The Common Reader: First Series

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‘A good essay must have this permanent quality about it; it must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in not out’

In the first volume of her critical essays, Virginia Woolf discusses the greatest authors of the literary canon – Jane Austen, George Eliot and Geoffrey Chaucer among others – with the everyday, ‘common reader’ in mind. With wit and insight, Woolf also revisits classic novels and examines scholarly subjects, from the Greek language to the Modern Essay, to the Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights.

First published in 1925, The Common Reader is a stunning work from one of the most perceptive minds of the twentieth century, a collection which continues to nurture the joys of literature and reading to this day.

Review

‘groundbreaking … a true classic that has pointed the way not just for science-fiction writers, but for how we as a civilisation might think of ourselves’ Guardian

‘[Wells’ work is] astonishingly rich in human and historical interest … he foresaw the invention of, among other things, television, tanks, aerial warfare and the atom bomb’ David Lodge

‘I personally consider the greatest of English living writers [to be] H. G. Wells’ Upton Sinclair

About the Author

Virginia Woolf was an English novelist, essayist, short story writer, publisher, critic and member of the Bloomsbury group, as well as being regarded as both a hugely significant modernist and feminist figure. Her most famous works include Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse and A Room of One’s Own.