The Common Reader: Volume 1 - Softcover

Woolf, Virginia

Softcover

ISBN 10: 009944366X ISBN 13: 9780099443667

Publisher: Vintage Classics, 2003

Synopsis

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.

About this title

Review:

"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)

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 this edition

• Publisher: Vintage Classics
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 009944366X
• ISBN 13: 9780099443667
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288