Virginia Woolf, “Jane Austen” [from The Common Reader]
This essay appeared in Virginia Woolf ’s The Common Reader, a two-volume essay collection in which she adopts the position of a layperson who, unlike a scholar or critic, “reads for his own pleasure rather than to impart knowledge or correct the opinions of others.” In “Jane Austen,” Woolf argues that examining Austen’s early works helps to illuminate her later, finished novels, and discusses Austen’s mastery of quotidian subject matter. She also draws on Persuasion to speculate as to what Austen “might have written had she lived” longer.