Books And Portraits Book

Virginia Woolf's reputation as a novelist tends to overshadow her significance as a literary critic. Her first published works, however, were reviews or critical essays, and she continued to write literary criticism until her death. Only the two volumes of The Common Reader were published during her lifetime. Five additional volumes of essays were published posthumously. After the last appeared, in 1965, research uncovered well over a hundred more uncollected articles. From these Mary Lyon chose forty-eight that seemed, from both the reader's and the scholar's point of view, most important to preserve. Many were written when Virginia was still in her twenties, but from the very beginning her literary judgment was sure and her style distinctive.