SOURCE: A chapter in A Room of One's Own, Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1929, pp. 100-36.

Woolf is one of the most prominent literary figures of twentieth-century English literature. Like her contemporary James Joyce, with whom she is often compared, Woolf is remembered as one of the most innovative of the streamof-consciousness novelists. Concerned primarily with depicting the life of the mind, she revolted against traditional narrative techniques and developed her own highly individualized style. Her criticial essays, which cover almost the entire range of English literature, contain some of her finest prose and are praised for their insight. Here, Woolf comments on Behn's importance to the history of female writers in England.

[With] Mrs. Behn we turn a very important corner on the road [in the history of women writers]. We leave behind, shut up in their parks among their folios, those solitary great ladies who wrote without...