Collected Essays

This collection gathers thirty of Virginia Woolf’s finest essays, spanning two decades of the most incisive literary criticism in English. Woolf writes on the Brontës and Jane Austen, on Gibbon and Madame de Sévigné, on the death of a moth and the art of street haunting. “The Common Reader” opens with her manifesto for the amateur reader who reads for pleasure, not instruction. The three-part essay on Henry James traces a master from his early vigour through his late obscurity. “Middlebrow” is a comic grenade lobbed at literary pretension. “Professions for Women” is among the most quoted pieces of feminist criticism ever written. And “Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid,” composed during the Blitz, is Woolf’s last published essay—a meditation on freedom written while bombs fell on London.