“Hesperus Press has raided Woolf’s volumes of critical writing and rescued four lesser-known literary essays, grouping them under the title On Fiction. Each essay brims with insight and interpretation that is conveyed stylishly and authoritatively. Here is a writer expounding on the secrets of her craft. In one essay, “Women and Fiction”, she classifies criticism as one of the few “sophisticated arts”, something seldom practised by women, at least in 1929. She foresees more women tackling and mastering it, albeit in a “golden” future when they will no longer have to protest to be heard, being enfranchised, financially and socially independent and with “a room to themselves” – a reference to her most celebrated critical work, “A Room of One’s Own”, published one year earlier. The essays are bound by ideas that are perceptive and prophetic. She scrutinizes the worth of literature past and present but goes the extra mile to consider if it, and its practitioners, can improve and increase in value in the future.”