In The Value of Virginia Woolf, Madelyn Detloff explores the writings of Virginia Woolf from her early texts to her challenging and inventive novels. Detloff demonstrates why Woolf has enduring value for our own time, both as a defender of modernist experimentation and as a novelist of innovation and poetic vision who also exhibits moments of intense insight and philosophical depth. A famously enigmatic figure, Woolf's literary works offer different rewards to different readers. The Value of Virginia Woolf examines not only the significance of her most celebrated fiction but the function of time and allegory, natural and urban spaces, voice and language that give Woolf's writings their perennial appeal.

Madelyn Detloff is Associate Professor of English and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Miami University. She is the author of The Persistence of Modernism: Loss and Mourning in the Twentieth Century and has published widely in such journals as Hypatia, Women's Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, ELN, Literature Compass, the MLA Approaches to Teaching series, MMLA, and Modernism/modernity.

1. Eudemonia: the necessary art of living; 2. Incandescence: attention and illumination; 3. Interdependence: pattern and precarity; Epilogue: Woolf's legacy.