Literature is no one's private ground; literature is common ground.

– ‘The Leaning Tower’ (E6 278)

This study has sought to demonstrate what Virginia Stephen's apprenticeship as an essayist was like, how she educated herself, and what she learned that contributed to Virginia Woolf's later attempts to reach out to readers through her essays.

Broadly speaking, Virginia Stephen's homeschooling taught her about gender isolation and its impact on learning; her work at Morley College taught her about class exclusion and its impact on learning but also teaching; and her years as a reviewer taught her about different audiences and their impact on writing. This overall education affects Virginia Stephen's development as an essayist, but as she educated herself, she learned many other specific lessons, both positive and negative.

As Virginia Stephen explored her father's library and absorbed her mother's training, she experienced, quite literally, tension between two feminist views of education (separatist and non-compromising). Perhaps most important, Virginia Stephen experienced access and exclusion, was both inside and outside. Her class meant she had access to the wealth of her father's library, but her gender excluded her from a formal education outside that library. With no systematic curriculum framing her education, she practised learning from everyone, including her brother Thoby, and did so mainly through talking with others, reading everything she could put her hands on, attending classes at King's College London Ladies’ Department as a non-matriculated student, and being tutored in Greek and Latin, the English patriarchy's nomenclature. She learned the importance of libraries and began using them and creating her own. She read widely among the classics, explored a wide variety of genres and had a glimmer of a woman's literary tradition. She watched her father and aunt live professional writing lives, observed the connection between writing and periodicals, and practised producing a periodical herself. Her reading taught her both what she was being excluded from and what some previous women had done in response. She developed discipline in her Greek studies, watched her aunt negotiate with the patriarchal culture, and absorbed the obligation to remember literary foremothers. Because both her father and Janet Case took her and her ideas seriously (though in different ways), used questions and discussion, and gave her freedom, she absorbed a pedagogy.