Product Description

What she produced is an eccentric and unofficial literary and social history from the fourteenth to the twentieth century, with an excursion to ancient Greece thrown in. she investigates medieval England, tsarist Russia, Elizabethan playwrights, Vicotiran novelists and modern essayists. When she published this book Woolf's fame as a novelist was already established: now she was hailed as a brilliant interpretative critic. Here, she addresses her 'common reader' in the remarkable prose and with all the imagination and gaiety that are the stamp of her genius.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #223053 in Books
• Published on: 2003-01-02
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

From the Publisher
This is Virginia Woolf’s first collection of essays, published in 1925. In them, she attempts to see literature from the point of view of the ‘common reader’ – someone whom she, with Dr Johnson, distinguished from the critic and the scholar. She read, and wrote, as an outsider: a woman set to school in her father’s library, denied the educational privileges of her male siblings – and with no fixed view of what constitutes ‘English Literature’

About the Author
Virginia Woolf was born in London in 1882, the daughter of Sir Leslie Stephen, first editor of the Dictionary of National Biography. From 1915, when she published her first novel, The Voyage Out, Virginia Woolf maintained an astonishing output of fiction, literary criticism, essays and biography. In 1912 she married Leonard Woolf, and in 1017 they founded the Hogarth Press. She suffered a series of mental breakdowns throughout her life, and on 28th March 1941 she committed suicide.

Customer Reviews

Critical excellence
The rescue of Virginia Woolf's critical essays from obscurity by critics in recent years and the recognition that they bear significance equal to that of her novels is a delightful fact. Yet it is quite disappointing that the mention of Woolf's work, let alone the essays in particular, still often meet with general dislike, confessions to little understanding of her meanings and occasional ignorance by the general public; this is compounded by the fact that Woolf's own intention was to reach this type of audience: the alert, interested and not necessarily well-educated reader.

Reading the first volume of The Common Reader could reverse the situation. Known to few yet targeted at the wider public, the lay 'common reader' as its title suggests, this is Virginia Woolf's attempt to produce a collection of essays with an interconnecting, cyclical thematic pattern running throughout in order to connect with the reader and practise a dialogic relationship whereby the author's and the reader's mind merge for the sake of artistic creation.

Embarking on the discussion of a wide range of topics from novelists, dramatists, essayists and letter-writers to issues like the process of reading, the function of criticism and its abuse by authoritarian critics, or women's experiences of patriarchy over the centuries, this is a book designed to enrich the mind and not to bore. Definitely a good read!!