It was the summer of 1988, I was finally there, in the New York Public Library's Berg Collection, and I asked for it first. I remember holding Virginia Stephen's 1897 diary in the palm of my hand, tears welling. What became days, weeks, years, a lifetime of transcribing began in that moment. Later that summer, I read the holograph draft of Virginia Woolf's talk at Hayes Court School, ‘How Should One Read a Book?’, transfixed by the teacher I saw there. I didn't know it then, but the seed for what I came to regard as the crucial relationship between Virginia Stephen's education and Virginia Woolf's essays had been planted.

Virginia Woolf's Apprenticeship: Becoming an Essayist is the first of two books about Woolf's essay canon. Virginia Stephen spent her apprenticeship as a common reader learning, working to weave together the disparate threads of her homeschooling, teaching and early writing. Coping with piecemeal lessons, she learned, practised and gained an education, writing the nearly 160 reviews and essays that would transform her into Virginia Woolf, a common reader teaching, an essayist who wrote 500 mature essays that strive to educate others.

Virginia Woolf's Essays: Being a Teacher, the book to follow, will show how Woolf uses her essays to welcome readers and students into the literary conversation as well as how they function as an educational laboratory for teachers. She outlines an educational philosophy, shares a curriculum, models a pedagogy and creates a community, demonstrating all the while how we might teach in our classrooms and on the page. Virginia Stephen's apprenticeship turned Virginia Woolf into an educator compelled to teach in essays that continue to guide, encourage and inspire readers, writers and teachers. In this book, Virginia Stephen, student, teacher and apprentice, studies and practises as a common reader learning; she emerges and flourishes in the second book as Virginia Woolf, essayist, educator and mentor, a common reader teaching.