Selected Essays

'A good essay must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in, not out.'According to Virginia Woolf, the goal of the essay 'is simply that it should give pleasure...It should lay us under a spell with its first word, and we should only wake, refreshed, with its last.' One of the best practitioners of the art she analysed so rewardingly, Woolf displayed her essay-writing ...