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

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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.

Bibliographic Information

Affiliations are at time of print publication..

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: 12 April 2024

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The Essays of Virginia Woolf

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Gould library, engl 353: the writings of virginia woolf, mla international bibliography, woolf in context, socio-cultural context, credo reference.

The companions, guides, and edited collections below feature chapters introducing the scholarly conversation about about a specific topic. ("Woolf, Race, and Empire," "Woolf's Feminism," "Woolf and the Visual Arts," etc.) They are excellent starting places to understand cultural, political, and social contexts as well as arguments and debates in Woolf Studies.

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The Common Reader

Virginia woolf in the yale review.

Over the years, The Yale Review published ten pieces of Virginia Woolf’s nonfiction. Portrait of Virginia Woolf from October 1929. Courtesy Hulton Archive via Getty Images

Annotating the Archives is a new column in which an author reflects on work from our 200-year-old archi ve.

The publication of Mrs. Dalloway in spring 1925—just shy of a century ago—established Virginia Woolf as a novelist of innovative interiority. To the Lighthouse (1927) was published two years later and Orlando (1928) the year after that. The Waves, the book in which she believed she reached new heights (“my first work in my own style!”), appeared in 1931, when she was forty-nine. In the fifth decade of her life, Woolf experienced flourishing literary productivity, romance (her passionate affair with Vita Sackville-West), and optimism, as her fame and income increased. During these years, she recorded in her diary an ever-greater ease, even urgency, in her fiction writing. In November 1931, she wrote, “Oh yes, between 50 & 60 I think I shall write out some very sin­gular books, if I live. I mean I think I am about to embody, at last, the exact shapes my brain holds. What a long toil to reach this beginning.” In 1926, embarking on the second section of To the Lighthouse (“Time Passes”), she remarked in her diary: “Is it non­sense, is it brilliance? Why am I so flown with words, & apparently free to do exactly what I like? . . . Compare this dashing fluency with the excruciating hard wrung battles I had with Mrs Dalloway (save the end).”

1925, though, also saw the publication of Woolf’s influential book of essays, The Common Reader , which gathered previously published literary journalism. Between 1919 and 1924, at the height of her productivity as a journalist, she produced at least 136 articles, many of them short reviews. By the 1930s, having greater financial stability, Woolf wrote less journalism and approached it differently. The easy urgency of her fiction-writing stood in contrast with the slower labor of her essay-writing. Several of the long, substantial essays she produced in this period appeared in The Yale Review , which over the years published ten pieces of Woolf’s nonfiction. " How Should One Read a Book? " (1926), the earliest of these, is perhaps the most comprehensive statement of Woolf’s project for what she called the common reader, and ultimately became the concluding essay in The Common Reader—Second Series (1932). In 1932, on finishing her " Letter to A Young Poet, " in which Woolf exhorts the addressee to throw off fashionable self-involvement and write about the external world, she noted in her diary that “Writing becomes harder & harder. Things I dashed off I now com­press & re-state.”

The marvelous archive of Woolf’s pieces for TYR makes clear that each essay forms part of a cohesive whole: a radical vision of the literary process. In Woolf’s conception, all parties—writer, reader, and critic—are engaged in acts of selfless creativity. In " Byron & Mr. Briggs, " published posthumously by TYR in 1979, she writes, “To make a whole—it is that which we have in common.” Woolf’s essays are stylistically conversational, digressive, and open-ended. They ask us to imagine scenarios, to listen to conversations, and to understand multiple perspectives. Her approach is the more authoritative for never being authoritarian.

