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18 The Essays

Beth C. Rosenberg is Professor of English at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. She is the author of Virginia Woolf and Samuel Johnson: Common Readers (1995) and co-editor of Virginia Woolf and the Essay (1997). She is currently working on a comparative study of Virginia Woolf and Elena Ferrante.

• Published: 11 August 2021
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Woolf’s essays fall into many genres, including book reviews, literary criticism, biography, memoir, and occasional pieces. As a student of the essay and its history, she studied the form from Montaigne, Hazlitt, Pater, and Beerbohm and through their work she learned to make the essay her own, reinventing the genre to argue for a uniquely female and feminist perspective. Woolf’s deep understanding of the essay’s form, her drive to construct a female literary history and female narrative form, culminate in A Room of One’s Own (1929), where she employs a feminist rhetoric of affect and emotion. Woolf’s particular contribution to the essay includes a new kind of literary history that focuses on women, gender, and politics. Hers is a uniquely feminine and feminist voice created through a visceral and sensual rhetoric that addresses the body’s response to experience and exploits emotions in order to persuade her readers.

Virginia Woolf’s essays fall into many genres, including book reviews, literary criticism, biography, memoir, and occasional pieces. Her topics range from the home of Thomas Carlyle in ‘Great Men’s Houses’ (1932) to aerial battles in ‘Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid’ (1940) to the nature of sickness in ‘On Being Ill’ (1926). She documents seemingly trivial events, like a moth’s struggle to escape a window frame in ‘The Death of the Moth’ (1942) or a walk to a stationer’s store in ‘Street Haunting’ (1927). Her memoirs ‘A Sketch of the Past’ (1939) and ‘Am I a Snob?’ (1936) are highly personal narrative essays. She theorizes the nature of fiction in ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’ (1923) and ‘Modern Fiction’ (1925). She writes the biographical essays in ‘Lives of the Obscure’ and essays on women writers who were unstudied in Woolf’s time, such as ‘Mary Wollstonecraft’ and ‘Dorothy Wordsworth’, as well as women writers she revered like ‘Jane Austen’ and ‘George Eliot’. Woolf’s deep understanding of the essay’s form and history, her drive to construct a female literary history and female narrative form, culminate in A Room of One’s Own (1929), where she employs a feminist rhetoric of affect and emotion. Woolf’s particular contribution to the essay includes a new kind of literary history that focuses on women, gender, and politics. Hers is a uniquely feminine and feminist voice that is created through a visceral and sensual rhetoric that addresses the body’s response to experience and exploits emotions in order to persuade her readers.

As a student of the essay and its history, Woolf studied the form from the only models available to her, and these were almost exclusively male. Montaigne, Hazlitt, Pater, and Beerbohm are among her greatest models—and through their work she learns to make the essay her own, turning from the masculine tradition that she was trained in and reinventing the genre to argue for a uniquely female and feminist perspective. Woolf’s theory of the essay, what it should say and do, includes an emphasis on voice and personality, a conversational tone, and a style that is clear yet visual and aesthetic. Ultimately, she breaks from her predecessors by expanding nineteenth-century aestheticism to include tropes of emotion—anger, love, and enthusiasm, among others—that are commonly associated with women. Rather than weaken her rhetoric, the use of emotion empowers it, making her prose appeal to a visceral and bodily knowledge in the reader.

Woolf’s essays do not deploy the detached critical tone or a sense of absolute authority that her friend T.S. Eliot affected. Compared to her contemporaries, Woolf’s essays were considered impressionistic and antiquarian. Her casual conversational tone, where the reader is her peer, and her subjective responses to art and life were misunderstood and dismissed. She strove for a personal voice that the common reader understands. She refers to the soul, the inner self, but it is really the psychological and aesthetic self that she describes; Woolf’s inner self is defined by her gender and, through style and voice, she presents a female experience. She also uses fictional techniques, creating story out of her subject, to engage the reader and stimulate both the imagination and emotions. Her form of argumentation is based on an intuitive logic, where she emphasizes affective responses to cultural and economic conditions. This mode of writing, for Woolf, is the antidote to the masculine essay of reason, logic, and ego, flaws she found even in the male essayists she adored.

Woolf’s earliest exposure to the essay was through her father, Leslie Stephen. Stephen, an influential essayist and biographer in his own right, introduced the idea of the essay as an integral part of literary history. Not only did he write full-length biographies of figures such as Samuel Johnson and George Eliot, but he published essays on literature, history, biography, and agnosticism. Woolf was intimately familiar with his Hours in a Library (1874–1879), An Agnostic’s Apology and Other Essays (1893), Studies of a Biographer (1898–1902), and his contributions as editor to The Dictionary of National Biography (1882–1891). Through Stephen, Woolf was introduced to the notion of literary history, which is not only a guiding principle of many of her essays but essential to her use and critique of the essay form.

Woolf began her essay-writing career as a book reviewer. 1 While she published reviews as early as 1904, and while, from the start, she strove to do more than simply assess a book but to put it in a larger context and develop her point of view as a critic, she always had the essay and its form in mind. Some of her early works, such as ‘Haworth, November, 1904’ (1904), ‘Journeys in Spain’ (1904), and ‘A Walk by Night’ (1905), take the tone of her later more personal and occasional essays. The style of the book reviews is more conventional, limited to space, topic, and an editor’s hand. The essays, on the other hand, have a clear and definitive voice, point of view, and personality, and they engage with the reader in a more affective and sensory way. Her apprenticeship in essay writing taught Woolf to use greater aesthetic and visual language to make abstract ideas and experiences concrete; she also develops and refines the novelist’s sense of story and character in her non-fiction. It is in the essays too that she follows her attraction to nineteenth-century aestheticism, which she learns from Pater and Hazlitt, and where she vividly articulates the rhetoric of emotional response to and in non-fiction.

Woolf revised and collected some of her reviews and published them as collections of essays, The Common Readers , first series (1925) and second series (1932). Anne Fernald notes the ‘difficulty in comprehending this impressive collection as a whole’, arguing that the essays are organized according to a voice and point of view that belong to ‘a kind of every person, a blank common reader’ and yet Woolf ‘slips in’ women writers and unknown female histories. 2 Future work on Woolf’s self-edited collections will help us to understand her as an essay writer with agency and purpose, one who makes her own aesthetic and structural choices, not the passive, imitative subject of a male-dominated literary history.

Early critics such as Winifred Holtby and Ruth Gruber recognized the significance of Woolf’s essays. 3 Leonard Woolf would later collect the essays in four volumes and publish them between 1966 and 1967. 4 Leonard’s Collected Essays , as Andrew McNeillie points out, was a kind of extended Common Reader , 5 without annotations or even notes on date and place of first publication. However, in 1989 McNeillie began to edit a six-volume series of collected essays, including footnotes and appendixes. It took over twenty years for the collection to be completed, with Stuart N. Clarke editing the last two volumes. 6

The 1970s and 1980s focused more on Woolf’s feminism, politics, and novels. 7 None address Woolf’s use of the essay to create literary history, let alone a specifically female history. Woolf began to articulate her theories of the essay long before she wrote her own. Her focus, throughout her essay-writing career, was on voice and the speaking ‘I’. She rejected what she calls the ‘egotistical’ I of her contemporaries to argue for a more authentic personality that could communicate her experience to her audience, whether that experience was aesthetic, personal, or in the world. Woolf believed that essays should deal with truth, not fact, reflect the movement and change of our being, be passionate and emotional, have a ‘fierce attachment to an idea’ ( E 4 224), and, ultimately, give pleasure to their readers. In the 1920s, she not only refined her first-person voice but brought a more self-consciously gendered perspective, first by writing about women and their unknown histories, and then by finding the means to create a uniquely feminine subjective voice and rhetorical style.

