mathematics and astronomy at night. She becomes engaged, without love, to William Rodney, a pedantic poet, while Ralph Denham, a young lawyer from a poorer family, falls in love with her, and her friend Mary Datchet, who works for the women's suffrage movement, loves Ralph. The novel follows the four of them as they try to discover what love and marriage should mean.
Context and significance
Virginia Woolf published her second novel in 1919. It is more traditional than her later books, and Katharine was partly modelled on her sister, the painter Vanessa Bell. Read The Voyage Out, Jacob's Room and Mrs Dalloway.
About the author
Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) was the daughter of the critic Leslie Stephen and grew up in a London house full of books. With her sister and friends she formed the circle of artists and writers known as the Bloomsbury Group, and with her husband Leonard she founded the Hogarth Press, which published her own books and those of T. S. Eliot.
Her novels Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse and Orlando changed the way fiction follows the mind, and her essay A Room of One's Own argued that a woman needs money and a room of her own to write. She suffered all her life from depression, and drowned herself in 1941.