Virginia Woolf’s feminist treatise on women and writing appeared in 1929 and would later influence the development of feminist literary criticism during the Second Wave of the Women’s Movement in the 1960s and 70s. In this course we will return to Woolf’s text and consider it in relation to the historical situation of women in Britain in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, paying attention to such issues as the struggle for women’s suffrage, the impact of the First World War, and the breakdown of the British Empire. We will begin the course with a classic Victorian novel: Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Bronte and then read short stories by Woolf’s contemporary, Katherine Mansfield, before delving into the complexities of Woolf’s powerful, experimental modernist novel: To the Lighthouse. We then will take up Woolf’s predictions about what kind of fiction women will write in the future and read a post-modernist novel, Wide Sargasso Sea, by Jean Rhys, and two novels that were published at the beginning of the twenty-first century: Brick Lane, by Monica Ali, and On Beauty, by Zadie Smith.