Virginia Woolf was born on January 25, 1882.
Essays are written. Scholarship is carried on. We take up The Common Reader now, pencil in hand, as a book to be marked up and commented upon. We imagine that we are a little like Virginia herself, sitting up in bed, bent over a text, savoring its words, turnings its pages with delicious expectation. What will we find there to drive forward our imaginations and our fingers at the keyboard? For Woolf would not wish nor expect silence of us. In Woolf’s mind, the habit of reading is surrounded, always, by conversation and writing. But especially by conversation. Her essays are for the unprofessional reader; their style is meant to replicate the rhythm of dinner conversation, impressions traded over tea, arguments developed among friends.
Of course, both the professional and the unprofessional reader have found things to admire and things to contest within the pages of Woolf’s first Common Reader. Published first in 1925, it is a collection of essays representing her best literary criticism to that date, as well as her particular, peculiar reading habits. It opens a range of questions that Woolf had been contemplating at that time and continued to decipher in later writings -- the role of the critic, the place of women in literature and society, the difficulties of reading across languages and cultures, and the relationship between reading and writing.
It is a collection replete with tensions. For example, Woolf was skeptical of the work of professional scholars, but was well-educated and intelligent enough to produce exceptional scholarship herself. In the first essay of The Common Reader, she plunges into that realm of scholarship relegated, at the time, almost entirely to men -- Greek literature. She begins by gesturing to the difficulty of piecing together history using the scraps and shards that remain. How, she asks, can scholars say anything at all about the literature of the Greeks if they aren’t certain how the words sounded, how the dramas were acted, what constituted the context in which jokes were funny, allusions meaningful? She compares the abundance of information and associations that help us to envision Chaucer’s world and so appreciate his work to the paucity of biographical information about Sophocles or Sappho; likewise, we might compare the abundant record that Woolf left us of her daily life, her social engagements, and her inner thoughts to the lack of both those other, earlier records.
According to Woolf’s rules, to know something about the personal life and the social world of the writer allows the reader to more closely collaborate with the author of the text. Furthermore, in her essay on the eighteenth century Greek scholar, Dr. Bentley, she suggests that knowledge of the personality of a writer sometimes leads us to return and reexamine their work, not always in their favor. We know much about Virginia Woolf, from her long affair with Vita Sackville-West, to her troubled periods of depression, to her clashes with the live-in cook, Nelly. It is “the Nelly question,” as Woolf referred to it, that reveals one of the ironies, one might even say a hypocrisy, of her life. For while Woolf envisioned the reader of at least this volume as “common,” she was less than affable with the commoners in her life, her household staff. Woolf was especially bothered by Nelly; she resented Nelly’s necessary intrusions into her physical and mental space and, at one point, she expressed disgust and amazement that she and Nelly might have the same opinion on a political issue. The Woolfs finally let Nelly go after eighteen years.
While Woolf’s clashes with Nelly might have had as much to do with personality as with class tension, even the earliest critics of The Common Reader recognized that the reader Woolf imagined was anything but common; the person needed to be well-read and have time and financial security necessary for both the reading and the dinner-table conversations that Woolf envisioned. As the daughter of a respected scholar, the beneficiary of a modest independent income, and a member of a largely upper-class and idiosyncratic intelligentsia, Woolf was far from the commoner. Woolf’s exceptional education -- exceptional both in that it was provided to her and in that she made such good use of it -- opened to her the world of belles-lettres and its associations of high-brow scholars, but simultaneously closed to her the real worlds of those below her own social class.
But we ought not to find fault. The private lessons in Greek, which Virginia received as a teenager, ultimately enabled her to stake a claim as the intellectual equal of the Cambridge-educated scholar. In the roughly sixteen pages of her essay, “On Not Knowing Greek,” Woolf comments upon Sophocles, Euripides, Aeschylus, Socrates, Plato, Sappho, Homer, and Thucydides. And those are just the Greeks. She also mentions Chaucer, Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Proust, Voltaire. This is her resume and she is indicating the breadth of her reading and her ability to articulate a vision of the history and purpose of literature.
