The Common Reader: Volume 1
  • Published: 26 February 2015
  • ISBN: 9781448182145
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 288

The Common Reader: Volume 1

Formats & editions
EBook
26 Feb 2015
Paperback
15 Feb 2003
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Virginia Woolf's first collection of essays demonstrates her eccentric, entertaining brilliance as a literary critic

Discover Virginia Woolf’s informative and erudite critical essays on some of the key novelists and dramatists of the canon – from the ancient Greeks to Jane Austen and beyond.

Virginia Woolf read, and wrote, as an outsider, denied the educational privileges of her male contemporaries. She was perhaps better able, then, to address a 'common reader' in this wide-ranging collection of essays. With all the imagination and gaiety that are the stamp of her genius, she turns from medieval England to tsarist Russia, and subjects Elizabethan playwrights, Victorian novelists and modern essayists to her wise, acute and entertaining scrutiny.

Essays on Jane Austen, George Eliot, Nancy Mitford, Joseph Conrad, Michel de Montaigne, Daniel Defoe and many others.
  • Published: 26 February 2015
  • ISBN: 9781448182145
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 288
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About the author

Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) was born in London. She became a central figure in The Bloomsbury Group, an informal collective of British writers, artists and thinkers. In 1912 Virginia married Leonard Woolf, a writer and social reformer. She wrote many works of literature which are now considered masterpieces, including Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando, and The Waves.

Also by Virginia Woolf

A Room of One's Own: Popular Penguins
The Waves (Vintage Classics Woolf Series)
Mrs Dalloway
Orlando (Vintage Classics Woolf Series)
To The Lighthouse (Vintage Classics Woolf Series)
A Room of One's Own and Three Guineas (Vintage Classics Woolf Series)
To the Lighthouse: Popular Penguins
See all

Praise for The Common Reader: Volume 1

Her essays are delightful in the way that serious play is delightful. She is enjoying herself, and reading her gives me that leaping sense of being in excellent company

Jeanette Winterson, The Times

More like novels than ordinary criticism

New Statesman

Woolf was easily the greatest literary journalist of her age

James Wood,, Guardian

It is all pure Woolf, so distinctive is her voice - ironic, cool, conversational and playful, shrewd and fantastical by turns

Literary Review
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