This book explores the relationship between aesthetic productivity and artists' degree of involvement in social and sexual life as depicted in Virginia Woolf's novels. Ann Ronchetti locates the sources of Woolf's lifelong preoccupation with the artist's relationship to society in her family heritage, her exposure to Walter Pater and the aesthetic movement, and the philosophical and aesthetic interests of the Bloomsbury group.

Ann Ronchetti received her Ph.D. in English from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is a bibliographer for English, French, and Italian languages and literatures and the performing arts at the University of Pittsburgh's Hillman Library.