Makes me want to read more of her criticism ( )

This attractive volume collects fourteen of the unsigned reviews Virginia Woolf wrote for the Times Literary Supplement. Although she complained of paltry pay and deadline pressure, this gig was important for her development as a writer. She had grown up in an intellectual household, but was acutely aware that her brothers went up to Cambridge while she and her sister were kept home. She had the run of the father’s library, though, and became convinced that her perceptions and reactions to what she read were the equal of anyone with a formal education. But having those views sought out by an editor, printed, and remunerated, was the external confirmation she needed.
Soon, her confidence as a reader was joined by ambition to be a writer. To receive a book at the beginning of the week and produce 1500 words before the week was out was a good discipline.
When I read (and reread) Woolf’s novels, I often feel on shaking ground, as if I’m not quite getting them. But her review essays are accessible and beautifully-written. They display a lively, penetrating intelligence applied to the act of reading. Her appreciations of Conrad and Hardy, for instance, published on the death of each, are finely balanced in their praise and criticism. The essay on Elizabethan drama had me laughing out loud.
Her essay on Montaigne, viewed side by side with that on Hardy, make me marvel at the human mind and its capacity of produce imaginative literature. We not only perceive the world around us but, like Hardy, we can propose a world—his Wessex is not exactly Dorset—and make it seem real to us. Or someone like Montaigne can use the same faculty to explore itself, the human mind at work.
I bought this book on an impulse, momentarily suppressing the thought that that I undoubtedly had most, if not all of these essays in the collections already on my shelf. But I was far away from home and added it to my stack of purchases. I’m glad I did—it was a wonderful traveling companion; small enough to fit easily in my small backpack and be taken out at the airport or inflight to enjoy one or two of the essays, then read the rest in the evenings after arriving back home, waiting for sleep to creep up on me. ( )

The greatest hits of the Common Reader I and II. This is a collection of previously published works and makes for a good introduction to Woolf and her thoughts. ( )