An example of a high comedy of Forsterian dyes, the work has considerable interest as a portrait of the time when Virginia and Leonard were courted, and the members of the celebrated Bloomsbury Circle were at their best. In any case, this novel constitutes, first of all, a brazen satire of the puritanical and convulsive English society in the first decades of century XX.
The wise virgins, which Leonard Woolf began to write just a month after his wedding with the writer Virginia Woolf, is a Roman acid clef that would cause, after its publication in 1914, a real earthquake in the artistic circles of London. Leonard Woolf's sister, Bella, begged him to bury the novel, and his mother was traumatized by the portrait of her in her family. In fact, two weeks after Virginia Woolf read it for the first time, she suffered one of the most severe nerve attacks in her life.
