Virginia Woolf is 47 at the beginning of this volume, and struggling to complete her masterpiece, The Waves - rewriting it three times, interrupted by illness and unwanted visitors. But she continued to meet and correspond with old friends such as Roger Fry, Lytton Strachey, Vita Sackville-West and Ottoline Morrell, and made several new ones. The most important of these was the composer Ethel Smyth - over 70, explosively energetic, and openly in love with Virginia - who gradually replaced Vita as her most intimate friend. Virginia's letters to Ethel, in which she discussed frankly her madness, sex, her literary aspirations and even her thoughts of suicide, are among the strongest and most personal she ever wrote.