Tracing the lives of a group of friends, this book follows their development from childhood to youth and middle age. It presents rich poetic language that expresses the inner life of its characters: their aspirations, their triumphs and regrets, and their awareness of unity and isolation.

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) is a major twentieth-century author, a great novelist, essayist and a key figure in literary history as a feminist and a modernist. Her family and friends were writers and artists and they later became known as the Bloomsbury Group. Woolf suffered mental health problems throughout her life and, fearing another outbreak of mental illness, drowned herself in 1941.