How Should One Read a Book?

Ten of Virginia Woolf’s most beloved essays in a new edition, introduced by Meghan O’RourkeVirginia Woolf is renowned as a novelist, but she was a prolific and gifted essayist and literary critic as well. She wrote on Jane Eyre and Jane Austen, on Daniel Defoe and Laurence Sterne, on war and feminism, aiming her work at the “common reader.”Between 1926 and 1939, Woolf wrote ten essays—on the pleasures of writing, reading, and walking—for publication in the Yale Review, including the now-classic pieces “Street Haunting: A London Adventure,” “Letter to a Young Poet,” and “How Should One Read a Book?” (“To read a book well,” Woolf wrote, “one should read it as if one were writing it.”) Here is Woolf at her critical best—incisive, lyric, and mercurial in turn. These ten essays have now been gathered in a striking edition introduced by Meghan O’Rourke, editor of the Yale Review.