This fourth volume of the first complete edition of Virginia Woolf's essays and reviews celebrates her maturing vitality and wonderfully reveals her prodigious reading, wit, and original intelligence. Written while she worked on To the Lighthouse and Orlando, these pieces explore subjects ranging from the world's greatest books to obscure English lives. The Common Reader, First Series, in which she influentially revives women's place in history, comprises a quarter of the volume. Contributions to American journals for the first time in her career outnumber those to the Times Literary Supplement, and so her pieces in the Nation & Athenaeum, under Leonard Woolf's literary editorship. The volume also includes her moving introduction to the Modern Library Edition of Mrs. Dalloway, not previously published.