Beyond Mrs Dalloway: 5 Most Underappreciated Works of Virginia Woolf Worth Reading

Born in London in 1882 to a literary and artistically gifted family, Virginia Woolf grew into one of the most influential modernist writers of the 20th century. Her life was marked by periods of profound creativity as well as bouts of psychological struggles. Navigating both, Woolf carved a space for herself in the literary world. She pioneered experimental forms, introspective narratives, and techniques such as stream of consciousness to articulate the depths of her inner experience.

Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway remains one of the most frequently studied and celebrated works. It often serves as a gateway into her complex body of literature. However, beneath the celebrated surfaces lie some quieter yet some of her most stirring works that often remain underappreciated. The ones that are tucked between early experiments, curious biographies, and posthumous masterpieces. If you’ve read her big titles and are ready to explore beyond them, these underappreciated Virginia Woolf books are waiting to be discovered.

1. Jacob's Room

“Indeed there has never been any explanation of the ebb and flow in our veins–of happiness and unhappiness.”

― Jacob's Room

Jacob’s Room represents Woolf’s early experimentation with stream of consciousness and narrative fragmentation. The novel tells the story of Jacob Flanders not through a conventional, linear plot, but through a mosaic of impressions and memories offered by those who knew him. The novel’s shifting perspectives and Virginia Woolf’s writing style create a haunting meditation on absence, the ravages of war, and the transient nature of human connection.

2. Monday or Tuesday

“Once she knows how to read there's only one thing you can teach her to believe in and that is herself.”

― Monday or Tuesday

Monday or Tuesday is one of the first books produced by Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press. This short story collection features eight stories that appeared during Woolf’s lifetime. It captures fleeting moments and realistic psychological details, allowing readers to enter the minds of her characters. Through her experimental narrative style, these short stories take readers into the flow of human consciousness, exploring themes of perception, memory, and identity.

3. Between the Acts

“Do you think people change? I meant ourselves — do we change?”

― Between the Acts

Woolf’s last novel, Between the Acts, was published posthumously by her husband Leonard in July 1941, shortly after her death and at the devastating dawn of World War II. Though she completed the manuscript, Woolf considered it “too silly and trivial” in its current form and intended to revise it before publication.

This novel remains one of her least-known yet most striking works. Set in a small English village on the looming threat of World War II, it unfolds during the day of an annual pageant held at Pointz Hall, the home of the Oliver family. The pageant represents scenes from English history and literature. Woolf explores those "between the acts" moments from the pageant, serving as both a celebration and a critique of England's cultural legacy.

4. The Diary of Virginia Woolf

“They are very large in effect, these painters; very little self-conscious; they have smooth broad spaces in their minds where I am all prickles & promontories.”

― The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Volume One: 1915-1919

Stripped to her bare self, The Diary of Virginia Woolf is a record of Woolf unfiltered. This five-volume collection reveals her inner world like never before. She used her diaries to think out loud about mental struggles, writing processes, feminism, daily life, and her time with the Bloomsbury Group. Her entries range from painfully self-critical to sharply witty—sometimes even cruel.

5. Flush: A Biography

“It seemed as if nothing were to break that tie—as if the years were merely to compact and cement it; and as if those years were to be all the years of their natural lives.”

— Flush

An unusual and lighthearted work on the surface, Flush is a fictionalised biography of an English Cocker Spaniel belonging to an eminent Victorian poet, Elizabeth Barrett. However, it goes beyond that. Woolf’s lighthearted yet humorous tone plays with the critical exploration of social hierarchy, gender, literary fame, and other constructs of Victorian England, all seen through the eyes of a dog.

Virginia Woolf is far more than the labels often assigned to her as a modernist or influential 20th-century writer. While her popular works rightly earn their place in the literary canon, it is in her lesser-known, underappreciated pieces that we encounter Woolf most intimately. It reveals her identity not just as a writer, but as a thinker, a feeler, and a woman with an entire world unfolding within her mind. These works reveal the quiet brilliance, vulnerability, and insight that defined her voice, offering us not just literature but fragments of a deeply human soul.