‘A good essay must have this permanent quality about it; it must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in not out’
In the first volume of her critical essays, Virginia Woolf discusses the greatest authors of the literary canon – Jane Austen, George Eliot and Geoffrey Chaucer among others – with the everyday, ‘common reader’ in mind. With wit and insight, Woolf also revisits classic novels and examines scholarly subjects, from the Greek language to the Moder ...