This scholarly book on Virginia Woolf’s experimental novels is an outstanding contribution to Virginia Woolf scholarship. The renewed academic venture re-examines the distinctive features of the experimental novels of the novelist gifted with a vision of life and (moment’s) reality that appears in its multifarious aspects never repeated even once in her successive novels. The strength of the book is that each part is clearly focused with precision, and the argument is highly insightful, thorough and sharp. In its treatment of a subject matter that has become baffling and difficult to the common readers to the extent of misunderstanding a novelist of such fine artistic vision and passionate experimental accomplishment, the book is as refreshing as it is exhaustive. It offers a wide coverage of background studies, starting from the social, historical and intellectual situations in a comprehensive manner so as to amply inform the reader of the tendencies of the early part of the twentieth century which inspired Virginia Woolf to be a new generation novelist breaking away from tradition, yet becoming a novelist par excellence reorienting a tradition to suit modern sensibility. With the dawn of the twenty-first century there has been an increasing interest in Virginia Woolf, especially her feminine sensibility and androgynous vision – all conflating with her sense of life itself. The book deals with the fictional techniques and the artistic vision of the novelist. It tends to solve many of the problems a Virginia Woolf reader usually encounters. The need of the academic back-up for Indian students, researchers and teachers, as far as the study of Virginia Woolf is concerned, will be satisfactorily taken care of by this book. Every chapter is so illustrative as to unfold the complexity of Virginia Woolf’s mind deeply committed to innovative techniques and a vision of life and its reality. For anyone interested in understanding the novels of Virginia Woolf this book will remain indispensable.
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