The Common Reader: "Volume 1: 26 Essays on Jane Austen, George Eliot, Conrad, Montaigne and Others "

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'. What she produced is an eccentric and unofficia...