"I don't like writing for my half-brother George," Virginia Woolf wrote to her friend Bunny Garnett in July, 1917. It was actually her half-brother Gerald Duckworth who ran the firm but Woolf's point was that she did not want to be controlled or censored by anyone. Her first novel The Voyage Out (1915) was considered promising and original but while she was working on her second one, Night and Day (1919), she had already begun to feel constrained by the traditional forms of the novel and told Vanessa Stephen Bell, Woolf's sister who married Clive Bell in 1907, that "I should have liked to try the other way," hoping that Duckworth would not accept it for his list. As she noted in her diary, "the other way" would have made her "the only woman in England free to write what I like." Bell's suggestion "Why don't you write more short...