8vo. Original publisher's cloth-backed pictorial paper bards. Extremities marked and dulled, lightly rubbed. Scattered foxing, contemporary inked gift inscription and bookplate of Constance Miles to FEP - likely the noted diarist Constance Miles [née Nicoll] (1881-1962).

The first edition of Woolf's collected essays treating on a wide variety of literary topics; from medieval England to tsarist Russia, Elizabethan playwrights, and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novelists including Jane Austen, George Eliot, and Joseph Conrad.

Constance Miles [née Nicoll] (1881-1962), bibliophile and diarist, who lived for much of her life in Shere, Surrey, where she wrote her war journals, published as Mrs Miles's Diary: the Wartime Journal of a Housewife on the Home Front (2013). She was the eldest daughter of Sir William Robertson Nicoll, founder of two successful periodicals, the nonconformist The British Weekly, and The Bookman; and sometime literary advisor to Hodder and Stoughton. He knew many of their authors personally, amongst them Winston Churchill and J. M. Barrie; the latter Constance knew as a young girl. In her diaries she credited her passion for books and writing for getting her through the war. In 1940, she grieved the loss of the works of the publishing houses of Paternoster Row destroyed by fire: 'Five to six million books have perished. Oh, the brave, bright paper jackets, the lovely purple colours, the crisp, unopened pages, the quips and crank, the love scenes and the thoughtful essays, the learned remarks, the verses and the valuable photographs, the pure new bindings in red and yellow, blue and mauve and olive green, the messages and signals to the human race that were embraced by the horrible flames!'