The female voices and styles she creates in ‘Street Haunting’ and ‘The Death of the Moth’, for example, illustrate her innovative approach to the essay. Both essays are ostensibly about small, trivial subjects and use first person to suggest an intimacy with the narrator’s thoughts and feelings. Though the underlying themes about death and the nature of the self are abstract, the language she uses in both essays is concrete and specific. The power of a moth that struggles against death is compared to the human struggle: ‘One could watch the extraordinary efforts made by those tiny legs against an oncoming doom which could, had it chosen, have submerged an entire city, not merely a city, but masses of human beings; nothing, I knew, had any chance against death’ ( E 6 444). Woolf is concerned with the metaphysical, and her use of first person brings a personal tone often associated with the feminine. A walk to buy a pencil can allow us to ‘leave the straight lines of personality and deviate into those footpaths that lead beneath brambles and thick tree trunks into the heart of the forest where live those wild beasts, our fellow men’ ( E 4 490–1). Here the narrator talks of empathy for ‘those wild beasts, our fellow men’, also a traditionally female emotion. Metaphor and connotation, diction, the appeal to the reader’s senses to see, hear, and feel what she is describing, allow her style to become highly aesthetic as it persuades on intuitive and emotional levels through the colour of her prose.

To write her own feminine and feminized version of the essay, Woolf culled from her male predecessors techniques that they themselves did not identify as ‘feminine’. From Pater, Beerbohm, Montaigne, and Hazlitt, she learns techniques that bring a confidential trust between the author and her reader: a voice that reflects the personality of the author, the desire to create pleasure for the reader with a conversational and accessible tone, movement of thought, artful, sensuous, and emotional language, and the use of a painter’s visual imagery. Though she gives the most detailed attention to male essayists, she is aware of her own historical position. Woolf applies the lessons she learns to many essays about individual woman writers and the obscure women who made writing possible for men, including ‘Lives of the Obscure’, ‘The Duchess of Newcastle’, and ‘Outlines’ in The Common Reader , but it is not until A Room of One’s Own that she confronts the problems of writing as a woman about women through a distinctly female rhetoric where emotion and affect become modes of persuasion.

Woolf’s more detailed thoughts on the essay’s power to move its readers are sketched out in ‘The Modern Essay’, written in 1922 for the Times Literary Supplement ( TLS ), which covers fifty years of essay writing, is historical and chronological in structure, and theoretically frames Woolf’s ideas about how ‘certain principles appear to control the chaos’ ( E 4 216) of the essay’s form. In this essay she writes of two Victorian essayists, Pater and Beerbohm, whom she greatly admires. She spends a considerable amount of space defining the history and nature of the essayist’s audience. According to Woolf, the most significant change in audience came at the turn of the nineteenth century, when the Victorian reader changed to a modern one. The change ‘came from a small audience of cultivated people to a larger audience of people who were not quite so cultivated’ ( E 4 220). The modern ‘public needs essays as much as ever … The demand for the light middle not exceeding fifteen hundred words, or in special cases seventeen hundred and fifty, much exceeds the supply’ ( E 4 222). The ‘light middle’ brow reader wants to read but hasn’t the time to wade through a beautifully wrought essay of more than fifteen hundred words. Woolf states that to ‘write weekly, to write daily, to write shortly, to write for busy people catching trains in the morning or for tired people coming home in the evening, is a heart-breaking task for men who know good writing from bad’ ( E 4 223). The challenge for the modern essayist is how to bring pleasure to a reader preoccupied by modern life while revealing the true personality of the writer.

The guiding principle of the essay is that it should ‘give pleasure’, and everything in the essay ‘must be subdued to that end’. A good essay will ‘lay us under a spell with its first word’ and in ‘the interval we may pass through the most various experiences’. It must ‘lap us about and draw its curtain across the world’. This is seldom accomplished by the essayist, Woolf claims, though the reader is partially to blame: ‘Habit and lethargy have dulled his palate’. To produce pleasure in the reader, the essayist must know ‘how to write’. This is not just a matter of reproducing knowledge on a page, but an essay ‘must be so fused by the magic of writing that not a fact juts out, not a dogma tears the surface of the texture’ ( E 4 216). Though the essay’s purpose is to reproduce knowledge, pleasure is derived from the writer’s ability to communicate knowledge while nothing blatant, explicit, or jarring appears on the writing’s surface.

The knowledge communicated is ‘some fierce attachment to an idea. It is on the back of an idea, something believed in with conviction or seen with precision and thus compelling words to shape it’. The good essay ‘must have this permanent quality about it; it must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in, not out’ ( E 4 224). The way the essay does this is to let the personality of the writer come through and embrace the reader, an act seemingly so easy but difficult to achieve. How does an essay achieve its ‘permanent quality’? It is through concrete and visual language, according to Woolf, that the essayist can provoke an affective response from her reader. No phrase is wasted, no word is lost. Her study of the essay’s history, and her attention to her male precursors, taught her how to use language to move her reader’s emotions.

The first writer who taught Woolf how to appeal to affect is Walter Pater, and her response to him defines a style she tries to achieve in her own essays. Perry Meisel’s study on Woolf and Pater establishes Pater’s influence on Woolf by way of Pater’s aestheticism. He traces Pater’s figurative language, particularly the image of the ‘hard gemlike flame’ of aesthetic experience, in Woolf’s novels. 8 Her notion of the ‘moment’, Meisel argues, is Pater’s influence. 9 Woolf also learned from Pater the power of nineteenth-century aestheticism, its use of colourful rhetoric as well as its focus on the reader’s visceral and bodily experience of language. Woolf borrowed from Pater techniques that make her prose appeal to our senses—taste, sight, sound, touch—to give something other than a concrete fact. It is through our bodies’ senses that Woolf communicates to us. If our senses help to define our experience, then the emphasis of emotions, too, are expressions of our physical bodies and part of the vocabulary of aestheticism.

Woolf describes Pater’s aestheticism and how he uses it in his essay on Leonardo da Vinci:

[H]e has somehow contrived to get his material fused. He is a learned man, but it is not knowledge of Leonardo that remains with us, but a vision. … Only here, in the essay, where the bounds are so strict and facts have to be used in their nakedness, the true writer like Walter Pater makes the limitations yield their own quality. Truth will give it authority; from its narrow limits he will get shape and intensity. ( E 4 218)

Even within the conventions of the essay, which limits Pater to ‘facts’, he is able to give these facts their own quality that Woolf names ‘vision’ and ‘truth’. These abstract qualities—not objective facts—are what the essay writer must strive for. Even as Woolf moves through the history of the essay into the twentieth century, she demands these qualities and ultimately passes harsh judgement on the essay writer who can’t achieve them.

Woolf goes on to quote images from Pater’s work, like ‘ “the smiling women and the motion of the great waters” ’, as examples of how Pater’s concrete language appeals to our senses and emotions; his writing reminds us ‘that we have ears and we have eyes’. Pater’s style is one where ‘every atom of its surface shines’ ( E 4 218), a style Woolf finds grounded in the physical world and is also found in her own intensely visual style, her use of metaphor and connotation, and her desire to give the reader a visceral, bodily experience of language. If Pater has flaws for Woolf, it is his insistence on detachment and objectivity in his tone and his inability to write as himself, to use the human, individual voice to speak to his audience.

Unlike Pater, Woolf’s essays distinguish themselves by their constant intimate tone, loaning itself to a more feminine point of view. Her use of first person, singular and plural, is deliberate. It is a rhetoric that appeals to affect and emotion, the visceral response that moves the reader along a train of thought. She learns this from Beerbohm who, unlike Pater, is an essayist who cultivates a speaking voice in his essays. Woolf writes that in Beerbohm’s essays readers of the 1890s found themselves ‘addressed by a voice which seemed to belong to a man no larger than themselves’. Beerbohm uses the ‘essayist’s most proper but most dangerous delicate tool’ by bringing ‘personality into literature’. He does so ‘consciously and purely’ ( E 4 220). We know that the ‘spirit of personality permeates every word he writes’. It is only ‘by knowing how to write that [Beerbohm] can make use in literature of [the] self; the self which, while it is essential to literature, is also its most dangerous opponent’. There are many essayists who show ‘trivial personalities decomposing in the eternity of print’, though Beerbohm ‘possessed to perfection’ the art necessary to bring personality to the essay ( E 4 221). Although the use of first person, especially to write about experience, is typically understood as the feminine mode of writing, Woolf learns from Beerbohm how to bring personality and voice to her writing. Her use of a personal voice is most obvious, for example, in ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’ (1924), where she speaks in first person to pull her reader into her experience of observation on the train. In this essay she also brings to our attention the imaginative impulse that goes into creating a personality, as she does with the character of Mrs Brown, whose personality is so clearly defined that it resonates in the mind long after we have finished reading.