Meanwhile, she mocked the certainty with which established (male) scholars made declarations about the classical world and its literature: she chastises “the cloistered disciplinarian mortifying himself in solitude,” that is, in solitary study, considers the limits of interpretation and translation from one language and culture to another, and forces recognition of the private passions of readers, “distorted and romantic…servile and snobbish.” The entire collection stands as a challenge to the official academy which, in 1925, remained nearly inaccessible to women. It defies, not only the privilege afforded to male scholars, but also what Woolf saw as the male style of scholarship: a fruitless exercise of word parsing and source citing. What this parsimonious, uninspired scholarship lacked, and what Woolf here provides, is what she sees as “the woman’s point of view.” She believed that women were different from men and that they had a unique perspective to offer. She considered her novels the best place to define and describe the woman's point of view, and the essays are a merely hint of what was to come in her later fiction and nonfiction writing.
Woolf’s dedication to advancing the educational and vocational opportunities available to women later produced A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas. In The Common Reader as well, Woolf gives special attention to women. Roughly half of the essays take women writers or personalities as their subjects; one of them is Woolf’s essay on the Brontë sisters, Charlotte and Emily.
No other essay in the collection is as exuberant in its style as “Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights.” Woolf praises Emily Brontë especially -- she speaks of her novel’s “huge stature” and Emily Brontë ’s ability to “free life from its dependence on facts.” Meanwhile, Woolf’s particular style, her talent for incorporating sharp critique without appearing harsh, is at work in this essay and makes us reconsider her praise. She doesn’t argue; hers is not a polemic. It falls unapologetically onto the page like the judge’s gavel, final, closed to negotiation, and, therefore, more persuasive. Her words on Charlotte Brontë ’s style exemplify this technique:
For the self-centred and self-limited writers [like Charlotte Brontë and Thomas Hardy] have a power denied the more catholic and broad-minded. Their impressions are close packed and strongly stamped between their narrow walls. Nothing issues from their minds which has not been marked with their own impress. They learn little from other writers and what they adopt they cannot assimilate. Both Hardy and Charlotte Bronte appear to have founded their styles upon a stiff and
decorous journalism. The staple of their prose is awkward and unyielding. But
both with labour and the most obstinate integrity, by thinking every thought
until it has subdued words to itself, have forged for themselves a prose which
takes the mould of their minds entire; which has, into the bargain, a beauty, a
power, a swiftness of its own.
What Woolf admires about the writing of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights is what she calls, rather obliquely, its “poetry.” In a 1931 journal entry, Woolf describes her own novels as expressing “the general, the poetic.” She contrasts this to the playful biography she was then writing, which she associated with historical fact. However, fact versus fiction doesn’t seem to be the distinction that Woolf is making in her essay on the Brontës. It would seem that it has more to do with the personality of the writer. She describes the writing in terms of “ardour,” “passion,” and “emotion.” She is saying, without saying: These two women felt and that is partly what made them good writers. To Woolf’s mind, they failed in the more technical aspects of the craft -- character, allusion, description of any world beyond the one they had lived in or feelings beyond the ones they had felt. But there was something there….something.
