In 1932, Ruth Gruber earned her PhD—the youngest person ever to do so—with a stunning doctoral dissertation on Virginia Woolf. Published in 1935, the paper was the first-ever feminist critique of Woolf’s work and inspired a series of correspondences between the two writers. It also led to Gruber’s eventual meeting with Woolf, which she recounted six decades later in Virginia Woolf: The Will to Create as a Woman.

 

Described by Gruber as “the odyssey of how I met Virginia Woolf, and how her life and work became intertwined with my life,” Virginia Woolf is a clear and insightful portrait of one of modern literature’s most innovative authors, written by one of America’s most remarkable journalists.