In their various ways, all Woolf's works – novels, short stories and essays – contribute to an ongoing debate about the nature and the purpose of writing; but she was equally preoccupied with the nature of reading, and especially so between the publication of Night and Day in the autumn of 1919 and that of Mrs Dalloway and The Common Reader in the spring of 1925. Struggling to come to terms with an older literary tradition associated with her father and to let go of the dead leaves of the past, she began to search for new and more open ways to practise reading as well as writing. She wanted to understand how reading worked and how it related to the wider interpretation of signs.

Woolf had always loved and needed reading: she wrote essays on ‘Hours in a Library’ (the title of her father's best-known book), ‘Reading’, ‘On Re-reading Novels’, ‘How It Strikes a Contemporary’ (the title of a Robert Browning poem), ‘How Should One Read a Book?’ and ‘All About Books’ (Essays ii, 55; iii, 141, 336; 353; iv, 388; CE ii, 263). She discussed it in her fiction, diaries and letters, and kept careful records of what she read. At least twenty-six notebooks are devoted to her reading, and many other documents include further notes on it.