Woolf continued to develop her narrative voice and personality studying other essayists. Two years after publishing ‘The Modern Essay’ Woolf published ‘Montaigne’, which was first a review of Essays of Montaigne for the TLS in 1924 and later published in The Common Reader . She explains the vitality of voice in Montaigne’s essays. We ‘never doubt for an instant that his book was himself’ ( E 4 72). He brings art to ‘this talking of oneself, following one’s own vagaries, giving the whole map, weight, colour, and circumference of the soul in its confusion, its variety, its imperfections’ ( E 4 71). The revelation of the self, to ‘tell the truth about oneself, to discover oneself near at hand’ through language is ‘not easy’ ( E 4 71). Montaigne teaches Woolf that the essayist does not condescend or tell others how to live their lives, but rather traces the flexibility of identity and its ability to reflect self-consciousness in the narrative.

When Woolf writes of Montaigne’s determination to represent his ‘soul’, she is referring to his subjective self, his personality, his voice. This inner self is ‘the strangest of creatures … so complex, so indefinite’ that a man might spend his life trying to discover her ( E 4 74). Yet there is the ‘pleasure of pursuit’ of the self. Montaigne can say nothing of ‘other people’s souls’ since he can ‘say nothing … about his own’ ( E 4 74). Woolf learns from Montaigne how to focus on her personality, her own truth and perception of the world and experience; it is the art of presenting a unique self through the writer’s voice that Woolf practices throughout her essay-writing career.

Montaigne’s essays are then an ‘attempt to communicate a soul’ for ‘Communication is health; communication is truth; communication is happiness’ ( E 4 76). A version of this assertion will reappear in Mrs Dalloway (1925), when Septimus contemplates suicide and his message for the world in Regents Park ( MD 75). The ability to communicate the self is healthy, truthful, and brings contentment. But real communication is difficult. The successful essayist can share her thoughts, ‘to go down boldly’ into the self and ‘bring to light those hidden thoughts which are most diseased; to conceal nothing; to pretend nothing’, to tell her own truth and therefore connect with others ( E 4 76). The essayist’s most authentic communications reveal what is most difficult for the reader to acknowledge—dark thoughts that potentially tell us things about ourselves we don’t want to be aware of. We are all ‘ordinary men and women’ in Montaigne’s essays ( E 4 77). Montaigne shows Woolf how to look deeply into her own responses and feelings, to communicate those to her readers without demanding that they follow her.

For Woolf, William Hazlitt brings together voice and style, and he models for her how to make her language visual and engaging. His essays are written with the language of a visual artist and stylist. It is Hazlitt’s self-consciousness as he writes that Woolf feels is his greatest contribution to the essay form. In her essay ‘William Hazlitt’, a revised TLS review that was republished in The Common Reader: Second Series , she introduces Hazlitt’s essays favourably: ‘His essays are emphatically himself. He has not reticence and he has no shame. He tells us exactly what he thinks’ ( E 5 494). He also tells us ‘exactly what he feels’ ( E 5 494) and has ‘the most intense consciousness of his own experience’ ( E 5 494).

In addition to Hazlitt the thinker there is ‘Hazlitt the artist’. This man is ‘sensuous and emotional, with his feeling for colour and touch … with his sensibility to all those emotions which disturb the reason’ ( E 5 498). As she did with Pater, Woolf comments on the aesthetic qualities of Hazlitt’s essays. She calls attention to the sensuality and emotionality of his language, his ‘feeling for the colour’ of language, and how his ‘sensibility’ is open to all ‘emotions’ that overcome reason ( E 5 499). Hazlitt’s inner conflict is reflected in his style as he vacillates between thinker and artist. In his essays, we sense the movement of his thought: ‘[H]ow violently we are switched from reason to rhapsody—how embarrassingly our austere thinker falls upon our shoulders and demands our sympathy’ ( E 5 499). It is this movement of tone and mood, from logic to emotion, which Woolf admires.

It is Hazlitt’s visual language that Woolf attempts to imitate. Hazlitt has the ‘great gift of picturesque phrasing’ that allows him to “float … over a stretch of shallow thought’ ( E 5 500). He has the ‘freest use of imagery and colour’ and the ‘painter’s imagery’ that keeps his reader engaged. And though there are weaknesses in his essays—they can be ‘dry, garish … monotonous’—each essay has ‘its stress of thought, its thrust of insight, its moment of penetration’. His aim is to ‘communicate his own fervour’, and according to Woolf he succeeds ( E 5 501). Hazlitt’s ability to articulate his ideas through his visual language, to pursue his ideas in the finest detail, allow ‘the parts of his complex and tortured spirit [to] come together in a truce of amity and concord’ ( E 5 502). In the end, there ‘is then no division, no discord, no bitterness’. Hazlitt’s ‘faculties work in harmony and unity’. His sentences are constructed with determination and energy: ‘Sentence follows sentence with the healthy ring and chime of a blacksmith’s hammer on the anvil’. His ‘words glow and the sparks fly; gently they fade and the essay is over’ ( E 5 503). Hazlitt is a craftsman who cobbles his words together with such expertise that they explode with energy. He brings passion to his essays through his imagery, figurative language, and consistency of style. The tension between the thinker and artist is refined and unified with his prose. These qualities become useful for Woolf’s essays and her feminist rhetoric.

Woolf adapts the essay form to express a woman’s experience, sometimes her own, sometimes others’, in literature, education, marriage, and the domestic sphere. From her male precursors and teachers she borrows their more ‘feminine’ and unconventional techniques of style and rhetoric. The freedom to use an individual voice and personality, to show thoughts moving and changing, to communicate a truth that is not a fact, to use language visually and sensually to appeal to our visceral senses are the lessons she learned. These things are used most forcefully in A Room of One’s Own , which on the one hand is a personal essay that utilizes first person, and other hand is a treatise, a call for a collective history of women in culture, meant to appeal to a woman’s sensibility and experience. She not only lists a range of writers who might be considered part of her great tradition of women’s writing—Jane Austen, George Eliot, the Brontës, among others—but she analyses the historic and socioeconomic conditions of women in society. Woolf introduces specific themes, such as female friendship and love, women’s education, the desire to write, and the inability to do so, financial, social, and economic barriers the female artist must confront. These themes have been well discussed by feminist and modernist literary scholars from the time of its publication to the present. In addition to the critical issues that confront women writers, Woolf addresses other innovative and provocative qualities in this long and experimental essay. It is Woolf’s reinvention of the essay form that really reflects her genius and ingenuity. Unlike male essayists before her, she brings gender to her understanding of form, and she goes beyond their influences by adding to and amplifying the rhetoric of affect and emotions.

Written in 1929, A Room of One’s Own challenges our understanding of the personal essay with its mixture of non-fiction and fiction. 10 From the first paragraphs, Woolf undermines our assumptions about the narrator in her essay. Based on a series of lectures Woolf gave in 1928 at Newnham and Girton, the essay immediately calls into question the authority of the speaker: ‘ “I” is only a convenient term for somebody who has not real being’ ( ARO 4). It contains a full-voiced narrative persona whose thought represents the movement of an active and lively mind in direct conversation with her audience.

The accessibility of the speaker is found in her playful tone: ‘But, you may say, we asked you to speak about women and fiction—what has that got to do with a room of one’s own?’ ( ARO 3). The first sentence is an equivocation, an uncertainty, a small rebellion. We know from the start that Woolf does not plan to make us secure in her meaning. Her narrative wanders like the river she sits by to contemplate her subject. The narrator alludes to Montaigne’s tenet that truth and fact are not the same things. She will not be able to tell her audience the ‘truth’ about women and fiction; nor will she be able to hand them ‘after an hour’s discourse a nugget of pure truth to wrap up between the pages of [their] notebooks’ ( ARO 3). This is because ‘fiction here is likely to contain more truth than fact’, and she proposes ‘making use of all the liberties and licences of a novelist’ to tell the ‘story’ of the two days that preceded her lecture ( ARO 4).

