literary history – Scott J. Pearson’s Book Review

A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf

By Scott J. Pearson | March 15, 2025March 20, 2025 by Scott J. Pearson

Much as it’s hard to critique a William Shakespeare or a Mark Twain, it’s hard to critique Virginia Woolf. She pioneered women’s literature in the early twentieth century and helped lay its foundation for an incredibly successful, bustling marketplace in today’s world. Despite nagging misogyny, women writers receive deserved respect because of Woolf’s proposals to let women’s genius work. So in one sense, this book offers a distilled, timeless essay worthy of historical study for…

Review: Chaucer

By Scott J. Pearson | August 1, 2019August 1, 2019 by Scott J. Pearson

Author of the Canterbury Tales (among other works), Geoffrey Chaucer is a pioneer of the English language from the late middle ages. He is eclipsed in his innovations perhaps only by William Shakespeare. Peter Ackroyd is a modern British historian and a worthy biographer of this giant. In this accessible series (read: short books), Ackroyd provides us with a great summary of what there is to know about Chaucer from historical records. Chaucer was not…