The Common Reader

Published in two series, the first in 1925 and the second in 1932, The Common Reader is a collection of essays by Virginia Woolf, an English writer, considered one of the most important modernist 20th-century authors and a pioneer in the use of stream of consciousness as a narrative device.

Not written for scholars or critics, these essays are a collection of Virginia Woolf’s everyday thoughts about literature and the world—and the art of reading for pleasure. Woolf outlines her literary philosophy in the introductory essay to the first series, and in the concluding essay to the second series.

The first series includes essays on Geoffrey Chaucer, Michel de Montaigne, Jane Austen, George Eliot, and Joseph Conrad, as well as discussions of the Greek language and the modern essay.

The second series features essays on John Donne, Daniel Defoe, Dorothy Osborne, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Thomas Hardy, among others.