The Common Reader, First Series

What It's About

This is Woolf's first and most popular volume of essays, most of which first appeared in publications such as the Times Literary Supplement, the Athenaeum, and the Nation. The essays range widely: pieces on Chaucer, Montaigne, Defoe and Addison sit alongside studies of Jane Austen, George Eliot, and Emily, Ann, and Charlotte Brontë, a survey of Russian fiction (Chekhov, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy), and a series of sketches of obscure or forgotten literary figures under the heading "Lives of the Obscure." The collection closes with a study of Joseph Conrad and a reflection on contemporary literature.

Key Concepts

Woolf writes for what she calls the "common reader" — someone who reads for pleasure rather than as a scholar or critic — and sets out this approach in the volume's title essay. Throughout, she blends literary criticism with biography and personal impression, and shows a recurring interest in women writers and in minor or neglected figures overlooked by literary history. Essays such as "Modern Fiction" also lay out ideas about the novel that Woolf was developing in her own fiction at the time.

About the Author

Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) was an English writer and a central figure in the Bloomsbury Group of writers and intellectuals in early twentieth-century London. She suffered from recurring periods of mental illness throughout her life and died by suicide in 1941.