Author Description

This ambitious and lucid study examines the profound effect the Renaissance had on the work of major critic and novelist Virginia Woolf. Drawing on the full spectrum of Woolf's available letters, diaries, reading-notes, drafts of essays and novels, and feminist polemics, Fox argues that the style and wit of such sixtheenth-century works as Shakespeare's poems and plays, Hakluyt's prose, and the great lyric poetry of the seventeenth century, can be seen in the language, characterization, and structure of Woolf's fiction and criticism.