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    The Common Reader: Volume 1: 26 Essays on Jane Austen, George Eliot, Conrad, Montaigne and Others
    The Common Reader: Volume 1: 26 Essays on Jane Austen, George Eliot, Conrad, Montaigne and Others
    The Common Reader: Volume 1: 26 Essays on Jane Austen, George Eliot, Conrad, Montaigne and Others
    Audiobook8 hours

    The Common Reader: Volume 1: 26 Essays on Jane Austen, George Eliot, Conrad, Montaigne and Others

    Written by Virginia Woolf

    Narrated by Joan Walker

    ()

    • Literature

    • Criticism

    • Social Issues

    • Religion

    • Essay Writing

    • Star-Crossed Lovers

    • Rags to Riches

    • Forbidden Love

    • Secret Identity

    • Self-Discovery

    • Found Family

    • Redemption

    • Reluctant Hero

    • Betrayal

    • Power Struggle

    • Nature & the Environment

    • Social Class & Status

    • Literary Criticism

    • Human Nature

    • Character Development

    About this audiobook

    This is Virginia Woolf's first collection of essays, published in 1925. In them, she attempts to see literature from the point of view of the ‘common reader' - someone whom she, with Dr Johnson, distinguished from the critic and the scholar. She read, and wrote, as an outsider: a woman set to school in her father's library, denied the educational privileges of her male siblings - and with no fixed view of what constitutes ‘English literature'. What she produced is an eccentric and unofficial literary and social history from the 14th to the 20th centuries, with an excursion to ancient Greece thrown in.

    She investigates medieval England (The Paston Letters and Chaucer), tsarist Russia (The Russian Point of View), Elizabethan Playwrights, Jane Austen, Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, Modern Fiction and the Modern Essay. When she published this book Woolf's fame as a novelist was already established: now she was hailed as a brilliant interpretative critic. Here, she addresses ‘the common reader' in the remarkable prose and with all the imagination and gaiety that are the stamps of her genius.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherW. F. Howes Ltd
    Release dateFeb 10, 2020
    ISBN9781004134038
    The Common Reader: Volume 1: 26 Essays on Jane Austen, George Eliot, Conrad, Montaigne and Others
    Author

    Virginia Woolf

    Virginia Woolf was born in 1882, the youngest daughter of the Victorian writer Leslie Stephen. After her father's death, Virginia moved with her sister Vanessa (later Vanessa Bell) and two of her brothers, to 46 Gordon Square, which was to be the first meeting place of the Bloomsbury Group. Virginia married Leonard Woolf in 1912, and together they established the Hogarth Press. Virginia also published her first novel, The Voyage Out, in 1912, and she subsequently wrote eight more, several of which are considered classics, as well as two books of seminal feminist thought. Woolf suffered from mental illness throughout her life and committed suicide in 1941.

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