This volume, published in 1925 by Hogarth Press, represents Virginia Woolf's first collection of essays. In it, she attempts to view literature from the perspective of the "common reader," a reader she distinguishes from the critic and scholar. She read - and wrote - as an outsider, a woman who was educated in her father's library, having been denied the privilege of an academic education that was afforded to her brothers. She read without any preconceived notions of how the canon of English literature was composed. The result is an eccentric and unofficial literary and social history that spans from the 14th to the 20th century, with a small digression into ancient Greece as a bonus. It examines medieval England and tsarist Russia.