the writer’s challenge , according to Woolf, is to create work to which the common reader may respond. “Common reader,” which was a widely familiar term at the time, comes from Samuel Johnson, who had written in 1781, “I rejoice to concur with the common reader; for by the common sense of readers uncorrupted with literary prejudices, after all the refinements of subtilty and the dogmatism of learning, must be finally decided all claim to poet­ical honours.” Adapting Johnson, Woolf puts it more succinctly: “Literature both past and present must rest in the hands of the peo­ple who continue to read it.” Writers, then, who would wish to be read, must consider what this possession by common readers might entail for their work, a matter she addresses in her lovely meditation on the novels of Turgenev , published in the Winter 1934 issue of TYR. Here, she asks why Turgenev, despite his flaws, remains relevant in the twentieth century (as she herself remains relevant in the twenty-first), noting that his books “are curiously of our own time, undecayed, and complete in themselves.” She observes, “A novelist, of course, lives so much deeper down than a critic that his statements are apt to be contradictory and confusing; they seem to break in process of coming to the surface, and not to hold together in the light of reason.” And yet, she goes on, sev­eral of Turgenev’s aperçus about his art prove enduringly germane: “He lays the greatest emphasis upon the need of observation. The novelist must observe everything exactly, in himself and in oth­ers . . . And he must observe as impartially, as objectively as possi­ble.” As Woolf understands Turgenev, dispassion and curiosity are essential both in the making of the fiction and in the characters’ personalities. She notes that “Turgenev’s people are profoundly conscious of what is outside themselves.”

The marvelous archive of Woolf’s pieces for The Yale Review makes clear that each essay forms part of a cohesive whole: a radical vision of the literary process.

For himself, Turgenev insisted upon simply stating the facts of a character or scene, without explanation or expatiation, allow­ing readers to decide for themselves (“ Que le lecteur le discute et le comprenne lui-même ” [Let the reader discuss it and understand it himself]). Turgenev wrote from “the self which is so rid of super­fluities that it is almost impersonal,” so that “no hot and personal feeling has made the emotion [in his fiction] local and transitory; the man who speaks is not a prophet clothed with thunder but a seer who tries to understand.”

The urgency of looking outward, beyond the self, of endeavor­ing to understand others, is at the heart of Woolf’s exhortation to John Lehmann, twenty-five years her junior, in “Letter to a Young Poet” ( TYR , Summer 1932). Lehmann had complained that the genre was in a parlous state. Woolf, in reply, laments that the poetry of their time is mired in the self, “a self that sits alone in a room at night with the blinds drawn . . . the poet is much less interested in what we have in common than in what he has apart: in myself than in himself.” She asks of poetry, “Why should it not once more open its eyes, look out of the window and write about other people?” And further, she insists, “Summon all your courage, exert all your vigilance, invoke all the gifts that nature has been induced to bestow. Then let your rhythmical sense wind itself in and out among men and women, omnibuses, sparrows—whatever comes along the street—until it has strung them together in one harmonious whole.”

It is impossible, reading these lines, not to recall the opening pages of Mrs. Dalloway , in which Woolf’s floating perspective drifts away from Clarissa and out through central London, as it indeed “wind[s] . . . in and out among men and women, omnibuses, sparrows”: Woolf herself has practiced what she preaches, which may be in no small part why her work remains powerful today.

for woolf, it is essential that an aspiring writer master the vibrant English language and its rhythms: “the art of having at one’s beck and call every word in the language, of knowing their weights, colors, sounds, associations” so they “suggest more than they can state.” Achieving this mastery, Woolf proposes, is not simply a matter of extensive reading, but, again, of turning out­ward, beyond the limited self, “imagining that one is not oneself but somebody different. How can you learn to write if you write only about yourself?” Shakespeare is her prime example, capable of inhabiting the grammar and syntax of “Hamlet, Falstaff, and Cleopatra” as well as “the lords, officers, dependents, murderers, and common soldiers”: “It was they who taught him to write, not the begetter of the Sonnets.”

Finally, she insists that the aspiring poet should “publish noth­ing before you are thirty,” allowing for freedom to experiment and, precisely, to learn. “Be silly, be sentimental . . . give the rein to every impulse; commit every fault of style, grammar, taste, and syntax; pour out; tumble over.” If the young poet publishes too soon, “Your freedom will be checked; you will be thinking what people will say; you will write for others when you ought only to be writing for yourself.”

what, then, of the role of the common reader in the literary enter­prise? This question Woolf addresses in multiple essays, including two of the pieces from TYR ’s archives, “How Should One Read a Book?” (1926) and “Byron & Mr. Briggs.”

