Her works seem much more accessible than they did to her contemporaries. Though there is now an enormous critical apparatus available, "common readers," as Virginia Woolf called them (borrowing the term from Samuel Johnson), need feel no fear in approaching her novels on their own. Secondary material should be used to enhance rather than impede or replace the reading of her work.
Nonetheless, the advantages of the recent critical and popular attention are manifold. Her novels are now in print again, in a variety of editions, often with introductions in homage by today's writers. They have been translated into more than fifty languages. Her essays, reviews, and short stories have been collected. Fragments of unpublished manuscripts have been pieced together and published, giving general readers access to valuable material such as Woolf's autobiographical writing, edited by Jeanne Schulkind in the collection Moments of Being (1976). And then there is the vast delight of the many volumes of letters and diaries, all scrupulously edited, copiously footnoted, and indexed. Even her reading notes are being published.
This new attention to Virginia Woolf has been paralleled by an increasing interest in the so-called Bloomsbury Group, which had its origins at Cambridge among some undergraduates who were under the influence of the philosopher G.
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