She tells us that hers is an ‘opinion upon one minor point’, an idea she is fiercely attached and loyal to throughout the essay, ‘that a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction’ ( ARO 3). Like Hazlitt, she will develop in our presence (if we as readers should consider ourselves part of her audience) ‘as fully and freely’ as she can ‘the train of thought that led [her] to think this’ ( ARO 4). At this point she undermines any confidence the reader might have that Woolf is the narrator or that the speaking ‘I’ is identified with the author. The ‘I’ in A Room of One’s Own becomes a fictional construct, one meant to engage and entertain the reader. In fact, ‘lies will flow’ from her lips, though ‘there may be some truth mixed up with them’ ( ARO 4). It is her audience’s responsibility to ‘seek out this truth and to decide whether any part of it is worth keeping’ ( ARO 4). Here the influence of her predecessors is clear—the essay is meant to address truth, reflect a mind in process, and contain a clear speaking voice (even if the ‘I’ of the narrative is fictional).

She begins to narrate the extended argument A Room of One’s Own will make about the importance of a female literary tradition for women writers. It is not only what she says, but the way she presents her case by appropriating the techniques of essayists like Montaigne and Hazlitt; she never dwells too long on any subject, and her thoughts move along to Oxbridge, an invented university modelled on Oxford and Cambridge. Also invented is Fernham, the women’s college she compares with Oxbridge. Her aesthetic and sensory language to make a socioeconomic argument provokes readers into a visceral and instinctual realm, the realm of connotative and fictive language, where we can see, taste, and feel the differences in social class. The narrator walks by the library at Oxbridge and admires the grand spires and buildings of this awe-inspiring institution. She contemplates how much gold and silver it has taken to build it and eventually describes the sumptuous meal she eats. These images are tangible, vivid, and appeal to a range of senses. In comparison, the language used to describe the women’s college is stark, empty, and has no aesthetic attraction. Colourful, concrete, sensory language is associated with the power and authority of one institution while the lack of aesthetic description reflects the powerlessness of the other. This is done to make an argument, using a more feminine, concrete language to point to inequities of experience.

The use of aesthetic language in her essays, encouraged by Pater and Hazlitt, resembles what we find in Woolf’s great novels from the 1920s, Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse (1927), where she also tries to convey some abstract truth for her readers. What we do not find in those novels, or in many of her earlier essays, is a tone of disaffection with the status quo . What begins in A Room of One’s Own as a kind of restlessness, like the narrator who unconsciously walks off the path, quickly grows into discontent and frustration, dissension, hostility, and anger, and then back. In this essay, Woolf alludes to and describes a range of emotions and uses them as rhetorical tropes to persuade her readers of a female logic, one that is visceral, sensual, and bodily. For Woolf, emotions are the body’s response to experience, and aestheticism’s attachment to the senses is a way Woolf exploits emotions to her purpose.

A Room of One’s Own appeals to the reader’s emotions, names and discusses emotions, and employs tropes of emotion and affect to move the reader to a female and feminist point of view. There is the appeal to enthusiasm, for example, found at the end of the essay when Woolf calls on her readers to work in ‘poverty and obscurity’ ( ARO 86) to help Judith Shakespeare come into being. The most powerful and disturbing affect that Woolf invokes is anger. It is the affect of anger, an emotion that is most provocative, aggressive, inappropriate, and unreasonable that she uses most successfully. Woolf names anger, both in women and men, when she visits the British Museum to research the history of women.

Woolf’s representation of anger has been discussed by feminist critics Jane Marcus and Brenda Silver, among others, who argue that Woolf’s anger (emotion) is repressed, sublimated, or destructive. 11 These readings view anger as a psychological construct rather than a rhetorical figure. They see these passages as Woolf’s expression of her personal anger instead of a rhetorical trope functioning within the tradition of the essay. Rhetorician and feminist Barbara Tomlinson argues for a ‘socioforensic discursive analysis’. 12 Discursive analysis, by focusing on how emotions function rhetorically, allows us to reveal underlying ideologies and authority in social discourse. It demands that we analyse ‘textual emotion in the light of larger discourses about social power’. 13 Narratives move through a ‘modulation’ of emotion, some moments stronger than others, and textual markers of anger in Woolf’s essay reveal what Tomlinson calls its ‘textual vehemence’, a critique of the institutional forces that undermines traditional modes of writing and argument. 14

Sara Ahmed’s work on emotion and affect also helps us to look at what she calls the ‘emotionality of texts’. 15 Her method calls on us to investigate how ‘texts name or perform different emotions’. 16 Most important to understanding Woolf’s use of emotion is Ahmed’s ideas that emotions are ‘performative’ and that they ‘involve speech acts’. She argues that emotion is not ‘in’ texts, but rather ‘effects of the very naming of emotions’. 17 Woolf’s essay names anger, her own and others’, and by doing so reveals and exposes what is hidden under the rhetoric she critiques. In what ways does she ‘perform’ anger in her essay and how does it affect the reader?

In A Room of One’s Own , Woolf hypothesizes that emotions, while expressed through the body’s physical responses and grounded in an aesthetic ethos, are tools of persuasion. In acknowledging the rhetorical power of emotion, Woolf reverses a Victorian taboo against emotional prose, tempts her critics to dismiss her, and, at the same time, evokes an older history of the essay as a genre open to recording a range of responses. The contribution Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own makes to the history of the essay is an increased awareness that we cannot separate gender from personality, voice, and point of view, since these things are a function of the body. Building on Pater’s aestheticism and Hazlitt’s painterly language, Woolf writes a careful, sensual, sensory, detailed prose; in addition to the reader’s aesthetic response, Woolf hopes for an emotional one, where emotion resides in the interaction between the naming of emotion and emotion itself. Woolf’s representation of emotions reveals the ways she makes her own theory of personality in non-fiction; not only does her essay contain a distinct voice and strong sense of audience but she also uses affect to communicate the power of her experience.

The first time we see the representation of anger is in the second chapter of A Room of One’s Own . We find the narrator at the British Museum researching her talk on women and fiction. Woolf takes us through her argument that institutions of great literature, like the British Museum, contain nothing to help the female writer develop as an artist and individual—there is no tradition for her to follow. Her frustration is revealed in her unconscious sketching of Professor X, and the sketch itself reflects her own, as yet unacknowledged, anger. She describes her sketch of the Professor: ‘His expression suggested that he was labouring under some emotion that made him jab his pen on the paper as if he were killing some noxious insect as he wrote. … Whatever the reason, the professor was made to look very angry and very ugly’ ( ARO 24). In the physical expression of his body, we see his anger as he jabs his pen, a phallic allusion, to kill the ‘noxious insect’ he condescends to write about. Not only is he angry, but his anger makes him ‘ugly’, much in the same way women’s anger has historically been represented.

Woolf consciously uses the trope, if not of the ‘angry feminist’, then of the ‘angry woman’. She subverts this highly charged metaphor to argue against the ideological power of the male intellectual institutions by making the Professor angry too, with all the traditional associations of irrationality and inappropriateness. Not only does the narrator become aware of men’s anger toward women, but with a conscious reflection on the sketch, she becomes aware of her own. The narrator knows that what she has done is transfer her anger onto her drawing. The sketch is a manifestation of an emotion, a symptom communicated through her body with her pen to her page. When she reads about the inferiority of women the first thing she notices is her bodily response: her ‘heart leapt’, her ‘cheeks had burnt’, and she was ‘flushed’. Not only are her emotions felt through her body but she understands how it is an anger that ‘mixed itself with all kinds of emotions’ ( ARO 25). The narrator’s anger is expressed through her body and senses and is inextricably linked to the aesthetic response Woolf wants to inspire in her reader. Her sketching begins the act of naming emotion.

Where Professor X is angry at women, and the narrator becomes aware of her anger toward him, the story of Judith Shakespeare escalates anger to violence and rage. Through this visual anecdote Woolf comments on the psycho-manipulation of anger toward women by men. Judith Shakespeare endures her father’s anger through his violence: ‘She cried out that marriage was hateful to her, and for that she was severely beaten by her father. Then he ceased to scold her. He begged her instead not to hurt him, not to shame him in this matter of her marriage’ ( ARO 36). Judith’s ‘hate’ is manifested through her cries, and her body becomes the site of emotion and severe punishment. Knowing that his anger will not change Judith’s mind, her father turns her pain into his ‘hurt’ and ‘shame’, emotions he uses to persuade her. These appeals do not stir pathos in Judith, but rebellion. Judith seeks freedom, circumstances lead to suicide, and the narrator asks: ‘[W]ho shall measure the heat and violence of the poet’s heart when caught and tangled in a woman’s body?’ ( ARO 37). Anger is trapped in the body, which literally feels the sensation of ‘heat’, of passion and fury, but finds no expression. However, Woolf has expressed it for us, by naming the emotion and connecting it to female experience and allowing the reader to feel Judith’s rage through a language that is sensory, visceral, and undoubtedly female.

