What we have in this present selection is only a fraction of those she penned, but, within the confines of space, we have, arguably, thirty of her best. She wonders, in ‘How it Strikes a Contemporary’ (1923), how much of the writing produced in her own age will still be in print a century hence. Though there are still a few years to go until the centenary of that essay we can be fairly sure that it and the rest of Woolf’s most acute, visionary, and intimate essays will still be on the shelves in 2023 and beyond, and not least because Woolf, as she puts it in ‘Poetry, Fiction and the Future’, so expertly and memorably ‘clasp[ed] to [her] breast the precious prerogatives of the democratic art of prose; its freedom; its fearlessness, its flexibility’ (p. 81).

NOTE ON THE TEXT

REFERENCES to Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader (London: Hogarth Press, 1925) have been abbreviated to CR; references to Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader: Second Series (London: Hogarth Press, 1932) have been abbreviated to CR2; and references to The Death of the Moth and Other Essays by Virginia Woolf (London: Hogarth Press, 1942) have been abbreviated to DM.

The versions of the essays reprinted in this volume are as follows:

Reading and Writing

‘The Decay of Essay-Writing’, Academy and Literature (25 Feb. 1905), 165–6; ‘Modern Fiction’, CR, 184–95, first published in 1919 in a significantly different form as ‘Modern Novels’; ‘The Modern Essay’, CR, 267–8, first published in 1922 in a slightly different form as ‘Modern Essays’; ‘How it Strikes a Contemporary’, CR, 292–305, first published in April 1923 in a slightly different form; ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’, Nation and Athenaeum (1 Dec. 1923), 342–3: see note to ‘Character in Fiction’; ‘Character in Fiction’, Criterion, 2/8 (July 1924), 409–30. This essay evolved from ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’ (see previous entry) and was itself reprinted as Virginia Woolf, Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown (London: Hogarth Press) on 30 Oct. 1924, vol. i of The Hogarth Essays: First Series; ‘“Impassioned Prose”’, Times Literary Supplement (16 Sept. 1926), 601–2; ‘How Should One Read a Book?’, Yale Review, NS 16/1 (Oct. 1926), 32–44, reprinted in a considerably revised form in CR2, 258–70; ‘Poetry, Fiction and the Future’, New York Herald Tribune (14 Aug. 1927), Section 6, ‘Books’, pp. 1, 6–7 and (21 Aug. 1927), Section 6, ‘Books’, pp. 1, 6, reprinted with minor variations as ‘The Narrow Bridge of Art’ in Granite and Rainbow: Essays by Virginia Woolf (London: Hogarth Press, 1958); ‘Craftsmanship’, Listener (5 May 1937), 868–9, first broadcast as a BBC talk in the series ‘Words Fail Me’ on 29 April 1937.

Life-Writing

‘The New Biography’ first appeared as a review of Some People by Harold Nicolson in the New York Herald Tribune (30 Oct. 1927), Section 7, ‘Books’, pp. 1, 6; ‘On Being Ill’, Virginia Woolf, On Being Ill (London: Hogarth Press, 1930), first published in a different form in the January 1926 number of the New Criterion; ‘Leslie Stephen’ was first published in The Times (28 Nov. 1932), 15–16 under the full title of ‘Leslie Stephen. The Philosopher at Home. A Daughter’s Memories’; ‘The Art of Biography’, Atlantic Monthly, 163/4 (Apr. 1939), 506–10.

Women and Fiction

‘The Feminine Note in Fiction’ first appeared as a review of The Feminine Note in Fiction by W. L. Courtney in the Guardian (25 Jan. 1905), 168; ‘Women Novelists’ first appeared as a review of The Women Novelists by R. Brimley Johnson in the Times Literary Supplement (17 Oct. 1918), 495; ‘Women and Fiction’, Forum (New York), 81/3 (Mar. 1929), 149–50; ‘Professions for Women’, DM, 149–54; ‘Memories of a Working Women’s Guild’ originally appeared as an introductory letter to Co-operative Working Women, in Margaret Llewellyn Davies (ed.), Life as We Have Known It (London: Hogarth Press, 1931), pp. xv–xxxix, a revised version of an essay which first appeared in the September 1930 number of the Yale Review; ‘Why?’, Lysistrata (Oxford), 1/2 (May 1934), 5–12.

Looking On

‘Thunder at Wembley’, Nation and Athenaeum (28 June 1924), 409–10; ‘The Cinema’, Arts (New York), 9/6 (June 1926), 314–16; ‘Street Haunting: A London Adventure’, Yale Review, NS 17 (Oct. 1927), 49–62; ‘The Sun and the Fish’, Time and Tide (3 Feb. 1928), 99–100; ‘The Docks of London’, Good Housekeeping, 20/4 (Dec.