Description

Book Synopsis

Discover Virginia Woolf's informative and erudite critical essays on some of the key novelists and dramatists of the canon from the ancient Greeks to Jane Austen and beyond.

Virginia Woolf read, and wrote, as an outsider, denied the educational privileges of her male contemporaries. She was perhaps better able, then, to address a ''common reader'' in this wide-ranging collection of essays. With all the imagination and gaiety that are the stamp of her genius, she turns from medieval England to tsarist Russia, and subjects Elizabethan playwrights, Victorian novelists and modern essayists to her wise, acute and entertaining scrutiny.

Essays on Jane Austen, George Eliot, Nancy Mitford, Joseph Conrad, Michel de Montaigne, Daniel Defoe and many others.



Trade Review
Her essays are delightful in the way that serious play is delightful. She is enjoying herself, and reading her gives me that leaping sense of being in excellent company -- Jeanette Winterson * The Times *
More like novels than ordinary criticism * New Statesman *
Woolf was easily the greatest literary journalist of her age -- James Wood, * Guardian *
It is all pure Woolf, so distinctive is her voice - ironic, cool, conversational and playful, shrewd and fantastical by turns -- Literary Review

The Common Reader Volume 1

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    A Paperback / softback by Virginia Woolf

    £10.44

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    RRP £10.99 – you save £0.55 (5%)

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      Book details

      Publisher Penguin Random House Group
      Imprint Vintage Classics
      Published 2 January 2003
      ISBN-13 9780099443667
      978-0099443667
      ISBN-10 009944366X
      Also in:
      Non Fiction Biography Essays ELT & Literary Studies Literature: history and criticism Books by Virginia Woolf

      Description

      Book Synopsis

      Discover Virginia Woolf's informative and erudite critical essays on some of the key novelists and dramatists of the canon from the ancient Greeks to Jane Austen and beyond.

      Virginia Woolf read, and wrote, as an outsider, denied the educational privileges of her male contemporaries. She was perhaps better able, then, to address a ''common reader'' in this wide-ranging collection of essays. With all the imagination and gaiety that are the stamp of her genius, she turns from medieval England to tsarist Russia, and subjects Elizabethan playwrights, Victorian novelists and modern essayists to her wise, acute and entertaining scrutiny.

      Essays on Jane Austen, George Eliot, Nancy Mitford, Joseph Conrad, Michel de Montaigne, Daniel Defoe and many others.



      Trade Review
      Her essays are delightful in the way that serious play is delightful. She is enjoying herself, and reading her gives me that leaping sense of being in excellent company -- Jeanette Winterson * The Times *
      More like novels than ordinary criticism * New Statesman *
      Woolf was easily the greatest literary journalist of her age -- James Wood, * Guardian *
      It is all pure Woolf, so distinctive is her voice - ironic, cool, conversational and playful, shrewd and fantastical by turns -- Literary Review

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