Tres guineas

Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) published Tres guineas (Three Guineas) in 1938 through the Hogarth Press, which she and her husband Leonard had founded in 1917. Inspired by the Enlightenment humanist ideals of liberty, equality, fraternity and happiness that fueled the democratic revolutions, the essay, in epistolary form, is a defence of the author’s pacifist, feminist and humanist ideals which sought to reconcile individual and collective freedom. Released during the turbulent years of the Spanish Civil War, and against the broader backdrop of the rise of totalitarianism and imperialist expansion preceding World War II, Tres guineas, a jewel of the epistolary genre, is an essential title in any collection of classics of thought, in view of the insights it offers into creativity, art, science, language, literature, poetry, the aesthetics of body and mind, sex, gender, higher education, the battle of the sexes, feminism, anti-fascism, pacifism and humanism. For, above anything else, it is a sublime ode to human dialogue, love and peace.

Clásicos do Pensamento Universal is the product of a collaboration between the BBVA Foundation and the University of Santiago de Compostela. Created in 2002, this collection has the aim of publishing and disseminating great works of scientific, humanistic and social thought translated into Galician. Under the direction of Darío Villanueva, a selection has been made of titles that stand as an unquestioned landmark in mankind’s intellectual history, translated from the original language. Plato, Aristotle, Seneca, Machiavelli, Erasmus, More, Newton, Lavoisier, Beccaria, Darwin, Bernard, Von Neumann, Popper, McLuhan, and other illustrious authors can now be read in Galician, in rigorous critical editions, with each volume introduced by a specialist in the subject matter.