Kew Gardens - Tapa dura

In 1927, at the Hogarth Press, Virginia Woolf produced and published a limited edition, with a jacket design and decorative illustrations by her sister Vanesa Bell, of what was to become one of her best-loved stories. Seventy-two years later The Hogarth Press at Chatto & Windus is proud to publish a beautiful facsimile edition of that much sought-after edition of Kew Gardens. The lush and haunting story circles round Kew Gardens, one hot day in July, as various odd and interesting couples walk by and talk, exchanging words but letting thoughts and memories float languorously above the gloosy leaves and exotic flowers, while at their feet a determined snail makes its slow way across a mountainous flowerbed. Gorgeously produced, a precise replica of that 1927 special edition, with Vanessa Bell's jacket and drawings round each page of text, this is a rare treat for aficionados of Bloomsbury and for those who love beautiful books.

Virginia Woolf was born in London in 1882, the daughter of Sir Leslie Stephen, first editor of The Dictionary of National Biography. After his death in 1904 Virginia and her sister, the painter Vanessa Bell, moved to Bloomsbury and became the centre of ‘The Bloomsbury Group’. This informal collective of artists and writers which included Lytton Strachey and Roger Fry, exerted a powerful influence over early twentieth-century British culture.

In 1912 Virginia married Leonard Woolf, a writer and social reformer. Three years later, her first novel The Voyage Out was published, followed by Night and Day (1919) and Jacob's Room (1922). These first novels show the development of Virginia Woolf's distinctive and innovative narrative style. It was during this time that she and Leonard Woolf founded The Hogarth Press with the publication of the co-authored Two Stories in 1917, hand-printed in the dining room of their house in Surrey. Between 1925 and 1931 Virginia Woolf produced what are now regarded as her finest masterpieces, from Mrs Dalloway (1925) to the poetic and highly experimental novel The Waves (1931). She also maintained an astonishing output of literary criticism, short fiction, journalism and biography, including the playfully subversive Orlando (1928) and A Room of One's Own (1929) a passionate feminist essay. This intense creative productivity was often matched by periods of mental illness, from which she had suffered since her mother's death in 1895. On 28 March 1941, a few months before the publication of her final novel, Between the Acts, Virginia Woolf committed suicide.