Virginia Woolf has emerged from recent scholarship as a less inward-looking and other-worldly writer than she was depicted for more than half a century. However, this is the first book to address the cryptographic nature of her writings about politics and history. Approaching each of her novels in turn through theoretical frameworks provided by Michel Foucault, Mikhail Bakhtin and contemporary social theorists, Linden Peach argues that Woolf is a more sophisticated political thinker than has been commonly recognised, interested in historiography, engaged by the coded nature of social 'reality' and interrogating the cryptic meanings within public discourse.