The Strange Elizabethans, Donne After Three Centuries, “The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia”, “Robinson Crusoe”, Dorothy Osborne’s “Letters”, Swift’s “Journal To Stella”, The “Sentimental Journey”, Lord Chesterfield’s Letters to His Son, Two Parsons, Dr. Here is the collection first published in 1925, aimed at ‘Common reader’, Woolf produced an eccentric and personal literary and social history of European thought in her own unique style, this collection helped cement Woolf as one of the most popular writers of her time. Virginia Woolf is well known as one of the most prominent fiction writers of the twentieth century, what may be less well known is her astounding collection of letters and essays. They cover literary criticism, character sketches and the byways of reading. They are collections of reviews and journalism, written while she was also creating some of her best-known novels. Volume 1 was published in 1925 and Volume 2 in 1932. In my salad days the two volumes of Virginia Woolf’s The Common Reader were among the most influential. As I scan my shelves, many of the titles my eyes pass over are books I read about while still at school or heard about at university books bought in a rush of enthusiasm which faded as something new grabbed my attention. I sometimes think that the books that have stayed longest in my mind are those that I haven’t read. Reviewed by Alan Bradley in Slightly Foxed Issue 60. In her second series of essays, published in 1932, Woolf turns her brilliant eye on Lord Chesterfield’s letters, the novels of George Gissing, the poetry of Donne, and we meet Dr Burney and Beau Brummell, Christina Rossetti, Geraldine Jewsbury, Jane Carlyle, Mary Wollstonecraft and many others.
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