Virginia Woolf was a great writer. Her voice is distinctive; her style is her own; her work is an active influence on other writers and a subtle influence on what we have come to expect from modern literature. - More on Virginia Woolf's books

She was an experimenter who managed to combine the pleasure of narrative with those forceful interruptions that the mind needs to wake itself. Familiar things lull us. We do not notice what we already know. In art, newness and boldness is vital, not as a rebuke to the past but as a way of keeping the past alive. Virginia Woolf was keenly aware of what she had inherited but she knew that her inheritance must be put to work. Every generation needs its own living art, connected to what has gone before it , but not a copy of what has gone before it.

Virginia Woolf was not an imitator. She was an innovator who re-defined the novel and pointed the way towards its future possibilities.

When Vintage asked me to commission new introductions for Woolf's nine novels I wanted to say no. Woolf herself had written that any piece of work that needs an introduction or an explanation is like a table that needs a beer mat jammed under one leg to make it level. Before a bevy of American PhD students write in to tell me that it was a wedge of paper and not a beer mat, let me say that the problem is exactly so. Woolf's fiction has been overwhelmed by facts. Her diaries have given licence to a kind of perpetual commentary on every aspect of her being, who she knew, what she wore, how many times a week she washed her hair (I am not making this up), if a different Oxford Street would have meant a different Mrs Dalloway, whether or not she had sex with Vita Sackville West. Did she have sex with Leonard? Was she abused? And so on until a play on the facts warps into a documentary of factoids. Under the stress of this tabloid-style scholarship, her books disappear. Maud Ellmann, writing for the new edition of To the Lighthouse, reminds us that, " (the Ramsays), together with their guests, children, pets and household objects, can all be traced to Woolf's biography - and yet the mystery they accrue within her art can never be dispelled by reference to her life."

Art into autobiography is bad enough but Critical Theory is worse. If you are very smart, like Ellmann or Julia Kristeva, you can summon up a hypertext that floats over the original like an astral body - connected, clear, unobscuring. If you are not smart - and Theory seems to attract the mentally challenged - then all we hear is a kind of intestinal groaning, length after length of tortured sentences coiled round a fugitive idea.

No one can read this rubbish except perhaps other academics squatting over the same pail. They sign to each other but they make no sense to us. If this was rocket science it might be excusable but the special knowledge needed for art is of the communicable kind. Art is communication.

I felt that while Virginia Woolf's work needs nothing added, it does need some weight taken away. She has been hi-jacked by so many self-interest groups - feminists, theorists, modernists, historicists etc., that it is difficult to come to the work in its own right, on its own terms. Of course this is a problem for all important writers but Woolf suffers it to a degree of distortion unfelt, say, by Dickens or T.S. Eliot. Some writers seem to attract it more than others. Plath does, Angela Carter doesn't. I wondered if there was a way to open up the work for students and the general reader. A way past the gossip into the text.

A way through the maze of scholarship into the map of the book.

I decided to get away from the usual Introduction format. For each volume I have commissioned two short essays, one by a writer and the other by a well-known critic or academic. From the writer I wanted something very personal. Writers read differently to other people. For a writer, all literature is contemporary. If the language endures, the thought endures. Writers eavesdrop on each other across time. This is a two-way process, because what has been written is continually changed by what is being written. To put it better, as Auden did, 'The words of a dead man are modified in the guts of the living.'

More on Virginia Woolf's books

I chose writers I like to read and I asked them to write as much or as little as pleased them. I am not interested in the tyranny of length. One good sentence is better than a hundred pages of blather. Perhaps with this in mind I asked four poets: Eavan Boland, Carol Ann Duffy, Jackie Kay and Jo Shapcott. I wanted to be specific about matching titles to authors. I felt there should be a connection of some kind and also that the writer and the critic should be in sympathy. This has happened. The essays are sharp, imaginative and full of zest. Listen to Eavan Boland on To the Lighthouse -

"This is not a novel of Englishness; it is not a novel of history, it is not a document of society. I mistook a case study of these realities for a deeply subversive, increasingly heartbroken dialogue with them. But that dialogue still needs to be grasped at the angle it was created:slantwise, askew."

Slantwise. Askew. These are a poet's words, but as Carol Ann Duffy says in her piece on Mrs Dalloway, ' We carry poetry inside us, even if we do not read it or write it. Woolf is a writer who allows her readers to stand inside the lived moment.'

Intensity. Intimacy. Woolf wrote as a poet. In her introduction to The Waves, Gillian Beer talks about what it is that Woolf helps us to discover - "Something permeable, something intimate, something closer to our silent experience than fiction usually permits. And something that seeks through language to reach the habitual states of being where language hardly counts, as Bernard, the professor-writer among the characters at last perceives, 'Blue, red even - they distract, even they hide with thickness instead of letting the light through.' "

I wanted to let the light through. I wanted the introductions to rip down the curtains and throw open the doors so that the work could be entered freely and with pleasure.

I was very lucky to get Peter Ackroyd to write on Orlando - who better to write on the biography of transformation than the man who has transformed biography? And he delivered three weeks early, which cannot be said for Jackie Kay or Valentine Cunningham to whom I had to send Hand of Doom faxes in Bodoni MT 72 point Ultra Bold.

Never mind. What I got was a tornado of a piece from Jackie Kay for Between the Acts and the kind of unshowy deeply intelligent scholarship from Val Cunningham on Mrs Dalloway that reminds you of what learning could be like. All the critics in this series, whether Lisa Jardine, Frances Spalding or Steven Connor, know how to engage their readers. Nothing ponderous has been allowed, but then nobody ponderous was asked.

For Jacob's Room, Woolf's War novel, Lawrence Norfolk's lovely, very English meditation is set against the tougher, European sensibility of Elisabeth Bronfen, Professor of Comparative Literature at Zurich. Susan Hill on Woolf's last novel, The Years, and Erica Wagner on her first, The Voyage Out, offer new and pleasing readings of books, that in my view, belong as much in the body of Woolf's work as the rest.

Jo Shapcott calls Night and Day 'a love song about London'. Margaret Reynolds, co-editor on the series, jams into Orlando like an academic on XTC, opening her introduction with 'Are you making an appointment to be penetrated on Friday?' Well, it is a quotation.

I asked for celebration and play because these are qualities strongly present in Woolf's work. Art is celebration. Celebration of our humanity and imagination.

A celebration of continuing life. These essays are sometimes funny, sometimes moving, always vigorous, never boring. In her piece on Between the Acts, Lisa Jardine drew me to the quote I wanted to describe the introductions in relation to the books themselves:

'like leaping dolphins in the wake of an ice-breaking vessel.'