This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book provides an ideal guide to Virginia Woolf and her place in modern literary and cultural studies. She has been used as a way to think generally about women and writing, or women and language. Feminist criticism has transformed the terms on which questions are asked in almost every sector of literary criticism in general, and has drawn on and argued with all the other new methodological fields - structuralism, deconstruction, psychoanalysis, to name the most obvious - associated with the general turn to theory. More recently, the adoption of questions derived from versions of psychoanalysis for feminist readings of literary texts by men and women has been a major factor in revitalising the hitherto somewhat stagnant area of 'Freudian' literary criticism.