Virginia Woolf's Renaissance: Woman Reader or Common Reader?

Explores Virginia Woolf's affinity with the early modern period and her sense of being reborn as writer and reader through the creation of an alternative tradition of reading and writing whose roots go back to the Elizabethans and beyond. The author, a Fellow in English at Girton College, Cambridge, critiques Woolf's ideas through a discussion of particular writers Montaigne, Donne, Pepys and Bunyan, Dorothy Osborne and Madame de STvignT. She considers the forms traditionally associated with women, such as the essay, the personal letter and diary, in the context of printing, the body, and the relationship between amateurs and professionals. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.