Then it creeps in here as it does in other essays, Nature as the ever-present, but inadequately considered, influence upon the writer. For the Brontës, it provided symbols powerful enough to evoke the weight of their emotion. For the Greeks, the Mediterranean climate commanded “dramatic,” “voluble,” “nimbleness of wit.” Its landscape commanded that the actors move with broad gestures, speak with decisive clarity. The wind intrudes on Sir John Paston’s reading of Chaucer and in Chaucer’s story, nature shines “with the hardness and freshness of an actual presence.” It looms as the “large horizon,” the backdrop for the accounts of exploration reviewed in “The Elizabethan Lumber Room,” and was a source of endless curiosity for seventeenth century diary-writer John Evelyn. Then there are Eleanor Ormerod’s obsessions with bugs, grubs and beetles. Nature quietly sneaks into Jane Austen’s last novels, where it had been absent before. Finally, it peeks its tiny head into “The Patron and the Crocus” as the writer’s true subject, the real thing which must be presented rightly at all costs. Virginia Woolf is not going to wax sentimental about the beauties, curiosities, and horrors of Nature, in fact, she scorns those who do; but she gives them their due and leads us to consider the effect of landscape on the mental and emotional “scape” within the writer.
It still remains unclear: what did Woolf mean by labeling a writer “poetic”? “His meaning [is] inseparable from his language,” she says. She speaks of a “mood” rather than specific events dominating the narrative. When analyzing Wuthering Heights, she identifies the presence of universal emotion, freed from overly-complex characters, free of the “I.” At first, it seems the opposite of Woolf’s approach, with her exceptionally inward characters, their idiosyncrasies thrown open, their particulars in full light. Yet Woolf draws the correlation herself and, in fact, her novels were often criticized for weak characterization.
“The meaning of a book,” Woolf goes on to say, “which lies so often apart from what happens and what is said and consists rather in some connection which things in themselves different have had for the writer, is necessarily hard to grasp.” She is not defending the artist so much as she is making a demand on the reader. Read between the lines, she seems to be saying. It is in this way that she heeds us to consider the arrangement of words, the progression of thoughts, in order to fabricate from the myriad words and images within the story a network of associations and significances that is based on the author's original set and yet is the reader’s own. This is how she wants us to read the Brontës; they aren’t really writing about pathetic governesses or a cruel, love-crazed women. These are just the materials, the vessels of the immensity before which we feel. This is how Woolf herself must be read. Where the Brontës trusted to bare narrative, the moors, and storms to convey, not a message, but a mood, Virginia plunged into the (sub)consciousnesses of her lightly sketched characters to lay before the reader all the potential that proceeded from those hung-together impressions.
What resulted was often more mood than story. Woolf’s early stories in Monday or Tuesday, especially “Kew Gardens,” were regarded well by both Woolf and her reviewers for creating mood. In addition to mood, Woolf was adept at collecting and arranging, so carefully, the minutae of the moment into a whole that worked according to its own internal rules. This concern for narrative and linguistic arrangement is present in all of Woolf’s novels and finds its best expression in To the Lighthouse.
The discernment of the meaning of these moods and arrangements is not easy work for the reader. It requires dedication and patience, rereading and contemplation. Where is the reader who will give so much to the work? And who is the “patron,” referred to in the shortest essay of them all, “The Patron and the Crocus,” who will be a good fit for the work that the writer intends to do? Woolf reminds the writer that her choice of patron will determine the type and quality of her writing. But “how to choose rightly?” she asks. “How to write well?”
She doesn’t answer her own question. But by choosing the word “patron” rather than “reader” in this essay, Woolf reminds us that the relationship between the writer and the audience is an economic as well as artistic one. Elsewhere, Woolf demonstrates her discomfort with this arrangement; yet it remains. The writer and the patron are involved in a relationship, an “alliance” that requires their mutual collaboration.
The responsibility works both ways: the writer must truly, carefully present her subject, for which the “crocus” of the essay stands in. The crocus is easily overdone by words that are too sentimental or by descriptions that are forced onto the page in time for the next morning’s paper; then again, it fades when the writer withholds what is within both the crocus and himself. The writer is facilitated in getting it right by an appropriate reader, a patron who can take the piece of writing and envelope it in what Woolf calls, imprecisely, “atmosphere.” It is not that the patron should be unquestioningly supportive of whatever the writer produces. The artistically produced crocus, after all, must be a “real” crocus. Rather, the patron must be dedicated to providing an environment in which that crocus can flourish.
