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by Virginia Woolf (Author)
This fourth volume of the first complete edition of Virginia Woolf's essays and reviews celebrates her maturing vitality and wonderfully reveals her prodigious reading, wit, and original intelligence. Written while she worked on To the Lighthouse and Orlando, these pieces explore subjects ranging from the world's greatest books to obscure English lives. The Common Reader, First Series, in which she influentially revives women's place in history, comprises a quarter of the volume. Contributions to American journals for the first time in her career outnumber those to the Times Literary Supplement, and so her pieces in the Nation & Athenaeum, under Leonard Woolf's literary editorship. The volume also includes her moving introduction to the Modern Library Edition of Mrs. Dalloway, not previously published.
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This fourth volume of the first complete edition of Virginia Woolf s essays and reviews celebrates her maturing vitality and wonderfully reveals her prodigious reading, wit, and original intelligence. Written while she worked on To the Lighthouse and Orlando, these pieces explore subjects ranging from the world s greatest books to obscure English lives. The Common Reader, First Series, in which she influentially revives women s place in history, comprises a quarter of the volume. Also included are Woolf s contributions to American journals during these years, contributions that for the first time in her career outnumbered those to the Times Literary Supplement and the Nation & Athenaeum, under Leonard Woolf s literary editorship. The volume also provides her moving introduction to the Modern Library Edition of Mrs. Dalloway, not previously published.
In his superb notes, editor Andrew McNeillie adds variations in Woolf s essays as they appeared in different versions; for example, he includes lines in her essay on Joseph Addison that she later omitted: our range of delights persuade us that the whole business of life is better worth while. Virginia Woolf s creativity and industry in these three years bespeak astonishing gifts, remarkable robustness, and a passion for the whole business of life that inspires.Praise for previous volumes of The Essays of Virginia Woolf Lovely. The New Yorker Extravagantly demonstrates what we already suspected . . . that Woolf was easily the greatest literary journalist of her age. James Wood, The GuardianAndrew McNeillie edited Virginia Woolf s The Common Reader and The Second Common Reader and assisted Anne Olivier Bell in editing The Diary of Virginia Woolf. He lives in England."
