A fascinating archival reconstruction of Woolf's draft manuscript of a totally new book format, the Novel-Essay. In this experiment, inspired by a speech Woolf gave to a group of women professionals in 1931, essays discussing the impact of social norms on the lives of women in England are illustrated by fictional chapters about a middle-class London family in 1880. Abandoned after six chapters, Woolf eventually transformed the novel sections of this work into the 1880 chapter of The Years, and her ideas from the essays section were rolled into Three Guineas. The book also includes the 1931 speech that gave Woolf the idea for this work as well as extensive footnotes. The author uses a system of italics and brackets to show where Woolf inserted and deleted sections as she revised the text in her notebooks. This takes a little getting used to, but is quite interesting if you are a Virginia Woolf super-fan. I don't know know that this book would be that fun to read if you hadn't already read The Years, but if you have, it adds a valuable lens into Woolf's intentions. ( )