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Imprint: Renard Press
ISBN: 9781913724474
Paperback • 48pp • £5
110 mm x 178 mm
11/11/21
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How Should One Read a Book?

Virginia Woolf

ISBN: 9781913724474
Paperback • 48pp
Published 11 November 2021

£5.00

Free UK delivery on orders over £25

First delivered as a speech to schoolgirls in Kent in 1926, this enchanting short essay by the towering Modernist writer Virginia Woolf celebrates the importance of the written word.

With a measured but ardent tone, Woolf weaves together thought and quote, verse and prose into a moving tract on the power literature can have over its reader, in a way which still resounds with truth today.

I have sometimes dreamt, at least, that when the Day of Judgement dawns and the great conquerors and lawyers and statesmen come to receive their rewards – their crowns, their laurels, their names carved indelibly upon imperishable marble – the Almighty will turn to Peter and will say, not without a certain envy when he sees us coming with our books under our arms, “Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them here. They have loved reading.”

About the author

Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) was a Modernist writer, widely considered to be one of the most important of the twentieth century.

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Also available by Virginia Woolf

A Letter to a Young Poet

‘So long as you and you and you, venerable and ancient representatives of Sappho, Shakespeare and Shelley, are aged precisely twenty-three and propose… to spend the next fifty years of your lives in writing poetry, I refuse to think that the art is dead.’

Penned in response to a letter about her novel The Waves from a young poet, John Lehmann, A Letter to a Young Poet answers a request for Woolf to set down her views on modern poetry.

Written with observational humour and empathy, the letter leaves the reader laughing in recognition of the errors depicted, with the words ‘And for heaven’s sake, publish nothing before you are thirty’ ringing in their ears.

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