ABSTRACT
The work of Virginia Woolf has certainly not lacked for commentary, and of a variety of types. Margaret Drabble, Woolf has had a sufficient number of commentators over a long enough period of time that there can be little doubt about the importance of her work. Feminists, especially starting in the 1970s, have found her essays and novels to be exemplary; critics interested in the rise of modernism have long heralded Woolf as one of the first major modernists. The sort of criticism very much precedes the more recent feminist commentary, and was already a staple during Woolf's lifetime. The classic feminist commentary on Woolf comes, of course, from Showalters A Literature of Their Own. Mitchell Leaska has authored both a biography of Woolf and volumes of criticism, some of the most telling work, with respect to the points we are trying to develop here, comes in his biography, Granite and Rainbow.
