Virginia Woolf, aged 23, recently orphaned and still 10 years away from publishing her debut novel, was first commissioned to write reviews for the TLS in 1905. She began, as Francesca Wade points out in her preface to this collection, like any novice – by reviewing anything the editors sent her: guide books, cookery books, poetry, debut novels. Often she was filing a piece a week, reading the book on Sunday, writing – in the anonymous, authoritative TLS first-person plural “we” – up to 1,500 words on Monday, to be printed on Friday. The reviews gave her independence, and they made her a writer.

Through these pieces she “learnt a lot of my craft”, she once recalled; “how to compress; how to enliven”, how “to read with a pen & notebook, seriously”. She could not of course have managed it without a childhood of reading (“the great season for reading is the season between the ages of18 and 24”, as she puts it, somewhat archly, in “Hours in a Library”). Also essential was the cultural capital she took for granted as the daughter of leading man of letters Leslie Stephen (and which she recognises as a foundation of Fanny Burney’s work: “all the stimulus that comes from running in and out of rooms where grown-up people are talking about books and music”). She possessed the journalist’s and then the novelist’s gift for detail (the 107 dinner parties Henry James attended in one season, for instance, without being appreciably impressed by any of them), and the humility, at least at first, to understand that she must earn the attention of “busy people catching trains in the mornings” and “tired people coming home in the evening”.

She was working out, too, what being a critic meant. ‘A great critic” – a “Coleridge, above all” – “is the rarest of beings” she believed; what’s more, he wrote of drama and of poetry. The criticism of fiction “is in its infancy”, she wrote. This was an opportunity, but also a challenge – for where, as a young woman, and an autodidact, did she fit in? That gender-ambiguous “we” sometimes feels like a cloak swept about her with too much bravado.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest James Joyce in Zurich, 1915. Photograph: Alamy

What she can always defend, however, is her own taste: the licence to talk of “what one liked because one liked it” and “never to pretend to admire what one did not”. This method can produce blind spots – about Ulysses, most famously (“a memorable catastrophe – immense in daring, terrific in disaster”), and more complicatedly when it comes to issues of class (an alternately kowtowing and condescending attitude to “rural” writers such as Thomas Hardy). But it is also where some of her best insights come from, because one of the things she clearly liked was serious craft. And the joy of a collection like this is to watch her hunting for that craft in what, for us, is a kind of real time: this is not the Woolf of posterity, but a young woman working out where she stands. This turns out to be in support of integral description versus decorative description; true emotion versus manipulative emotion; and a clear point of view, whether close or august and sweeping.

Her sense of reader and writer in their physical selves – their age, their illness or health, their social and geographical context, their individual memory and experience, and especially their emotional development – yields valuable dividends. This is never more true than when she is considering the effect of gender. So there’s George Eliot, “the grave lady in her low chair”, punished by overwhelmingly male critics for not being charming – “a quality … held to be supremely desirable in women”. (Eliot’s failing, for Woolf, lay in her heroines, who contained more of the intellectual life force of their creator than she believed their provincial settings could allow.) Or Charlotte Brontë, whose novels are a “superb gesture of defiance”. Or Aurora Leigh, crippled by the limitations imposed on its feminine creator. Calling Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s poem “a masterpiece in embryo” is no idle choice of words.

Then there is her description of Eliot reaching out for “all that life could offer the free and enquiring mind”, for that, of course, was what Woolf herself was doing. The reviews are full of such interfaces and echoes – between herself and her subjects, but also between her language and her subjects. So the rhythm of her description of the best of Joseph Conrad’s books echoes its content – a sentence so still it feels poised on a Conradian night time deck, describing achievements “very chaste and very beautiful” that “rise in the memory as, on these hot summer nights, in their slow and stately way, first one star comes out and then the other”. And her bravura, and funny trashing of almost all Elizabethan plays bar Shakespeare, in language that reflects their pile-ups of hectic incident. What does for the plays in the end is not their woeful characterisation and risible plots but their utter lack of solitude and silence – the unmistakable cri de coeur of the novelist, which she had by then (1925, the year Mrs Dalloway appeared) emphatically become.

• Genius and Ink is published by TLS (RRP £8.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p over £15.