The Common Reader

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The Common Reader

Virginia Woolf

Essays

Aug 3, 2018

One of the most articulate and enjoyable essayists of the modern era, Virginia Woolf makes literary criticism personal, private musing universal, and social commentary both particular and purposeful. Woolf’s essays are legion, and they have been collected and regrouped in any number of individual volumes. Start with the pieces the author gathered in two volumes and called The Common Reader, in which Woolf assembles a refined personal library. Scholarship takes a back seat to serendipity, education seems—as it should—a circuit of enthusiasms, and a serious mind finds its shape among the sentences and sentiments that speak most directly to it. In these engaging volumes, Woolf develops her understanding while the reader learns valuable lessons about Chaucer and the Elizabethans, Montaigne and Defoe, Joseph Addison and Jane Austen, the Brontës and George Eliot. Of special note are the essays “On Not Knowing Greek” and “How It Strikes a Contemporary” (in the first volume), and “How Should One Read a Book?” (in the second). Making their acquaintance, one gains insight not only into reading, but into thinking and being as well.

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Carol Ann Weaver

Aug 14, 2023

Fascinating read. Virginia Woolf was brilliant. It was fun to read her thoughts on people I have read over the years.

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