From 1928 to 1948, the Modern Library published an edition of Mrs Dalloway, with an introduction that Virginia Woolf had written especially for the series. This introduction is the only commentary of its sort that she wrote for any of her works. Woolf often insisted that readers should ‘take no advice’ on what and how to read, and yet she was willing to explain her work to a large American audience – ordinary readers as well as professional readers (professors, journalists, literary critics). The twenty-year period when Mrs Dalloway was offered in the Modern Library saw an unprecedented democratization of higher education. The Modern Library targeted the expanding population of students and their instructors, as well as all those who wanted to keep abreast of contemporary literary developments. The introduction to Mrs Dalloway shows that Woolf was eager to participate in the new middlebrow culture exemplified by the Modern Library and other institutions that mediated between the ‘high’ and the ‘low’. My central argument is that the Modern Library allowed Woolf not only to widen her audience, but also to cross the gap between common and professional readers (at least until the establishment of a great divide between the intellectuals and the masses after the Second World War).

While scholars have traditionally viewed Woolf as a writer of highbrow texts published by the Hogarth Press for a limited audience, a new wave of criticism has recently explored the interactions between Woolf and mainstream culture.