Pagodas are dissolving in dust. Ferro-concrete is fallible. Colonies are perishing and dispersing in spray of inconceivable beauty and terror which some malignant power illuminates. Ash and violet are the colours of its decay. From every quarter human beings come flying … They fly with outstretched arms, and a vast sound of wailing rolls before them, but there is neither confusion nor dismay … Cracks like the white roots of trees spread themselves across the firmament. The Empire is perishing; the bands are playing; the Exhibition is in ruins. (p. 171)

In future, Woolf seems to be saying in this visionary essay, the globe will no longer be so easily conquered, tamed, exhibited, and exploited as it has been in the past.

Woolf’s prose in ‘Thunder at Wembley’ seems as far from the sober reflectivenss of the conventional essay as it is possible to get, while a piece like ‘Flying over London’ has a clear affinity with a short story like ‘An Unwritten Novel’, in that both end with a dramatic twist when what has been offered to us with authority turns out to be a tissue of fabrication.11 Yet even though it transpires that the detailed aerial perspectives and ‘air values’ (p. 210) of ‘Flying over London’ are all made up, plucked out of the blue by Woolf’s roller-coaster imagination, it is an utterly convincing ‘factual’ essay until she suddenly lets us fall back to earth with a bump.

Some of the most important essays in this collection are those in which Woolf writes about living and writing as a woman. In works such as Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) and George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871–2), Woolf argues in ‘Women and Fiction’ (a companion piece to A Room of One’s Own), there is a strident element—the voice ‘of someone resenting the treatment of her sex and pleading for its rights’—which linked the woman writer with other downtrodden and afflicted types of human being such as ‘a working man, a negro, or one who for some other reason is conscious of disability’ (p. 135), whereas nowadays:

The woman writer is no longer bitter. She is no longer angry. She is no longer pleading and protesting as she writes. We are approaching, if we have not yet reached, the time when her writing will have little or no foreign influence to disturb it. She will be able to concentrate upon her vision without distraction from outside. The aloofness that was once within the reach of genius and originality is only now coming within the reach of ordinary women. Therefore the average novel by a woman is far more genuine and far more interesting today than it was a hundred or even fifty years ago. (pp. 135–6)

This now sounds as premature as it was ecstatic, and not long after writing it, in ‘Professions for Women’ (1931), Woolf took a decidedly less euphoric view of the woman writer’s situation, arguing that she still had many obstacles to contend with. ‘Professions for Women’ is a kind of sequel to A Room of One’s Own and in it Woolf writes of her need, every woman’s need, to slay ‘The Angel in the House’: ‘it will be a long time still, I think, before a woman can sit down to write a book without finding a phantom to be slain, a rock to be dashed against’ (p. 144). Another barrier to free expression for the woman writer was the burden of having to frame her thoughts in a language and style developed by men for the use of men. As Woolf argues in ‘Women and Fiction’, the conventional sentence is ‘too loose, too heavy, too pompous for a woman’s use’:

in a novel, which covers so wide a stretch of ground, an ordinary and usual type of sentence has to be found to carry the reader on easily and naturally from one end of the book to the other. And this a woman must make for herself, altering and adapting the current sentence until she writes one that takes the natural shape of her thought without crushing or distorting it. (p. 136)

These comments of 1929 are closely linked to those she makes about language and style in ‘“Impassioned Prose”’ and ‘Poetry, Fiction and the Future’, published in 1926 and 1927 respectively, and these, too, form part of the great creative surge which concluded with The Waves.

‘As the conditions change so the essayist, most sensitive of all plants to public opinion, adapts himself’ (p. 17), Woolf writes in ‘The Modern Essay’, and her essays from the late 1930s and the early years of the Second World War—here represented by ‘Why Art Today Follows Politics’ (1936) and ‘Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid’ (1940)—show how Woolf responded first to the looming threat of fascism and then to the awful reality of total war. Cultural enlightenment and the feminist movement might have been slowly making a kind of Flaubertian ‘aloofness’ a possibility for the woman novelist, but the threat posed by Nazi Germany made any notion of detachment unconscionable. The writer had to become committed and this partly explains why Woolf’s last two novels, The Years and Between the Acts (1941), are more polemical than any of those that preceded them.

Woolf wrote a good many essays and what is sure to become the standard edition of them, begun by Andrew McNeillie and soon to be completed by Stuart N. Clarke, will comprise no fewer that six meaty volumes.