To modern readers, many 1930s writers might as well be using Shakespearian English, such is the grace and complexity of their language. Is this why Elizabeth Jenkins has disappeared from bookshops?

Eight years ago, in their excellent Spanish Golden Age season, the RSC presented the English premiere of House of Desires, a surprising event on several levels.

Adapting Virginia Woolf's fantastical novel, which follows the title character through four centuries and a sex change, is no mean feat.

Wharton's late works hit the motherload

Most writers are poor. Virginia Woolf, high priestess of modernism, had to earn her living like anybody else. These days, her kind of fiction, richly figurative, with her characters' narratives floating dreamily between inner and outer life, is not fashionable. During her lifetime, and until only recently, Woolf was hailed as a genius. Despite her success, however, she still had to make sure she could pay the bills. Her expenses, unlike ours perhaps, included paying for live-in domestic help (a difficult situation for both mistress and maid, brilliantly analysed by Alison Light in Mrs Woolf and the Servants).

Edward Albee's 1966 country house comedy is a still startling mix of bizarre story-telling, sozzled sarcasm, unnamed terror and ruminations on friendship and alcohol.

London's burning: the view from Ground Zero

Lovers of TV's Mad Men will feel very much at home amid the styling and fashions of this excellent Northern Stage and Sheffield Theatres co-production of Edward Albee's early 1960s American-dream-about-to-turn-sour classic.

Virginia Woolf walked London's parks for inspiration, and to find solace from her dark moods. Seventy years after her great-aunt's death, Emma Woolf argues that you can still find her restless spirit there.

Funny, fast-moving and astounding, this biography goes way beyond what would be considered feasible in fiction.

In one sense, this novel is the story of Paul Bailey's elderly protagonist Harry Chapman – former actor, writer, sometime lecturer – and his (only somewhat Homeric) journey out of this life after he finds himself in hospital with acute stomach pains. Those familiar with Bailey's literary game-playing, however – in novels such as the Booker Prize-shortlisted Peter Smart's Confessions and Gabriel's Lament – will recognise the allusiveness in the title. It invokes not only the celebrated Jacobean translation of Homer's epic by George Chapman (already featured in Bailey's Sugar Cane), but also John Keats's poetic panegyric on the elevating effects of great literature, "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer".

Want to change the world? Go back to the futurists

The first thing to strike anyone who browses through this monster compendium will be the emollience of its tone. Did Ronald Blythe ever review a book he didn't like, or come across a fellow-author that he didn't in some way esteem? From Virginia Woolf to Graham Swift and Denton Welch to Stevie Smith, it all seems the same to Blythe (slight coldness towards Golding's Darkness Visible notwithstanding). Even a certain Dr Caunce, who decries the lack of method in his masterpiece of rural life Akenfield, is let off with a caution. "I had never heard the term 'oral historian' when I wrote it in the mid-sixties, nor have I ever called myself an oral historian" Blythe gently chides.