Woolf elaborates a rather sketchy list of qualities that the patron should exhibit, most of which are specific to the time at which she was writing. But the real point of interest to her is, undeniably, the relationship between reading and writing. “They are twins indeed,” she proclaims, “one dying if the other dies, one flourishing if the other flourishes.” And, in this essay at least, she argues that the reader precedes the moment of writing. Is it so? How can the reader be there before there is anything written to be read? Yet she insists: “To know whom to write for is to know how to write.”
The logic of the essay is so circular, and perhaps intentionally so, that she may well be thinking of the writer and the reader as the same person. After all, the writer reads what he has written and is often his sharpest critic. There is a way, also, in which the essay sarcastically mocks the writer who produces his work with a market already in mind, a professional writer who takes advantage of a reading public or, worse, a professional critic, who hasn’t the depth of appreciation for literature that his vocation demands.
However, what the essay reflects most aptly is the tension between writing for oneself and writing for another, a tension that Woolf explored in the protagonist of Orlando and relived over again with the publication of each new book. What would the reviewers say? Would she care? No. Oh, but she liked a wide and approving audience. That was precisely what she hoped to reach with the publication of The Common Reader. It was supposed to be, after all, for the common reader, not the elite, not the scholar, not the professional intellectual. She wrote it at the same time she was writing Mrs. Dalloway; her biographer points out that The Common Reader functioned as a foil to the much less accessible Mrs. Dalloway. It would be safe to say that she was writing at the time for two different audiences; still, she was writing for the audience. Without the reader or patron there to receive the art, it is only partial, for, “Writing is a method of communication; and the crocus is an imperfect crocus until it has been shared.”
Woolf did reach a wide readership during her lifetime. More importantly, her writing has passed one test by lasting through her era and into ours, a test that she considered useful in proving the quality of a writer’s work. There is another test as well, which she hints at in “The Patron and the Crocus” and develops more fully in the final essay of the collection, “How It Strikes a Contemporary.” The writer must believe. “To believe that your impressions hold good for others is to be released from the cramp and confinement of personality.” In the belief that one’s own experience and vision can be molded, through words, into something communicable and identifiable and that this effort is worth venturing, lies the strength of the good writer. Jane Austen is Woolf’s exemplar in this respect: “The little grain of experience once selected, believed in, and set outside herself, could be put precisely in its place, and then she was free to make it, by a process which never yields its secrets to the analyst, into that complete statement which is literature.” While Woolf notes that this “belief” has vanished among the Moderns, she is sure that there is something there, something of literature among her own and her contemporaries’ writings, that would remain. She was right.
*Quotes from The Common Reader are from the Harcourt edition (Orlando, 1984). The four essays quoted are: “On Not Knowing Greek” (23-38); “Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights” (155-161); “The Patron and the Crocus” (206-210); and “How It Strikes a Contemporary” (231-241). Other references: Sir John Paston (11), Chaucer (13), “The Elizabethan Lumber Room” (46), John Evelyn (80), Eleanor Ormerod (125), Jane Austen (144).
*Much of the historical material referenced in this essay draws on Julia Briggs's biography, Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life (Harcourt, Inc.: Orlando, 2005), including: details on Woolf’s relationship with Nelly (286-7); early reviews of The Common Reader (127); women’s access to education (226); Woolf’s opinion on the difference between men and women (126); her diary entry from 1931 (273); the simultaneous writing of The Common Reader and Mrs. Dalloway (119).
*In formulating my comments on “The Patron and the Crocus,” I benefited from Patrick Collier’s article, “Virginia Woolf in the Pay of Booksellers: Commerce, Privacy, Professionalism, Orlando.” Twentieth Century Literature. Winter 2002.
*This essay has many faults, but the one which troubles me most is my insufficient description of the "woman's point of view." It is a phrase that I hope to return to and unpack in light of Woolf's fiction and nonfiction work.
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