Thoughts on the World During an Air Raid

Included in the collection of essays by the famous English writer Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) are small analytical texts written in the same rich artistic language as her major prose. Some works were conceived as brutal social polemics, while others resemble literary sketches, samples of modernist novels, or psychological studies. In each essay of this collection, Woolf reveals herself as a sensitive registrar of modernity, creating texts-moments, elusive sketches, pictures, and intuitions of the new era. The titular work "Thoughts on the World During an Air Raid" was written in August 1940 for an American symposium on contemporary women's issues. In it, Woolf reflects on how the patriarchal desire to dominate and enslave leads to wars and dictatorships.