90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books

‘Waking, I cry “Oh, is this your – buried treasure? The light in the heart.”’

In these exquisite stories from the genius of English modernism, everyday objects acquire profound significance: a lump of buried green glass leads to a lifetime of obsession; a mark on the wall prompts a questioning of reality itself; a pale-yellow silk dress provokes a painful self-reckoning. Beautiful, strange and pioneering, each piece is a small precious stone to be held to the light and savoured.

Virginia Woolf, born in 1882, was the major novelist at the heart of the inter-war Bloomsbury Group. Her early novels include The Voyage Out, Night and Day and Jacob's Room. Between 1925 and 1931 she produced her finest masterpieces, including Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando and the experimental The Waves. Her later novels include The Years and Between the Acts, and she also maintained an astonishing output of literary criticism, journalism and biography, including the passionate feminist essay A Room of One's Own. Suffering from depression, she drowned herself in the River Ouse in 1941.