Few people ask from books what books can give us. Most commonly we come to books with blurred and divided minds, asking of fiction that it shall be true, of poetry that it shall be false, of biography that it shall be flattering, of history that it shall enforce our own prejudices. If we could banish all such preconceptions when we read, that would be an admirable beginning.

". Her most famous works include the novels Mrs Dalloway (1925) To the Lighthouse (1927) and Orlando (1928) and the book-length essay A Room of One's Own (1929) with its famous dictum "A woman must have money and a room of her own if Virginia Woolf is to write fiction. During the interwar period Woolf was a significant figure in London literary society and a central figure in the influential Bloomsbury Group of intellectuals.