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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 unofficial literary and social history from the 14th to the 20th centuries.

The collected BBC dramatisations of the fiction of Virginia Woolf, with star casts including Kristin Scott-Thomas, Vanessa Redgrave, Juliet Stevenson, Laura Fraser, Robert Glenister and Fenella Woolgar....

Published seven years after the first instalment, The Common Reader: Second Series explores the works of Thomas Hardy, Laurence Stern and George Eliot, elegantly dissecting the art of the biography and the very nature of reading itself. Again Woolf speaks from the perspective of the everyday reader, urging for an intuitive and curious approach to literature – one which allows for freedom and experimentation as opposed to academic rigour.

Championing the everyday, ‘common’ reader, Woolf emphasises the importance of reading for curiosity and interest, as opposed to academic analysis. In a delightfully conversational tone and with personal flair, Woolf explores the works of classical and contemporary authors alike; from Chaucer and Austen to Defoe and Montaigne. Effortlessly blending biography, criticism and philosophy, these brilliantly written essays showcase Woolf’s passion for literature, and particularly its ability to shape life as we know it.

A collection of essays by Virginia Woolf, some of which originally appeared in the Times Literary Supplement or the Dial, and others were originally published for the first time in this volume. "Anything that Virginia Woolf may have to say about letters is of more than ordinary interest, for her peculiar intelligence and informed attitude set her somewhat apart. She possesses the happy faculty simultaneously of enjoying and accepting the work of Daniel De Foe and James Joyce, of Joseph Addison and T.S. Eliot, of Jane Austen and Marcel Proust. Many of these essays are excellent examples of that...

Here is Virginia Woolf at her most entertaining and informative, relishing the portraits and insights she presents as she surveys a varied collection of individuals in English society and English literature. In The Common Reader Volume 2, (published in 1932), the essay lives on and even more so in this sensitive and engaging book by Georgina Sutton.