The essays in this collection are, of course, not merely concerned with the self. Woolf does also discuss the rights of women, the revolutions of modernity, the past, present and future of the novel. She is eloquent on social inequality and the agony of war. She is a robust literary antiquarian, she rakes through the past in search of treasure. She is transfixed, as well, by the aesthetic contests of the present, the dynamic incompleteness of her era. She fights with local demons, she mocks those who mock her, and generally prevails.