In the early 1930s, Virginia Woolf was writing The Years, as well as Flush, the second volume of The Common Reader, and her only play, Freshwater, while leading an active social and business life in Bloomsbury, and accompanying Leonard on holidays abroad. She made an important new friend in Elizabeth Bowen, and lost two, Lytton Strachey and Roger Fry, whose deaths affected her deeply. Her growing feminism and concern about the rise of fascism emerge in letters to Vanessa Bell, Ethel Smyth, Vita Sackville-West, and some of the other 70-plus correspondents in this volume, such as Stephen Spender, Ottoline Morrell, Hugh Walpole, and her nephews Julian and Quentin Bell, to whom she wrote many of her merriest letters.