Unnecessary Rankings! Virginia Woolf

Did you know (and why on earth should you) that yesterday was the second anniversary of my Unnecessary Rankings? How did we ever survive for so long without it, I’m sure you’re asking.

Well, today I’m going for a Big Dog – or a Big Wolf, perhaps. Yes, it’s time to rank the author I consider the best writer of the 20th century – here we go with Virginia Woolf. I haven’t included all her essay and short story collections separately, because they are published in some many iterations, and I’ve actually not read Night and Day yet, largely because I can’t face the idea of coming to an end of all the available Woolf novels.

16. Roger Fry: A Biography (1940)

Virginia Woolf never wrote a bad book, and probably never a bad sentence, but IMO her least satisfactory work is this biography of her friend Roger Fry. She drops her usual style and is made curiously bland by some self-imposed constraints. As I wrote in my review: ‘A good biography – but not quite what one expects from Woolf, and disconcerting to see her talent hide in the shadows of her own book.’

15. Collected Essays

It is hard to group these because, taken on its own, something like ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’ – Woolf’s very funny, fairly unfair take-down of writers like Arnold Bennett and John Galsworthy – would soar up the list. But I’m less interested in her writings on notable authors of the past, and it doesn’t feel like she’s having quite as much fun with them. (What people don’t tell you about Woolf is how funny she is, and this comes out most in her best essays.)

14. Flush (1933)

A faux biography from the perspective of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s dog! Sure, why not! The idea feels like a prank gone wrong, but it is worked out surprisingly well. I’m less interested in Flush than her other characters, but it is perhaps her most accessible novel.

13. Collected Short Stories

Woolf didn’t write masses of short stories, and some of the ones in her collected stories are more like experimental flourishes – ‘The Mark on the Wall’ being perhaps the most famous. She is certainly better at novel-length, but her eye for details is on display in her shortest fiction.

12. Collected Letters

There are few authors whose output has been so rigorously turned over, and any time Woolf put pen to paper, it ended up getting published. Her letters go to show that she never threw out a casual sentence. They are honest, thoughtful, often quite bitchy. I love them.

11. Three Guineas (1938)

I’ve included a couple of book-length essays as separate entries in this list. Three Guineas is wide-ranging and interesting, though I always find it hard to remember precisely what the main thrust of it is. What has largely stuck with me is the interesting way Woolf writes about photography.

10. The Voyage Out (1915)

Woolf’s first novel is surprisingly ordinary, in style. Rachel Vinrace is travelling by boat to South America, and the novel explores the range of fellow-passengers (including a couple who will take centre stage in a later novel!) as well as revealing Rachel’s life back in London. It’s a very readable, good book, but you wouldn’t necessarily know it was by Woolf.

9. The Years (1937)

I’m always surprised that The Years was Woolf’s bestselling title during her life, or up among them at least. Towards the end of her novel-writing career, Woolf returned to a more ‘traditional’ style – and this is a sort of family saga that, again, is excellent but not ‘Woolfian’ in the way you might expect.

8. Collected Diaries

You have to assume Woolf had an eye on publication here – her diaries are so beautifully, thoughtfully written. I love A Writer’s Diary, the single-volume focusing on books/writing/publishing that Leonard Woolf edited after Virginia Woolf’s death (though I know it is controversial in some circles). The unedited, six-volume edition is the real must there, and the best source for insights into Woolf’s mind.

7. Between The Acts (1941)

The top seven are hard to separate, because I’d say they are all works of genius. Woolf’s final, slim novel is characteristically insightful in its depiction of people putting on a pageant at a country house.

6. Orlando (1928)

Orlando lives for several hundred years and, overnight, becomes a woman. Sure! Why not! Woolf was joining in the 1920s vogue for fantastic novels (see: my doctoral thesis) and also teasing, and honouring, Vita Sackville-West. It’s a tour de force though I have to confess I loved it most the first time I read it.

5. The Waves (1931)

Woolf’s most experimental novel is written mostly in ‘dialogue’, but the speech marks are really the inner thoughts of a group of friends, from childhood upwards. When I first read it as a teenager, I was astonished that anything could be so beautiful – while also not really knowing exactly what was going on. That hasn’t changed.

4. A Room of One’s Own (1929)

A foundational text of 20th-century feminism, A Room of One’s Own has that famous central ask – that a woman should have a room of her own to work in, and £500 a year – but it is so much more than that. It exposes the sexism inherent in literary history, academic institutions and more – and it’s also bitingly funny.

3. To The Lighthouse (1927)

The Ramsay family take centre stage, and are the closest thing that Woolf did to a portrait of her parents. The plot is incidental – WILL they get to the lighthouse? – and what makes this novel so special is her extraordinary, searing understanding of the ways people interact with and hurt one another. Lily the artist is her deepest fictional exploration of the creative process. And having said the plot is incidental, the novel has a twist moment that made me gasp out loud on the bus.

2. Jacob’s Room (1922)

Whenever someone asks me where to start with Virginia Woolf, I point them towards Jacob’s Room. It was her third novel and the turning point for finding her own distinctive style. Jacob is largely absent from this novel-length portrait of him – and, while not as experimental as the ‘big four’ novels, it’s a great introduction to how she plays with traditional novelistic forms and styles.

1. Mrs Dalloway (1925)

My first Woolf novel remains my favourite. I juggle around the top three at different times, but listening to Mrs Dalloway recently, read perfectly by Kristin Scott Thomas, has re-established it as my absolute fave Woolf. In the parallel stories of Mrs Dalloway hosting a party (and, yes, buying the flowers herself) and Septimus Warren Smith experiencing PTSD, Woolf never puts a foot wrong. I still felt a thrill of delight about the way she merges their stories, playing with perspective in ways that still feel fresh a hundred year later. It’s a joy. It’s a lark, it’s a plunge.

How would you rank our Ginny?