This is a great way to read Virginia Woolf. My only complaints are that it is heavy to lift and hold and it has no analysis. However, at the low price you get most of her major novels plus two non-fiction essays in one fat book. So overall it is excellent value for the price.
I read the Voyage Out before buying the present book. That is Woolf's first novel. Then I read this collection. I skipped her second novel - which is considered to be a flop - and which is not here in the collected works. The present collection starts with her third novel. The Voyage Out was Woolf's first major work. It took years to write, and she took few chances. Her brother's company was the publisher. It has been mostly forgotten with the passage of time. From this point going forward she would spend less time on each novel and would publish through her own company, the Bloomsbury Publishing Company.
The Voyage Out is simple and straightforward work. It is over 400 pages long. After her second novel she decided to be more risky and creative, and we see that change in the works here in the collection starting with "Jacob's Room" and "To The Lighthouse," and virtually in all of her other novels that followed. Woolf is equally famous for her non-fiction polemics on the state of women in literature and two are included here.
What is interesting in the current collection is that we see the transformation in her style and her approach starting with Jacob's Room. Woolf uses the stream of consciousness technique to effectively portray the chaos and shortness of Jacob's life. Jacob becomes a soldier in WW I. One starts off with certain questions about Woolf's technique as one reads and wonders where the story is going. But at some point in the novel, the process is revealed to the reader, i.e.: from the pandemonium of Jacob's life as portrayed by Woolf through the use of the stream of consciousness technique, we eventually have clarity.
The collection contains a number of other important works including Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando, The Waves, and Between the Acts. Also, it contains A Room of One's Own and Three Guineas, which are non-fiction polemics or essays. It lacks the photographs found in some copies of Three Guineas.
In addition to the present book I bought A Room of One's Own, Three Guineas ISBN-10: 0141184604 and ISBN-13: 978-0141184609 (same book) because of the excellent introduction to Virginia Woolf.