Lippman, a Pulitzer Prize winning political columnist, helped found the liberal New Republic magazine. His writings there influenced Woodrow Wilson, who selected Lippman to help formulate his famous Fourteen Points and develop the concept of the League of Nations. A Preface to Morals endorses liberal democracy. Partial Contents: Part I The Dissolution of the Ancestral Order; Part II The Foundations of Humanism; and Part III The Genius of Modernity.

    The story was inspired by a visit Woolf made to Ethel Sands in Normandy. She noted in her diary for 20 September 1927: How many little stories come into my head! For instance, Ethel Sands not looking at her letters. What this implies. One might write a book of short significant separate scenes. She did not open her letters.