Reading Virginia Woolf's modernist masterpieces in light of her revisions of romantic intertexts, this book examines how she transforms sublime experience into a process of imaginative self-forming. Through readings of canonical texts such as A Room of One's Own to the often overlooked On Being Ill, Daniel T. O'Hara argues that these transformative moments displace the modern figure of individual male genius in favor of the democratic invention of female genius. Drawing on the work of theorists and scholars such as Harold Bloom, Perry Meisel, and Jane Goldman, this study places such ironic novels as Jacob's Room, Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and The Waves in the revisionary literary and critical tradition extending from the Elizabethans up to the contemporary moment.