From the publication of her first novel in 1915, Virginia Woolf's writing received serious critical attention from reviewers and essayists. By August 1932 Woolf was complaining about ‘personal appearances’ and that ‘my publicity is already too much for me’. Disturbed by the prospect of full-length books about her appearing, she explains:

Today's reader of Woolf is threatened with considerably more secondary reading. Not all of the hundreds of books on Woolf that have followed in floods from this first trickle of three have talked of her ‘husband, mother, father, and dog’, but Woolf criticism has not altogether ignored her biographical circumstances either. As Chapter Two has discussed, biographies of Woolf do shape the critical grounds on which she is discussed. Woolf's many autobiographical writings, mostly now in print, have been enthusiastically put to work by Woolf criticism. Her letters, diaries, journals and memoirs not only provide information about her private and public life, through which some critics seek to filter her fiction, but also reveal a wealth of material about her compositional practices and writing processes.