Excerpt from Granite and Rainbow Essays Virginia Woolf published during her life two volumes of collected essays: The Common Reader, First and Second Series. After her death I took steps to gather together her essays which had not been included in those volumes. There were a considerable number of them; most of them had been published in journals, but a few had never been published. They proved sufficient to fill three posthumous volumes: The Death of the Moth, 1942; The Moment, 1947, and The Captain's Death Bed, 1950. I included in those volumes only those essays which seemed to me of the same order of excellence as those which she herself had chosen to reprint in The Common Reader. When I published The Captain's Death Bed, I thought that I had been able to identify all the essays which had appeared in journals and I wrote in the editorial note to that volume that it would be the last book of collected essays, since I had now included in the posthumous volumes all her essays, with a few unimportant exceptions. I was mistaken about this, for those who had searched the records, including myself, had overlooked a considerable number of essays of the same kind and of the same merit as those published in the five volumes. There were several reasons for this. Virginia Woolf only spasmodically kept copies of essays and reviews written by her for journals and there was often no record of their publication among her papers. This accounted for the fact that the existence of the long essay, Phases of Fiction, published in The Bookman in 1929, was forgotten. Another difficulty was that so many of her essays appeared anonymously in papers like the Times Literary Supplement, and a further complication, not noticed by the searchers, was that in some cases they had been written under her maiden name, Virginia Stephen. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.