Woolf writes in A Room of One’s Own that it is ‘useless to go to the great men writers for help, however much one may go to them for pleasure’, just as she goes to the male essayists Montaigne, Pater, Beerbohm, and Hazlitt for pleasure. She too ‘may have learnt a few tricks from them and adapted them to her use’ ( ARO 57). From the history of male essayists Woolf inherited—and reinvented for her own use—the sensual, visceral, and painterly language of aestheticism. Hers is a rhetoric of affect and emotion, and she makes a literary space for herself and the women essayists who follow through a decidedly female strategy—the employment of emotions that in the past were considered weak and unconvincing. The narrator’s anger at the Professor and Judith’s anger with her father reverses conventional readings of the trope of the angry woman by showing how anger moves the subject to action. By making anger explicit, Woolf gives it new power. It is an anger of one’s own and is used both as resistance and a vehicle for change.

Not only does she use anger and rage to illustrate the socioeconomic inequities women suffer but Woolf’s notion of a female literary history also hinges on the emotion of anger. In chapter 4 of A Room of One’s Own , Woolf begins to piece together her literary history. Intense emotions, like anger and fear are flaws in the fiction of women who precede Woolf. She begins with the seventeenth-century poet Lady Winchilsea. Woolf finds her poetry ‘bursting out in indignation’ ( ARO 44). Had she ‘freed her mind from hate and fear and not heaped it with bitterness and resentment’ ( ARO 45) her poetry would have been much better. By the nineteenth century women writers had ‘training in the observation of character, in the analysis of emotion’ ( ARO 51 ). She praises Jane Austen for writing ‘without hate, without bitterness, without fear’ ( ARO 71), while she finds Charlotte Brontë unable to transcend her emotions in writing. Describing Brontë’s anger, Woolf cites a long passage from Jane Eyre that explains how ‘women feel just as men feel … they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer’ ( ARO 52). The entrance of Grace Poole at this point in the novel is an ‘awkward break’ that represents the ‘marks and jerks’ of the novel, and by noticing these ‘one sees that [Brontë] will never get her genius whole and entire’. Woolf finds that Brontë writes ‘in a rage where she should write calmly’ ( ARO 52). But Woolf also acknowledges that ‘she puts her finger exactly not only upon her own defects but upon those of her sex at that time’ ( ARO 53). For Woolf, anger is a deformity in women’s fiction—it scars and stains it.

Woolf was conflicted about the purpose and role of emotions in women’s writing, but she knew that it is through affect that the woman writer writes. Naming emotion engages the reader and influences her to see the world differently. Like the ‘dead poet who was Shakespeare’s sister’, the contemporary woman essayist must draw ‘her life from the lives of the unknown who were her forerunners’ ( ARO 86). Woolf sees herself as part of a cultural family, where the physical body expresses the emotions of experience. Using the techniques of clear prose, the speaking voice, the portrayal of a mind in the process of thought, and concrete and aesthetic imagery to help express the passionate intensity of her subject, she creates A Room of One’s Own , an essay that has profoundly influenced female essayists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Woolf’s late nineteenth-century education in biography, history, and literary criticism creates a foundation for her interest in genealogy, lineage, and canon formation. Her own essays helped her to understand the tradition and development of the genre. She disregarded gender in her evaluations of male essay writers because, beyond techniques and formal qualities she found helpful to her own writing, there were no allusions to gender in their work. She uses her inheritance from Montaigne, Pater, Beerbohm, Hazlitt, and others to create in her own essays, including A Room of One’s Own , what she herself lacked, a defined tradition of women’s essay writing that allows further possibilities in content and form.

Selected Bibliography

Brosnan, Leila , Reading Virginia Woolf’s Essays and Journalism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999 ).

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Dubino, Jeanne , ‘Virginia Woolf from Book Reviewer to Literary Critic, 1904–1918’, in Beth Carole Rosenberg and Jeanne Dubino , eds, Virginia Woolf and the Essay (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997 ).

Fernald, Anne , ‘ A Room of One’s Own, Personal Criticism, and the Essay’, Twentieth Century Literature 40, no. 2 (Summer 1994 ), 165–89.

Goldman, Mark , The Reader’s Art: Virginia Woolf as a Literary Critic (Paris: Mouton & Co., 1976 ).

Gualtieri, Elena , Virginia Woolf’s Essays (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000 ).

McNees, Eleanor , ed., Virginia Woolf: Critical Assessments , 4 vols. (Mountfield: Helm Information, 1994 ).

Rosenberg, Beth , and Jeanne Dubino , eds, Virginia Woolf and the Essay (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997 ).

Saloman, Randi , Virginia Woolf’s Essayism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014 ).

For more on Woolf as a reviewer, see Chapter 17 ‘Woolf as Reviewer-Critic’ in this volume, where Eleanor McNees describes in detail Woolf’s history as a book reviewer. See also Jeanne Dubino , ‘Virginia Woolf from Book Reviewer to Literary Critic, 1904-1918’ in Beth Carole Rosenberg and Jeanne Dubino , eds, Virginia Woolf and the Essay (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), 25–40 .

  Anne Fernald , ‘ “Writing for everybody, for nobody, for our age, for her own”: The Common Reader as Writer’s Manual’, in Eleonora Basso , Lindsey Cordery , Emilio Irigoyen , Claudia Pérez , and Matías Núñez , eds, Virginia Woolf en América Latina: Reflexiones desde Montevideo (Montevideo: Librería Linardi y Risso, 2013), 219–43 .

  Ruth Gruber , Virginia Woolf: The Will to Create as a Woman (New York: Avalon Publishers, 1935) ; Winifred Holtby , Virginia Woolf: A Critical Memoir (London: Bloomsbury, 2007) .

  Virginia Woolf , Collected Essays , ed. Leonard Woolf , 4 vols (London: Hogarth Press, 1967) .

  Andrew McNeillie , Introduction to The Essays of Virginia Woolf 1904-1912 , vol. 1 (New York: Harcourt, 1989) explains the need for republishing Woolf’s essays. Since the publication of Leonard’s 1967 collection, Woolf’s journals, diaries, and shorter fiction, as well as her reading notebooks and a bibliography and guide to her literary sources and allusions have been published. McNeillie’s and Stuart N. Clarke’s editions of the essays are complete with annotations and references.

For a survey of earlier criticism of Woolf’s essays, see Mark Goldman , The Reader’s Art: Virginia Woolf as a Literary Critic (Paris: Mouton & Co., 1976), 1–6 . See also Eleanor McNees , ed., Virginia Woolf Critical Assessments , 4 vols (Mountfield, East Sussex: Helm Information, 1994) .

A series of studies began to emerge in the mid-1990s that re-evaluated the importance of the essays, including Beth Rosenberg and Jeanne Dubino , Virginia Woolf and the Essay (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1997) and Leila Brosnan , Reading Virginia Woolf’s Essays and Journalism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999) ; Elena Gualtieri , Virginia Woolf’s Essays (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000) ; and Randi Saloman’s   Virginia Woolf’s Essayism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014) . These works situate Woolf within the traditions of the essay and non-fiction prose and illustrate Woolf’s deep understanding of the genre. They focus primarily on the aesthetic nature of her essays, her feminism, her journalistic impulses, and the influence of European ‘essayism’.

  Walter Pater , Conclusion to The Renaissance , in Harold Bloom , ed., Selected Writings of Walter Pater (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974), 60 .

See Perry Meisel , The Absent Father: Virginia Woolf and Walter Pater (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1980) .

  Anne Fernald , ‘ A Room of One’s Own, Personal Criticism, and the Essay’, Twentieth Century Literature 40, no. 2 (Summer, 1994), 165–89 . Fernald outlines the qualities of personal prose, which she distinguishes from personal criticism and autobiography. Woolf wrote about ‘thinking as a deeply personal act in her criticism’ (168). Fernald’s discussion ‘of the personal in Virginia Woolf emphasizes thought’ and why ‘various readers come to take Woolf so personally’ (172).

  Jane Marcus , Art and Anger: Reading Like a Woman (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1988) . Brenda Silver , Virginia Woolf Icon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999) .

