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.

So Virginia Woolf described the 'common reader' for whom she wrote. This is her second series of essays, first published in 1932. Here she turns her brilliant eye on Lord Chesterfield's letters, the novels of George Gissing, the poetry of Donne: we meet Dr Burney and Beau Brummell, Christina Rossetti, Geraldine Jewsbury, Jane Carlyle, Mary Wollstonecraft and many others. This is an informal, informative and witty celebration of our literary and social heritage by a writer of genius.