ABSTRACT
Virginia Woolf prepared her first collection of literary essays entitled The Common Reader. She took her title from Dr. Johnson, who in his Life of Gray rejoiced to concur with the common reader. Mrs. Woolf was neither a literary nor an academic critic in the sense defined by Angus Wilson in a review of The Garnett Family, by Carolyn Heilbrun, in the Listener. It is probable that this decade will see the end of private scholarship and of literary critics who are not qualified by holding university appointments. In several early reviews of stories by Dostoevsky, Mrs. Woolf, not being bowled over by his genius in these minor works, has some pertinent criticisms to make. Mrs. Woolf's preference among writers of memoirs and autobiographies, expressed as early as 1916, was for the less important people. Mrs. Woolf writes of Hazlitt that some of his essays set out to give us a proof and they end by giving us a picture.