In the former, she suggests that “To read a book well, one should read it as if one were writing it,” a formulation that evokes Nabokov’s 1948 essay “Good Readers and Good Writers,” in which he proposes that it is both parties together that create a literary work: “Up a trackless slope climbs the master artist, and at the top, on a windy ridge, whom do you think he meets? The pant­ing and happy reader, and there they spontaneously embrace and are linked forever if the book lasts forever.” In Woolf’s view, if the writer is climbing her side of the mountain in a selfless spirit, so too is the reader: “We have to remind ourselves that it is necessary to approach every writer differently in order to get from him all he cangive us.” In other words, great writers inevitably have an “uncom­promising idiosyncrasy” that may “require us to make heroic efforts in order to read them rightly.” She continues: “They bend and break us,” which hardly sounds like Nabokov’s spontaneous embrace, though it offers a usefully stringent vision of the reader’s experience.

Surely Woolf is right that we should not read only what feels immediately attuned to our individual temperament or back­ground. But she is also clear that the reader’s effort to engage with the unfamiliar is merely a first step. After reading, the reader “must cease to be the [author’s] friend [and] must become the judge.” The reader must step back and form an impression: “Now one can think of the book as a whole, and the book as a whole is different . . . from the book received currently in several different parts.”

This is not only a reprise of Woolf’s recurring insistence on “the whole” (in literature as in life), but it is also an account of the balance of constraint and freedom that constitutes the power of the common reader, to whom she grants significant agency in the creation of a literary work. As she notes, again in “Byron & Mr. Briggs,” there is both effort and pleasure involved, because “in the first place reading a great book is always an effort, often a disap­pointment, and sometimes a drudgery,” yet the rewards are consid­erable: “One must gather in beauty, subtlety, the various changes of sound and yet must subdue it, as the poet subdued [them], to some larger design, to art itself; for that perhaps is the circle round the whole. So it seems that the emotions of poetry are not our private emotions.”

in this long essay , Woolf allies the reviewer (herself, in this instance, confronted by a fictitious debut novel, E. K. Sanders’s The Flame of Youth ) with the ordinary reader. Both sides are com­mitted to a deliberate effort to understand a book and, crucially, to enjoy its pleasures: “The truth is that reading is kept up because peo­ple like reading . The common reader is formidable and respectable and even has power over great critics and great masterpieces in the long run because he likes reading [italics mine].”

Prescient, rebellious in its time, this perspective is for us now all but unquestioned: common readers, with the tools of social media and the internet, are aware of the power of our opinions.

Her perspective seems deeply Protestant: “It is I who have read the play. I hold it in my brain. I am directly in touch with Shakespeare. No third person can explain or alter or even throw much light upon our relationship.” Just as Protestants require no papal intermedi­ary for their religious experience, Woolf’s common readers need no critic to endorse or justify their literary one. In fact, she questions the authority of great critics, scoffing at “some man of genius who was so convinced of the truth of what he saw that he imposed his conviction upon others.” She imagines a common reader of the early nineteenth century, Mr. Briggs, a “spectacle maker of Cornhill,” and his many disparate descendants, each with their predilections and distastes: “They read then for pleasure; they read now for pleasure,” once again (!) “with a view to forming a whole.”

As Ursula K. Le Guin noted in a 1989 review of Woolf’s essays, “Virginia Woolf was the most awful democrat” (awful as in “tre­mendous”). “Her identification of, and with, the common reader, and her attack on literary theory, is radical; she is as subversive now as she was 60 years ago.” Thirty-five years later, this claim remains true: had Amazon, Goodreads, and BookTok existed in her time, Woolf the apparent aristocrat would have endorsed the cumulative force of ordinary readers shaping our literary landscape.

Woolf’s radicalism—the product in part of being a woman in an era when she was not granted a formal education or the right to vote, which women did not have in the United Kingdom until 1928—seeks to assure the freedom and agency of writers and read­ers alike. Prescient, rebellious in its time, this perspective is for us now all but unquestioned: common readers, with the tools of social media and the internet, are aware of the power of our opinions. We would be wise to listen to Woolf’s lessons in their entirety, as Le Guin suggests. Woolf, she writes, “asks . . . discipline of us, the com­mon readers, and so lifts us to the artist’s level, honoring us with the belief that we are capable of an understanding more valuable than the intellections of theorists and the reductions of moralizers.”

Just as citizenship is comprised of both privilege and responsibil­ity, Woolf’s vision of the compact between writer and reader involves the opposing qualities of indulgence and effort. She advocates this not for moralistic or pedagogical purposes but rather so that each of us might experience life to the fullest and have the capacity to recognize our experience. Invoking Shakespeare’s ability to illumi­nate our own emotions through the lives of others, Woolf observes, “how much indeed, that would die unexpressed [and unshared and] thus not fully felt in the privacy of our minds becomes bolder, more rational, and infinitely more profound in poetry.” Writer and reader together make experience and vision whole.

