Featuring new details about Virginia Woolf's homes and personal life, this engaging biography offers a fresh insight into her work, focusing on how place as much as imagination fashioned her writing. Drawing on her letters, journals, diaries, autobiographical essays and fiction, it reveals Woolf's response to her surroundings, from the enclosed space of Hyde Park Gate to the open and free-spirited Bloomsbury. Throughout, Ira Nadel gives consideration to her technique as a novelist, the skills she learned from reading others' work and her concern with history, narrative, art and friendship. Virginia Woolf shows how the context of her life shaped her imaginative goals.