  Barbara Tomlinson , Feminism and Affect at the Scene of Argument: Beyond the Trope of the Angry Feminist (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2010), 19 .

  Tomlinson, Feminism and Affect , 19.

  Tomlinson, Feminism and Affect , 57.

  Sarah Ahmed , The Cultural Politics of Emotion (New York: Routledge, 2004), 13 .

  Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion , 13.

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Selected Essays  

Virginia woolf  and david bradshaw.

According to Virginia Woolf, the goal of the essay ‘is simply that it should give pleasure…It should lay us under a spell with its first word, and we should only wake, refreshed, with its last.’ One of the best practitioners of the art she analysed so rewardingly, Woolf displayed her essay-writing skills across a wide range of subjects, with all the craftsmanship, substance, and rich allure of her novels. This selection brings together thirty of her best essays, including the famous ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’, a clarion call for modern fiction. She discusses the arts of writing and of reading, and the particular role and reputation of women writers. She writes movingly about her father and the art of biography, and of the London scene in the early decades of the twentieth century. Overall, these pieces are as indispensable to an understanding of this great writer as they are enchanting in their own right.

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Virginia Woolf, author

David Bradshaw, editor

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• Oxford World’s Classics: Selected Essays
• Biographical Preface
• Introduction
• Note on the Text
• Select Bibliography
• A Chronology of Virginia Woolf
• The Decay of Essay-Writing Virginia Woolf
• Modern Fiction Virginia Woolf
• The Modern Essay Virginia Woolf
• How it Strikes a Contemporary Virginia Woolf
• Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown Virginia Woolf
• Character in Fiction Virginia Woolf
• ‘Impassioned Prose’ Virginia Woolf
• How Should one Read a Book? Virginia Woolf
• Poetry, Fiction and the Future Virginia Woolf
• Craftsmanship Virginia Woolf
• The New Biography Virginia Woolf
• On Being Ill Virginia Woolf
• Leslie Stephen Virginia Woolf
• The Art of Biography Virginia Woolf
• The Feminine Note in Fiction Virginia Woolf
• Women Novelists Virginia Woolf
• Women and Fiction Virginia Woolf
• Professions for Women Virginia Woolf
• Memories of a Working Women’s Guild Virginia Woolf
• Why? Virginia Woolf
• Thunder at Wembley Virginia Woolf
• The Cinema Virginia Woolf
• Street Haunting: A London Adventure Virginia Woolf
• The Sun and the Fish Virginia Woolf
• The Docks of London Virginia Woolf
• Oxford Street Tide Virginia Woolf
• Evening Over Sussex: Reflections in a Motor Car Virginia Woolf
• Flying Over London Virginia Woolf
• Why Art Today Follows Politics Virginia Woolf
• Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid Virginia Woolf
• Explanatory Notes
• Oxford University Press

date: 17 May 2024

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How Should One Read a Book?

Read as if one were writing it.

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Young Girl Reading , c. 1868. Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington.

At this late hour of the world’s history, books are to be found in almost every room of the house—in the nursery, in the drawing room, in the dining room, in the kitchen. But in some houses they have become such a company that they have to be accommodated with a room of their own—a reading room, a library, a study. Let us imagine that we are now in such a room; that it is a sunny room, with windows opening on a garden, so that we can hear the trees rustling, the gardener talking, the donkey braying, the old women gossiping at the pump—and all the ordinary processes of life pursuing the casual irregular way which they have pursued these many hundreds of years. As casually, as persistently, books have been coming together on the shelves. Novels, poems, histories, memoirs, dictionaries, maps, directories; black letter books and brand new books; books in French and Greek and Latin; of all shapes and sizes and values, bought for purposes of research, bought to amuse a railway journey, bought by miscellaneous beings, of one temperament and another, serious and frivolous, men of action and men of letters.

Now, one may well ask oneself, strolling into such a room as this, how am I to read these books? What is the right way to set about it? They are so many and so various. My appetite is so fitful and so capricious. What am I to do to get the utmost possible pleasure out of them? And is it pleasure, or profit, or what is it that I should seek? I will lay before you some of the thoughts that have come to me on such an occasion as this. But you will notice the note of interrogation at the end of my title. One may think about reading as much as one chooses, but no one is going to lay down laws about it. Here in this room, if nowhere else, we breathe the air of freedom. Here simple and learned, man and woman are alike. For though reading seems so simple—a mere matter of knowing the alphabet—it is indeed so difficult that it is doubtful whether anybody knows anything about it. Paris is the capital of France; King John signed the Magna Charta; those are facts; those can be taught; but how are we to teach people so to read “Paradise Lost” as to see that it is a great poem, or “Tess of the D’Urbervilles” so as to see that it is a good novel? How are we to learn the art of reading for ourselves? Without attempting to lay down laws upon a subject that has not been legalized, I will make a few suggestions, which may serve to show you how not to read, or to stimulate you to think out better methods of your own.

And directly we begin to ask how should one read a book we are faced by the fact that books differ; there are poems, novels, biographies on the book shelf there; each differs from the other as a tiger differs from a tortoise, a tortoise from an elephant. Our attitude must always be changing, it is clear. From different books we must ask different qualities. Simple as this sounds, people are always behaving as if all books were of the same species—as if there were only tortoises or nothing but tigers. It makes them furious to find a novelist bringing Queen Victoria to the throne six months before her time; they will praise a poet enthusiastically for teaching them that a violet has four petals and a daisy almost invariably ten. You will save a great deal of time and temper better kept for worthier objects if you will try to make out before you begin to read what qualities you expect of a novelist, what of a poet, what of a biographer. The tortoise is bald and shiny; the tiger has a thick coat of yellow fur. So books too differ: one has its fur, the other has its baldness.

To be able to read books without reading them, to skip and saunter, to suspend judgment, to lounge and loaf down the alleys and bye-streets of letters is the best way of rejuvenating one’s own creative power.

Yes; but for all that the problem is not so simple in a library as at the Zoölogical Gardens. Books have a great deal in common; they are always overflowing their boundaries; they are always breeding new species from unexpected matches among themselves. It is difficult to know how to approach them, to which species each belongs. But if we remember, as we turn to the bookcase, that each of these books was written by a pen which, consciously or unconsciously, tried to trace out a design, avoiding this, accepting that, adventuring the other; if we try to follow the writer in his experiment from the first word to the last, without imposing our design upon him, then we shall have a good chance of getting hold of the right end of the string.

To read a book well, one should read it as if one were writing it. Begin not by sitting on the bench among the judges but by standing in the dock with the criminal. Be his fellow worker, become his accomplice. Even, if you wish merely to read books, begin by writing them. For this certainly is true—one cannot write the most ordinary little story, attempt to describe the simplest event—meeting a beggar, shall we say, in the street, without coming up against difficulties that the greatest of novelists have had to face. In order that we may realize, however briefly and crudely, the main divisions into which novelists group themselves, let us imagine how differently Defoe, Jane Austen, and Thomas Hardy would describe the same incident—this meeting a beggar in the street. Defoe is a master of narrative. His prime effort will be to reduce the beggar’s story to perfect order and simplicity. This happened first, that next, the other thing third. He will put in nothing, however attractive, that will tire the reader unnecessarily, or divert his attention from what he wishes him to know. He will also make us believe, since he is a master, not of romance or of comedy, but of narrative, that everything that happened is true. He will be extremely precise therefore. This happened, as he tells us on the first pages of” Robinson Crusoe,” on the first of September. More subtly and artfully, he will hypnotize us into a state of belief by dropping out casually some little unnecessary fact—for instance, “my father called me one morning into his chamber, where he was confined by the gout.” His father’s gout is not necessary to the story, but it is necessary to the truth of the story, for it is thus that anybody who is speaking the truth adds some small irrelevant detail without thinking. Further, he will choose a type of sentence which is flowing but not too full, exact but not epigrammatic. His aim will be to present the thing itself without distortion from his own angle of vision. He will meet the subject face to face, four-square, without turning aside for a moment to point out that this was tragic, or that beautiful; and his aim is perfectly achieved.