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Renaissance women, fady joudah, you might also like, how should one read a book, the novels of turgenev, byron and mr. briggs, the yale review festival 2024.

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Virginia Woolf: a Beacon of Modernist Literature and Feminism

This essay about Virginia Woolf’s significant role in modernist literature and her contributions to feminist literature examines how her innovative narrative techniques and thematic explorations have profoundly impacted both movements. Woolf’s use of stream-of-consciousness to delve into themes of gender, identity, consciousness, and the societal constraints on individual experience highlights her critique of patriarchal norms and the limitations of language. Through seminal works like “Mrs. Dalloway,” “To the Lighthouse,” and essays such as “A Room of One’s Own” and “Three Guineas,” Woolf not only challenged traditional storytelling but also underscored the importance of economic and spatial freedom for women’s creative expression. The essay portrays Woolf as a pivotal figure who navigated the challenges of her era with intellect and grace, leaving a lasting legacy on the literary world and feminist discourse by redefining narrative boundaries and advocating for a more inclusive understanding of human experience.

How it works

Virginia Woolf, an illustrious figure in the domain of modernist literature, etched out a distinctive position that reverberated profoundly within the feminist discourse of her era and beyond. Her literary artistry and avant-garde narrative methodologies established her as a pivotal presence in the modernist movement, while her examination of themes such as gender, identity, and consciousness solidified her contributions to feminist literature. Woolf’s oeuvre transcends mere storytelling; it delves into the intricacies of human experience through the prism of societal norms and the confines of language.

Woolf’s narrative modus operandi, distinguished by its stream-of-consciousness approach, diverged from conventional linear storytelling conventions. This method afforded her the ability to depict the innermost workings of her characters with unparalleled profundity and subtlety, offering insights into their thoughts and emotions in real-time. Through this vantage point, Woolf explored the complexities of individual identity and the ramifications of societal expectations on personal autonomy and self-expression. Her literary works, including “Mrs. Dalloway” and “To the Lighthouse,” epitomize this exploration, presenting characters grappling with the constraints imposed by society and the pursuit of self-actualization.

A staunch advocate for women’s rights and gender parity, Woolf’s essays, notably “A Room of One’s Own” and “Three Guineas,” stand as seminal pieces in feminist literature. In “A Room of One’s Own,” Woolf famously posited that a woman must possess financial independence and a space of her own to engage in fictional writing, underscoring the economic and spatial freedoms requisite for creative expression. This treatise not only critiques the patriarchal milieu of her era but also lays the groundwork for comprehending the intersection of gender and artistic creation. Woolf’s scrutiny of the historical marginalization of women from educational and literary spheres serves as a clarion call for the recognition of female voices in the literary canon.

Furthermore, Woolf’s writings frequently grapple with the limitations of language as a conduit for articulating the full spectrum of human experience, particularly concerning the inner lives of women. She contested prevailing patriarchal narratives and endeavored to carve out a space where the intricacies of women’s experiences could be articulated and esteemed. Woolf’s endeavors to redefine the boundaries of language and narrative structure reflect a broader critique of societal norms that constrain individual expression and identity.

Woolf’s influence on feminist literature extends beyond her thematic explorations, as she also contributed to the cultivation of a literary milieu that embraced female authors and narratives. Her involvement in the Bloomsbury Group, an intellectual collective championing equality and freedom of expression, further underscores her commitment to these ideals. Woolf’s legacy in feminist literature resides not solely in her written works but also in her lived example as a woman who navigated the challenges of her era with poise and intellect.

In summation, Virginia Woolf’s contributions to modernist literature and feminism are profound and multifaceted. Her innovative narrative techniques and thematic explorations of gender, identity, and consciousness have left an indelible imprint on the literary landscape. Woolf’s works prompt readers to interrogate societal norms and the confines of language, advocating for a more inclusive and nuanced comprehension of the human experience. As a figure transcending the conventions of her era, Woolf remains a guiding light for those seeking to plumb the depths of individual identity and expression amidst societal constraints. Her legacy endures as a testament to the potency of literature as a catalyst for change and understanding in the ongoing dialogue on gender and equality.

