Woolf, Woolf

THE SECOND COMMON READER--Virginia Woolf--Harcourt, Brace ($3).

Like Thornton Niven Wilder but more so, Virginia Woolf is a widely-read if not popular writer whose public is largely made up of people who have not the vaguest idea what she is driving at. Though many a Junior Leaguer felt called upon to rave over Orlando, though some who bought or borrowed it managed to wade through The Waves, few in any league would have chosen to make their enthusiasm coherent. Virginia Woolf is certainly no labyrinthine monster, monstrous clever though she be, but her readers, like a lot of Little Red Riding Hoods, are apt to mistake her for a kindly old grandmother.

The Second Common Reader, a sequel to her first collection of critical essays, will appeal more to library-haunters than to debutantes, though anybody who likes good writing might enjoy them. In 26 brief, graceful, revealing essays Authoress Woolf conducts you on a tour of the minor masterpieces of English literature and their makers--from the great late Elizabethans to the late great Thomas Hardy. In her concluding paper ("How Should One Read a Book?") she drops a cogent hint to readers of whatever kind: "Most commonly we come to books with blurred and divided minds, asking of fiction that it shall be true, of poetry that it shall be false, of biography that it shall be flattering, of history that it shall enforce our own prejudices. If we could banish all such preconceptions when we read, that would be an admirable beginning."

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