A preliminary rhetorical discussion of Virginia Woolf's essay canon with an annotated bibliography of her essays

This dissertation provides an annotated list and brief rhetorical consideration of all the non-fiction essays of Virginia Woolf that are currently available in published form. This dissertation extends the work of Andrew McNeillie who has published three of a projected six volumes of Woolf's complete (and chronologically arranged) essays which, when finished, will supersede Leonard Woolf's Collected Essays of Virginia Woolf (4 vols.).

The essays annotated in this work have been taken from McNeillie's three volumes; the four volumes of the Collected Essays and the volumes included in them; the longer works Three Guineas and A Room of One's Own; three collections of previously unpublished essays discovered by researchers other than McNeillie; and several published collections of Woolf's work edited by others.

Chapter 1 brings together a discussion of Woolf as an essayist with the problems of definition for the genre as a whole. Chapter 2 discusses the genre of the essay and seeks to define and describe non-fiction essays. Chapter 3 discusses Woolf's essay canon, briefly reviews the critical work to date, and considers a classification system for her essays; one each of four of the types are treated to a rhetorical analysis. Chapter 4 contains the annotated listing of the essays which provides publication and bibliographic data for each essay as well as a brief note on the contents. Essays of like name are traced and some themes are traced across the canon. Chapter 5 concludes with suggestions for further study of Woolf's essays and of all her works in light of a completed canon.