全書由作者生平、創作背景、文學作品和接受情況四個部分組成，全面繫統地介紹了現代英國著名女作家弗吉尼亞·伍爾夫的創作經歷、美學思想、藝術特征和文學成就。伍爾夫是現代英國文學史上出類撥萃的女作家，也是意識流小說的重要代表。她的作品已經成為國內外大學本科與研究生文學課程的必讀教材，同時也為我國學者提供了非常豐富的學術資源。本書對我國的英美文學教師、學者、大學生和研究生尤其是關注或研究伍爾夫的讀者具有重要的參考價值。

《弗吉尼亞·伍爾夫》是對於研究現代文學的學生而言是必讀。《弗吉尼亞·伍爾夫》語言簡明、資料豐富，介紹了伍爾夫其人其作，並論述了布魯姆斯伯裡文學團體對其創作發展所產生的重要影響。書中有對伍爾夫主要作品的詳細分析，包括《到燈塔去》、《達羅衛夫人》、《浪》及其他重要短篇小說。研究伍爾夫的學生均能從中獲益。

Preface
Abbreviations
Chapter 1 Life
1882-1909
The 1910s
The 1920s
1930-1941

Chapter 2 Contexts
Biographies
Bloomsbury
Wider historical and political contexts
Modern and contemporary cultural contexts

Chapter 3 Works
Woolfs fiction
Woolfs nonfiction
Other essays

Chapter 4 Critical reception
Introductory reading
Critical reception

Contemporary reviews and the 1940s：innovation， experimentalism， impressionism
The 1950s and 1960s： philosophy，psychology， myth
The 1970s and 1980s： feminism， androgyny，modernism， aesthetics
The 1980s： feminism， postmodernism，sexual/textual politics
The 1990s to the present： feminism，historicism， postcolonialism， ethics
Notes
Guide to further reading
Index

It is quite a responsibility to relate even the bare facts of Virginia Wolfs life, given the sometimes explosively diverging accounts of it in circulation. There are numerous published biographies of Wolf, as well as various collective Bloomsbury ones, a number of which will be briefly considered in Chapter Two. And sketches and snippets concerning Wools life crop up in all sorts of places, from Hollywood films to fashion magazine spreads. Leaving aside for the moment such fleeting, and often wholly misleading, cultural apron- privations of Woofs life and persona, each serious biography presents Wolof in a different light, and some offer quite differing views of everything from her writing habits to her relationships, her sexuality, her illness and her suicide. The daughter of the literary biographer Leslie Stephen, and close friend of the innovative biographer of the Victorians, Lynton Strachey, Woolf herself put forward, in The New Biography (1927) (reviewing work by another biographer acquaintance, Harold Nicholson), her own memorable theory of biography, encapsulated in her phrase granite and rainbow.Truth she envisions as something of granite-like solidity, and personality as something of rainbow-like intangibility, and the aim of biography, she pro- poses, is to weld these two into one seamless whole (E4 473). The following short biographical account of Woolf will attempt to keep to the basic granite- like facts that Woolf novices need to know, while also occasionally attending in brief to the more elusive, but equally relevant, matter of rainbow-like personality.
Woolf did not publish - or indeed, writea formal autobiography, but she did write, for her own circle of Bloomsbury intimates, a number of brief memoirs, reminiscences and autobiographical sketches, most of which have been published posthumously.