But let us not for a moment confuse it with Jane Austen’s aim. Had she met a beggar woman, no doubt she would have been interested in the beggar’s story. But she would have seen at once that for her purposes the whole incident must be transformed. Streets and the open air and adventures mean nothing to her, artistically. It is character that interests her. She would at once make the beggar into a comfortable elderly man of the upper middle classes, seated by his fireside at his ease. Then, instead of plunging into the story vigorously and veraciously, she will write a few paragraphs of accurate and artfully seasoned introduction, summing up the circumstances and sketching the character of the gentleman she wishes us to know. “Matrimony as the origin of change was always disagreeable” to Mr. Woodhouse, she says. Almost immediately, she thinks it well to let us see that her words are corroborated by Mr. Woodhouse himself. We hear him talking. “Poor Miss Taylor!—I wish she were here again. What a pity it is that Mr. Weston ever thought of her.” And when Mr. Woodhouse has talked enough to reveal himself from the inside, she then thinks it time to let us see him through his daughter’s eyes. “You got Hannah that good place. Nobody thought of Hannah till you mentioned her.” Thus she shows us Emma flattering him and humoring him. Finally then, we have Mr. Woodhouse’s character seen from three different points of view at once; as he sees himself; as his daughter sees him; and as he is seen by the marvellous eye of that invisible lady Jane Austen herself. All three meet in one, and thus we can pass round her characters free, apparently, from any guidance but our own.

Now let Thomas Hardy choose the same theme—a beggar met in the street—and at once two great changes will be visible. The street will be transformed into a vast and sombre heath; the man or woman will take on some of the size and indistinctness of a statue. Further, the relations of this human being will not be towards other people, but towards the heath, towards man as law-giver, towards those powers which are in control of man’s destiny. Once more our perspective will be completely changed. All the qualities which were admirable in “Robinson Crusoe,” admirable in “Emma,” will be neglected or absent. The direct literal statement of Defoe is gone. There is none of the clear, exact brilliance of Jane Austen. Indeed, if we come to Hardy from one of these great writers we shall exclaim at first that he is “melodramatic” or “unreal” compared with them. But we should bethink us that there are at least two sides to the human soul; the light side and the dark side. In company, the light side of the mind is exposed; in solitude, the dark. Both are equally real, equally important. But a novelist will always tend to expose one rather than the other; and Hardy, who is a novelist of the dark side, will contrive that no clear, steady light falls upon his people’s faces, that they are not closely observed in drawing rooms, that they come in contact with moors, sheep, the sky and the stars, and in their solitude are directly at the mercy of the gods. If Jane Austen’s characters are real in the drawing room, they would not exist at all upon the top of Stonehenge. Feeble and clumsy in drawing rooms, Hardy’s people are large-limbed and vigorous out of doors. To achieve his purpose Hardy is neither literal and four-square like Defoe, nor deft and pointed like Jane Austen. He is cumbrous, involved, metaphorical. Where Jane Austen describes manners, he describes nature. Where she is matter of fact, he is romantic and poetical. As both are great artists, each is careful to observe the laws of his own perspective, and will not be found confusing us (as so many lesser writers do) by introducing two different kinds of reality into the same book.

Yet it is very difficult not to wish them less scrupulous. Frequent are the complaints that Jane Austen is too prosaic, Thomas Hardy too melodramatic. And we have to remind ourselves that it is necessary to approach every writer differently in order to get from him all he can give us. We have to remember that it is one of the qualities of greatness that it brings heaven and earth and human nature into conformity with its own vision. It is by reason of this masterliness of theirs, this uncompromising idiosyncrasy, that great writers often require us to make heroic efforts in order to read them rightly. They bend us and break us. To go from Jane Austen to Hardy, from Peacock to Trollope, from Scott to Meredith, from Richardson to Kipling, is to be wrenched and distorted, thrown this way and then that. Besides, everyone is born with a natural bias of his own in one direction rather than in another. He instinctively accepts Hardy’s vision rather than Jane Austen’s, and, reading with the current and not against it, is carried on easily and swiftly by the impetus of his own bent to the heart of his author’s genius. But then Jane Austen is repulsive to him. He can scarcely stagger through the desert of her novels.

Sometimes this natural antagonism is too great to be overcome, but trial is always worth making. For these difficult and inaccessible books, with all their preliminary harshness, often yield the richest fruits in the end, and so curiously is the brain compounded that while tracts of literature repel at one season, they are appetizing and essential at another.

If, then, this is true—that books are of very different types, and that to read them rightly we have to bend our imaginations powerfully, first one way, then another—it is clear that reading is one of the most arduous and exhausting of occupations. Often the pages fly before us and we seem, so keen is our interest, to be living and not even holding the volume in our hands. But the more exciting the book, the more danger we run of over-reading. The symptoms are familiar. Suddenly the book becomes dull as ditchwater and heavy as lead. We yawn and stretch and cannot attend. The highest flights of Shakespeare and Milton become intolerable. And we say to ourselves—is Keats a fool or am I?—a painful question, a question, moreover, that need not be asked if we realized how great a part the art of not reading plays in the art of reading. To be able to read books without reading them, to skip and saunter, to suspend judgment, to lounge and loaf down the alleys and bye-streets of letters is the best way of rejuvenating one’s own creative power. All biographies and memoirs, all the hybrid books which are largely made up of facts, serve to restore to us the power of reading real books—that is to say, works of pure imagination. That they serve also to impart knowledge and to improve the mind is true and important, but if we are considering how to read books for pleasure, not how to provide an adequate pension for one’s widow, this other property of theirs is even more valuable and important. But here again one should know what one is after. One is after rest, and fun, and oddity, and some stimulus to one’s own jaded creative power. One has left one’s bare and angular tower and is strolling along the street looking in at the open windows. After solitude and concentration, the open air, the sight of other people absorbed in innumerable activities, comes upon us with an indescribable fascination.

The windows of the houses are open; the blinds are drawn up. One can see the whole household without their knowing that they are being seen. One can see them sitting round the dinner table, talking, reading, playing games. Sometimes they seem to be quarrelling—but what about? Or they are laughing—but what is the joke? Down in the basement the cook is reading a newspaper aloud, while the housemaid is making a piece of toast; in comes the kitchen maid and they all start talking at the same moment—but what are they saying? Upstairs a girl is dressing to go to a party. But where is she going? There is an old lady sitting at her bedroom window with some kind of wool work in her hand and a fine green parrot in a cage beside her. And what is she thinking? All this life has somehow come together; there is a reason for it; a coherency in it, could one but seize it. The biographer answers the innumerable questions which we ask as we stand outside on the pavement looking in at the open window. Indeed there is nothing more interesting than to pick one’s way about among these vast depositories of facts, to make up the lives of men and women, to create their complex minds and households from the extraordinary abundance and litter and confusion of matter which lies strewn about. A thimble, a skull, a pair of scissors, a sheaf of sonnets, are given us, and we have to create, to combine, to put these incongruous things together. There is, too, a quality in facts, an emotion which comes from knowing that men and women actually did and suffered these things, which only the greatest novelists can surpass. Captain Scott, starving and freezing to death in the snow, affects us as deeply as any made-up story of adventure by Conrad or Defoe; but it affects us differently. The biography differs from the novel. To ask a biographer to give us the same kind of pleasure that we get from a novelist is to misuse and misread him. Directly he says “John Jones was born at five-thirty in the morning of August 13, I 862,” he has committed himself, focussed his lens upon fact, and if he then begins to romance, the perspective becomes blurred, we grow suspicious, and our faith in his integrity as a writer is destroyed. In the same way fact destroys fiction. If Thackeray, for example, had quoted an actual newspaper account of the Battle of Waterloo in “Vanity Fair,” the whole fabric of his story would have been destroyed, as a stone destroys a bubble.

But it is undoubted that these hybrid books, these warehouses and depositories of facts, play a great part in resting the brain and restoring its zest of imagination. The work of building up a life for oneself from skulls, thimbles, scissors, and sonnets stimulates our interest in creation and rouses our wish to see the work beautifully and powerfully done by a Flaubert or a Tolstoi. Moreover, however interesting facts may be, they are an inferior form of fiction, and gradually we become impatient of their weakness and diffuseness, of their compromises and evasions, of the slovenly sentences which they make for themselves, and are eager to revive ourselves with the greater intensity and truth of fiction.

