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.

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.