Woolf attempts to see literature from the perspective of the "common reader", someone whom she distinguished from the critic and the scholar. She invesigates medieval England, tsarist Russia, Elizabethan playwrights, Victorian novelists and modern essayists.

What she produced is an eccentric and unofficial literary and social history from the fourteenth to the twentieth century, with an excursion to ancient Greece thrown in. she investigates medieval England, tsarist Russia, Elizabethan playwrights, Vicotiran novelists and modern essayists. When she published this book Woolf's fame as a novelist was already established: now she was hailed as a brilliant interpretative critic. Here, she addresses her 'common reader' in the remarkable prose and with all the imagination and gaiety that are the stamp of her genius.