MUSIC played a vital role in the work of Virginia Woolf, according to new research carried out by a Scots academic.

In a new book, the ­significance of music in the life of the famous writer, whose works include Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927) and Orlando (1928), has been outlined for the first time.

Among the discoveries made by author Dr Emma Sutton, of St Andrews University, was Woolf's membership of the National Gramophonic Society, founded in 1923 by Compton Mackenzie, which recorded avante-garde music.

Ms Sutton said: "In 1940, Virginia Woolf famously observed that 'I always think of my books as music before I write them', but until now no one has fully demonstrated the depths of her passion and knowledge on the subject."

The newly released text, Virginia Woolf and Classical Music: Politics, Aesthetics, Form, is claimed to be the first to show the importance of music to the writer's literary techniques and politics.

In the book, Ms Sutton demonstrates Woolf's "commanding knowledge" of a vast repertoire of music, acquired through almost daily attendance at operas and concerts as a young woman and through daily listening to recorded music as an adult.

Ms Sutton said: "Woolf's feminism and pacifism, her socialism and philo-Semitism, were all shaped by, and intersected with, her passionate love of music."

The academic said her discoveries have opened up new ways of thinking about Woolf's work.