If one is to deal with people on a large scale and say what one thinks, how can one avoid melancholy? I don’t admit to being hopeless, though: only the spectacle is a profoundly strange one; and as the current answers don’t do, one has to grope for a new one, and the process of discarding the old, when one is by no means certain what to put in their place, is a sad one.

". Her most famous works include the novels Mrs Dalloway (1925) To the Lighthouse (1927) and Orlando (1928) and the book-length essay A Room of One's Own (1929) with its famous dictum "A woman must have money and a room of her own if Virginia Woolf is to write fiction. During the interwar period Woolf was a significant figure in London literary society and a central figure in the influential Bloomsbury Group of intellectuals.