The Life of Violet: Three Early Stories

Virginia Woolfs first fully realized work of fictionpublished in its final, revised form for the first time

A beguiling trio of fantastical and farcical anti-fairy tales about a giantess who builds a magical cottage of ones own, battles a silver-scaled sea monster, and defies governesses and gravity alike

In 1907, eight years before she published her first novel, a twenty-five-year-old Virginia Woolf drafted three interconnected comic stories chronicling the adventures of a giantess named Violeta teasing tribute to Woolfs friend Mary Violet Dickinson. But it was only in 2022 that Woolf scholar Urmila Seshagiri discovered a final, revised typescript of the stories. The typescript revealed that Woolf had finished this mock-biography, making it her first fully realized literary experiment and a work that anticipates her later masterpieces. Published here for the first time in its final form, The Life of Violet blends fantasy, fairy tale, and satire as it transports readers into a magical world where the heroine triumphs over sea-monsters as well as stifling social traditions.

In these irresistible and riotously plotted stories, Violet, who has powers as marvelous as her height, gleefully flouts aristocratic proprieties, finds joy in building a cottage of ones own, and travels to Japan to help create a radical new social order. Amid flights of fancy such as a snowfall of sugared almonds and bathtubs made of painted ostrich eggs, The Life of Violet upends the marriage plot, rejects the Victorian belief that women must choose between virtue and ambition, and celebrates womens friendships and laughter.

A major literary discovery that heralds Woolfs ambitions to revolutionize fiction and sheds new light on her great themes, The Life of Violet is first and foremost a delight to read.

This volume features a preface, afterword, notes, and photographs that provide rich historical, literary, and biographical context.