It is necessary to have in hand an immense reserve of imaginative energy in order to attack the steeps of poetry. Here are none of those gradual introductions, those resemblances to the familiar world of daily life with which the novelist entices us into his world of imagination. All is violent, opposite, unrelated. But various causes, such as bad books, the worry of carrying on life efficiently, the intermittent but powerful shocks dealt us by beauty, and the incalculable impulses of our own minds and bodies frequently put us into that state of mind in which poetry is a necessity. The sight of a crocus in a garden will suddenly bring to mind all the spring days that have ever been. One then desires the general, not the particular; the whole, not the detail; to turn uppermost the dark side of the mind; to be in contact with silence, solitude, and all men and women and not this particular Richard, or that particular Anne. Metaphors are then more expressive than plain statements.

Thus in order to read poetry rightly, one must be in a rash, an extreme, a generous state of mind in which many of the supports and comforts of literature are done without. Its power of make-believe, its representative power, is dispensed with in favor of its extremities and extravagances. The representation is often at a very far remove from the thing represented, so that we have to use all our energies of mind to grasp the relation between, for example, the song of a nightingale and the image and ideas which that song stirs in the mind. Thus reading poetry often seems a state of rhapsody in which rhyme and metre and sound stir the mind as wine and dance stir the body, and we read on, understanding with the senses, not with the intellect, in a state of intoxication. Yet all this intoxication and intensity of delight depend upon the exactitude and truth of the image, on its being the counterpart of the reality within. Remote and extravagant as some of Shakespeare’s images seem, far-fetched and ethereal as some of Keats’s, at the moment of reading they seem the cap and culmination of the thought; its final expression. But it is useless to labor the matter in cold blood. Anyone who has read a poem with pleasure will remember the sudden conviction, the sudden recollection (for it seems sometimes as if we were about to say, or had in some previous existence already said, what Shakespeare is actually now saying), which accompany the reading of poetry, and give it its exaltation and intensity. But such reading is attended, whether consciously or unconsciously, with the utmost stretch and vigilance of the faculties, of the reason no less than of the imagination. We are always verifying the poet’s statements, making a flying comparison, to the best of our powers, between the beauty he makes outside and the beauty we are aware of within. For the humblest among us is endowed with the power of comparison. The simplest (provided he loves reading) has that already within him to which he makes what is given him—by poet or novelist—correspond.

With that saying, of course, the cat is out of the bag. For this admission that we can compare, discriminate, brings us to this further point. Reading is not merely sympathizing and understanding; it is also criticizing and judging. Hitherto our endeavor has been to read books as a writer writes them. We have been trying to understand, to appreciate, to interpret, to sympathize. But now, when the book is finished, the reader must leave the dock and mount the bench. He must cease to be the friend; he must become the judge. And this is no mere figure of speech. The mind seems (“seems,” for all is obscure that takes place in the mind) to go through two processes in reading. One might be called the actual reading; the other the after reading. During the actual reading, when we hold the book in our hands, there are incessant distractions and interruptions. New impressions are always completing or cancelling the old. One’s judgment is suspended, for one does not know what is coming next. Surprise, admiration, boredom, interest, succeed each other in such quick succession that when, at last, the end is reached, one is for the most part in a state of complete bewilderment. Is it good? or bad? What kind of book is it? How good a book is it? The friction of reading and the emotion of reading beat up too much dust to let us find clear answers to these questions. If we are asked our opinion, we cannot give it. Parts of the book seem to have sunk away, others to be starting out in undue prominence. Then perhaps it is better to take up some different pursuit—to walk, to talk, to dig, to listen to music. The book upon which we have spent so much time and thought fades entirely out of sight. But suddenly, as one is picking a snail from a rose, tying a shoe, perhaps, doing something distant and different, the whole book floats to the top of the mind complete. Some process seems to have been finished without one’s being aware of it. The different details which have accumulated in reading assemble themselves in their proper places. The book takes on a definite shape; it becomes a castle, a cowshed, a gothic ruin, as the case may be. Now one can think of the book as a whole, and the book as a whole is different, and gives one a different emotion, from the book received currently in several different parts. Its symmetry and proportion, its confusion and distortion can cause great delight or great disgust apart from the pleasure given by each detail as it is separately realized. Holding this complete shape in mind it now becomes necessary to arrive at some opinion of the book’s merits, for though it is possible to receive the greatest pleasure and excitement from the first process, the actual reading, though this is of the utmost importance, it is not so profound or so lasting as the pleasure we get when the second process—the after reading—is finished, and we hold the book clear, secure, and (to the best of our powers) complete in our minds.

But how, we may ask, are we to decide any of these questions—is it good, or is it bad?—how good is it, how bad is it? Not much help can be looked for from outside. Critics abound; criticisms pullulate; but minds differ too much to admit of close correspondence in matters of detail, and nothing is more disastrous than to crush one’s own foot into another person’s shoe. When we want to decide a particular case, we can best help ourselves, not by reading criticism, but by realizing our own impression as acutely as possible and referring this to the judgments which we have gradually formulated in the past. There they hang in the wardrobe of our mind—the shapes of the books we have read, as we hung them up and put them away when we had done with them. If we have just read “Clarissa Harlowe,” for example, let us see how it shows up against the shape of “Anna Karenina.” At once the outlines of the two books are cut out against each other as a house with its chimneys bristling and its gables sloping is cut out against a harvest moon. At once Richardson’s qualities—his verbosity, his obliqueness—are contrasted with Tolstoi’s brevity and directness. And what is the reason of this difference in their approach? And how does our emotion at different crises of the two books compare? And what must we attribute to the eighteenth century, and what to Russia and the translator? But the questions which suggest themselves are innumerable. They ramify infinitely, and many of them are apparently irrelevant. Yet it is by asking them and pursuing the answers as far as we can go that we arrive at our standard of values, and decide in the end that the book we have just read is of this kind or of that, has merit in that degree or in this. And it is now, when we have kept closely to our own impression, formulated independently our own judgment, that we can most profitably help ourselves to the judgments of the great critics—Dryden, Johnson, and the rest. It is when we can best defend our own opinions that we get most from theirs.

So, then—to sum up the different points we have reached in this essay—have we found any answer to our question, how should we read a book? Clearly, no answer that will do for everyone; but perhaps a few suggestions. In the first place, a good reader will give the writer the benefit of every doubt; the help of all his imagination; will follow as closely, interpret as intelligently as he can. In the next place, he will judge with the utmost severity. Every book, he will remember, has the right to be judged by the best of its kind. He will be adventurous, broad in his choice, true to his own instincts, yet ready to consider those of other people. This is an outline which can be filled, in at taste and at leisure, but to read something after this fashion is to be a reader whom writers respect. It is by the means of such readers that masterpieces are helped into the world.

If the moralists ask us how we can justify our love of reading, we can make use of some such excuse as this. But if we are honest, we know that no such excuse is needed. It is true that we get nothing whatsoever except pleasure from reading; it is true that the wisest of us is unable to say what that pleasure may be. But that pleasure—mysterious, unknown, useless as it is—is enough. That pleasure is so curious, so complex, so immensely fertilizing to the mind of anyone who enjoys it, and so wide in its effects, that it would not be in the least surprising to discover, on the day of judgment when secrets are revealed and the obscure is made plain, that the reason why we have grown from pigs to men and women, and come out from our caves, and dropped our bows and arrows, and sat round the fire and talked and drunk and made merry and given to the poor and helped the sick and made pavements and houses and erected some sort of shelter and society on the waste of the world, is nothing but this: we have loved reading.

Rachel Cusk

Renaissance women, fady joudah, you might also like, september twilight, the tolstoyans, thirty clocks strike the hour, new perspectives, enduring writing..

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• current item: no. 4/82
• title: David Copperfield - Part 1
• subject: essay/review
• source: newspaper
• author: Virginia Woolf
• publisher: The Nation and the Athenaeum
• rights holder: N/A
• date: 22nd August 1925
• format: text/plain
• provenance: College of William and Mary
• project: To The Lighthouse
• root: Contextual   +
• subset: Transcriptions   +
• parent: Essays   +
• name: Essays By Virginia Woolf   +

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Virginia Woolf : a collection of critical essays

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Browse the catalog, project type, virginia woolf (1882 - 1941).

Adeline Virginia Woolf (25 January 1882 – 28 March 1941) was an English writer, and one of the foremost modernists of the twentieth century. During the interwar period, Woolf was a significant figure in London literary society and a central figure in the influential Bloomsbury Group of intellectuals. Her most famous works include the novels Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927) and Orlando (1928), and the book-length essay A Room of One's Own (1929), with its famous dictum, "A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction."

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