The provenance of these texts is quite complex, as is explained in the Note on the Texts. Readers interested in the process by which these texts emerged may want to look particularly at The Manuscript Version of A Room of One’s Own: ‘Women and Fiction’, (ed. S. P. Rosenbaum, Blackwell, 1991) and the essay-novel that preceded Three Guineas, The Pargiters (ed. Mitchell A. Leaska, Hogarth Press, 1978). Readers looking for connections between these political essays and Virginia Woolf’s novels will find a fictional exploration of some of the themes of A Room of One’s Own (gender, androgyny, writing and desire) in Orlando (1928; Penguin Books, 1993). The links between Three Guineas and The Years, originally conceived as a single work, are closer still. It is worth adding, however, that all of Woolf’s novels, including those with the greatest abstraction in form, are heavily freighted with the cargo of gender and its meanings.
Many of Virginia Woolf’s shorter essays and reviews concern themes related to A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas. Selections can be found in the two volumes in this series, edited by Rachel Bowlby (A Woman’s Essays, Penguin Books, 1992; The Crowded Dance of Modern Life, Penguin Books, 1993), as well as in Virginia Woolf: Women and Writing (ed. Michèle Barrett, Women’s Press, 1979, 1992). The complete essays, edited by Andrew McNeillie, are published in six volumes by the Hogarth Press.
The documentation of Woolf’s life is now extensive. The edited Diary and Letters offer a fascinating companion to her political writings as well as to her novels. Woolf’s own reading practices have been tracked in Brenda Silver’s The Reading Notebooks of Viginia Woolf (1983). The secondary literature on Virginia Woolf’s life and literature is now so large that book-length publications are required to address it; John Mepham has produced an extremely useful and well-judged discussion of the biographical and critical literature on Woolf in a book in the ‘Criticism in Focus’ series of Bristol Classical Press (1992).
The secondary literature concerning the interpretations of Woolf’s feminism has a particular relevance. See Jane Marcus, Virginia Woolf and the Languages of Patriarchy (Indiana University Press, 1987; particularly the essay on A Room of One’s Own), and the collection edited by Jane Marcus on Virginia Woolf: A Feminist Slant (Nebraska University Press, 1983, particularly the essays on Three Guineas and Woolf’s later work). ‘Post-structuralist’ treatments of Woolf include Makiko Minow-Pinkney’s Virginia Woolf and the Problem of the Subject (Harvester Press, 1987) and Elizabeth Abel’s Virginia Woolf and the Fictions of Psychoanalysis (Chicago University Press, 1989).