Throughout history, some books have changed the world. They have transformed the way we see ourselves and each other. They have inspired debate, dissent, war and revolution. They have enlightened, outraged, provoked and comforted. They have enriched lives and destroyed them. Now Penguin brings you the works of the great thinkers, pioneers, radicals and visionaries whose ideas shook civilization, and helped make us who we are.

As the Pargiters, a middle-class English family, move from the oppressive confines of the Victorian home of the 1880s to the 'present day' of the 1930s, they are weighed down by the pressures of war, the social strictures of patriarchy, capitalism and Empire, and the rise of Fascism. Engaging with a painful struggle between utopian hopefulness and crippled with despair, the novel is a savage indictment of Virginia Woolf's society, but its bitter sadness is relieved by the longing for some better way of life, where 'freedom and justice' might really be possible. This is Virginia Woolf's longest novel, and the one she found the most difficult to write. The most popular of all her writings during her lifetime, it can now be re-read as the most challengingly political, even revolutionary, of all her books.

I shall never forget the day I wrote The Mark on the Wall — all in a flash, as if flying, after being kept stone breaking for months. The Unwritten Novel was the great discovery, however. That — again in one second — showed me how I could embody all my deposit of experience in a shape that fitted it... I saw, branching out of the tunnel I made, when I discovered that method of approach, Jacob's Room, Mrs Dalloway etc — How I trembled with excitement. The thrill Woolf got from these stories is readily apparent to the reader. She wrote them in defiance of convention, with a heady feeling of liberation and with a clear sense that she was breaking new ground. Indeed, if she had not made her bold and experimental forays into the short story in the period leading up to the publication of Jacob's Room (1922), it seems certain that her arrival as a great modernist novelist would have been delayed. Quirky, unrestrained, disturbing and surprising, many of these stories, particularly the early ones, are essential to an understanding of Woolf's development as a writer. She thought some of her short fiction might be 'unprintable' but, happily, she was mistaken.

Virginia Woolf's singular technique in Mrs Dalloway heralds a break with the traditional novel form and reflects a genuine humanity and a concern with the experiences that both enrich and stultify existence. Society hostess, Clarissa Dalloway is giving a party. Her thoughts and sensations on that one day, and the interior monologues of others whose lives are interwoven with hers gradually reveal the characters of the central protagonists. Clarissa's life is touched by tragedy as the events in her day run parallel to those of Septimus Warren Smith, whose madness escalates as his life draws toward inevitable suicide.