In the opening essay in this book Woolf tells us she is writing for the common reader. The common reader is not the critic and not the scholar."He is worse educated, and nature has not gifted him so generously. He reads for his own pleasure rather than to impart knowledge or correct the opinions of others. Above all, he is guided by an instinct to create for himself, out of whatever odds and ends he can come by, some kind of whole- a portrait of a man, a sketch of an age, a theory of the art of writing."

Woolf then goes on in the subsequent essays to write of Chaucer, Jane Austen, Joseph Conrad, Montaigne, George Eliot, Defoe, Addison, 'Modern Fiction' 'The Lives of the Obscure' ' Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights' 'The Russian Point of View'.

She writes with a special kind of insight and artfulness. I especially liked her essay on Montaigne who she sees as one of the few writers who truly makes a portrait of himself, and writes truly of the whole of his experience. She sees him as one who knew not only how to communicate himself but to be himself, who defied convention and ceremony, and prizing contemplation and retirement made a book which was himself.

It can be said that Woolf in a way does the same with these reflections upon others which hold up a mirror to her own masterfully insightful sensibility.