The preparation of this edition has been enormously helped by the fact that so much of the material relating to Virginia Woolf’s life and work, particularly her diary and letters, has been published with considerable scholarship and attention to historical context. Quentin and Olivier Bell have set a high standard in the provision of information about Woolf, enabling the myriad interpretations of her writing to rest on a substantial base of shared, publicly available reference. I am very grateful to Quentin Bell for his personal encouragement, and for permission to use material still in copyright. I would also like to endorse the thanks that most Woolf scholars offer to Mrs Bet Inglis, keeper of the Woolf archives at the Sussex University Library; I am particularly grateful to her for the part she played in the reproduction here of pages from the Three Guineas scrapbooks. The explanatory notes in this edition draw on many sources; I would like to acknowledge a specific debt to Jane Marcus’s research on the political and social background to A Room of One’s Own and also to Morag Shiach, editor of the Oxford University Press edition, for her work on the literary and other allusions of both texts. I would like to thank Ruthie Petrie for her help with my work on this project. Finally, I am very grateful to Julia Briggs, general editor of the series. She undertook a lot of work on the history and variations of the two texts published here, and gave enthusiasm and encouragement as well as practical advice.