"Who lived at Alfoxton?"

This study turns the critical conversation about Virginia Woolf from its current feminist and postmodernist course. It "recanonizes" her by acknowledging her debt to English Romanticism, particularly Wordsworth, and by placing her in the cultural landscape of the early twentieth century as an experimenter whose subjects and forms were modeled on the rich legacy of the past.

Politically and aesthetically, she was in the mold of the early Western European democrats and not "a guerilla fighter in Victorian skirts." The author draws on the full range of Woolf's writing - her short stories, essays, novels, diaries, and letters - to examine her unique translation of the Romantic dyad of self and world.