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PapersOwl.com. (2024). Virginia Woolf: A Beacon of Modernist Literature and Feminism . [Online]. Available at: https://papersowl.com/examples/virginia-woolf-a-beacon-of-modernist-literature-and-feminism/ [Accessed: 12 Apr. 2024]

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PapersOwl.com. (2024). Virginia Woolf: A Beacon of Modernist Literature and Feminism . [Online]. Available at: https://papersowl.com/examples/virginia-woolf-a-beacon-of-modernist-literature-and-feminism/ [Accessed: 12-Apr-2024]

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• Book of the Day

Women writers and the lure of deep England

The country lives of Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Rosamond Lehmann were studies in class, conflict and creativity.

By Margaret Drabble

The first images in this study of three country lives show photographs of Sylvia Townsend Warner and Rosamond Lehmann, each separately struggling with a goat. Sylvia’s goat is called Victoria Ambrosia, but Rosamond’s is unnamed. Virginia Woolf isn’t shown with a goat, but we know that as a child she was called “the Goat”, according to her nephew and biographer Quentin Bell because she was “incalculable, eccentric and prone to accidents”. At her Sussex home of Asheham, more exotically, she became the “Mandrill”, and it was there that she wrote the first draft of a painful and not very successful little story about a doomed marriage called “Lappin and Lapinova”. Virginia’s sister Vanessa kept rabbits, but we are not told if the Woolfs did.

Sylvia seems to have been the most committed countrywoman of the three. Virginia and Leonard Woolf were keen gardeners and Virginia was an acute observer of plant, animal and insect life, but she was a Londoner born and bred. Like Sylvia Plath’s narrator in The Bell Jar , she urgently needed both town and country. (Plath labels this divided allegiance as “neurotic”.) Rosamond had a fine eye for landscapes, flowers, trees and cloudscapes, and wrote of them lyrically; she was brought up in a large household in a much-loved family house in an idyllic stretch of the Thames Valley, where she was accustomed to others doing the hard work while she wrote girlish poetry and picked primroses. (Picking primroses is a recurrent motif in her work.) It is hard to picture Virginia or Rosamond shooting and skinning a rabbit, as Sylvia and her partner Valentine Ackland were wont to do.

Harriet Baker chooses episodes in the lives of Woolf and Lehmann which have not been over-explored, seeking to rescue Woolf’s time in Sussex from comparative neglect. “It would be easy to skip over the years between 1912 and 1919 – the years covering the lease of Asheham… to see them as years diminished by illness and war. Looking to her small notebook, I would like to reclaim this period.” Woolf’s editors and biographers have tended to consign the Asheham notebooks to the category of “nature notes”, and they differ greatly from the much more personal diaries that Woolf kept in later years. Baker makes a virtue of their sparseness and reads them as a means to recovery from the severe bouts of mental illness that had beset Woolf from adolescence and early adulthood, as well as early steps in Woolf’s literary journey. Baker tracks Woolf’s fragile mental state through her records of caterpillars and moths and fungi (“Darwin was her inheritance”) and moves on to examine her loving rivalry with her sister Vanessa, who for a time shared Asheham before setting up her own life (with rabbits) at Charleston, and her less than loving jealousy of Katherine Mansfield, whom she admired, resented, and published at the Hogarth Press.

Baker’s narrative of Woolf’s rural hours moves from one world war to the next, from her first novel The Voyage Out (1915) to Between the Acts , with its pageant of village life, which was published in 1941 after her death. Some haunting images from the Asheham notebooks record the German prisoners of war at work in the fields and the lanes, as the guns boomed over the Channel: “When alone, I smile at the tall German.” And the deprivations of war, when Virginia and Leonard learned to forage for firewood, are summed up in some comments on semolina: “We often eat nothing else for weeks. Try it with a spoonful of lard for supper.”

Rosamond Lehmann, with her sweet tooth and her love of cream, wouldn’t have liked that at all: she is triumphant when she manages to get 2lbs of icing sugar out of the village baker for her daughter Sally’s birthday cake. That’s a lot of icing sugar when there’s a war on, but Rosamond had winning ways. She was accustomed as a child to a grand style of country life, and the house at Ipsden in Oxfordshire where she lived with her second husband Wogan Phillipps was “an elegant red-brick Queen Anne manor house” looking towards the Berkshire Downs: Rosamond was annoyed when Wogan’s ill-bred communist friends put their feet up on the sofas.

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Diamond Cottage, which she had bought in 1939 as a bolt hole from marriage and a possible refuge with a lover, was in the Berkshire village of Aldworth. Lehmann’s first novel Dusty Answer (1927) had been a sensational critical and popular success, and in the 1940s her career was still riding high. It was at Diamond Cottage that she spent her happiest hours with Cecil Day Lewis, who divided his time between her, the Ministry of Information in London, and his wife Mary in Devon, whom he refused at this stage to desert. Rosamond was on the whole content with this arrangement, enjoyed his passionate visits, and negotiated herself a secure place in village life, despite her notoriety and ambiguous marital status. She coped valiantly with the vegetable patch and the “persisting cold, the catastrophes of British plumbing”, and produced some of her best stories. She knew that she was loved and desired, and that was of supreme importance to her. She rubbed along well enough with her aged gardener and with her cook, Mrs Wickens. She made much fun of the farm folk, of the dirty evacuees, of the “adenoidal” village infants (that word “adenoidal” in this period always carries a huge weight of class prejudice), but she made the best of rural living and had a good war.

Sylvia Townsend Warner engaged more deeply with country life, making it the centre of her existence. She was a walker, an explorer, an eccentric, and the account of her purchase and renovation of a not particularly attractive labourer’s cottage in East Chaldon in Dorset in 1930, which she whimsically dubbed “Miss Green”, is well told. By this time she was already an acclaimed novelist and poet, well known for the very English Lolly Willowes (1926) and its exotic successor, Mr Fortune’s Maggot (1927). The detailed description of how she and Valentine learned how to bathe in the copper in the back-kitchen is particularly enjoyable. She was “disdainful of middle-class luxuries”, such as bathrooms.

She had been introduced to the neighbourhood by TF Powys, whose fiction she championed; he was a writer who liked to dwell on unattractive aspects of village life: its meanness, incest, dishonesty, cruelty and violence. Warner’s own work veers between realism, intensely poetic and powerful descriptions of the English landscape, and a kind of jarring folklorist fantasy which makes some readers uneasy. But her positive and active commitment to the community of village life, particularly during the war years, is impressive, and Baker has made a good story out of not very promising records documenting her firefighting, her work with the Women’s Voluntary Service (WVS) in Dorchester, the “Blitzed Libraries Scheme”, and her advice to about how to make soap flakes by grating bars of soap with a cheese grater. She was a useful go-between, linking the evacuees and the WVS volunteers.

It is curious to note how intensely snobbish these writers could be about their neighbours, despite their left-of-centre politics. Woolf’s inability to write well about her social inferiors has been well documented, and Lehmann had a horrible habit of lapsing into fake cockney in the mouths of her fictional characters. Baker comments on Warner’s “unsparing …depictions of her working-class neighbours”, odd in “a communist who had spent a decade writing in their defence”. Country life was not wholly redemptive.

This volume brings sections of three overlapping lives together, perhaps a little arbitrarily. They all needed the countryside for different reasons, but their experiences of war provide a common theme, and create a strong sense of period, a Virago Modern Classic atmosphere. (Both Lehmann and Townsend Warner were successfully relaunched by the Virago founder Carmen Callil in the Seventies and Eighties.) This sense of time and place is occasionally disrupted by an anachronistic usage: I really don’t think autumn days can be “bookended by mist” (though Virginia’s story “Kew Gardens” could more plausibly have been “bookended” by Vanessa’s woodcuts, as Baker writes elsewhere). And the notes and index, although copious, are not as exhaustive as they seem. It would have been good to have been told who wrote the line that Baker quotes from one of Woolf’s last letters, to Rosamond’s brother John Lehmann, in January 1941, two months before she walked into the River Ouse: “What is the phrase I always remember – or forget. Look your last on all things lovely”. Walter de la Mare deserves an acknowledgement: in this strange and moving line, from his poem “Fare Well”, he gave Woolf one of her last moments of beauty.

Rural Hours: The Country Lives of Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Rosamond Lehmann Harriet Baker Allen Lane, 384pp, £25

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This article appears in the 10 Apr 2024 issue of the New Statesman, The Trauma Ward

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