virginia woolf pictures essay

Virginia Woolf Project

Viwop è nato per darti voce - viwop is born to give you voice.

• Dicono di noi
• Virginia Woolf Project stories
• Virginia Woolf Project Multimedia
• Virginia Woolf – Books
• Il progetto
• Le storie di ViWoP
• ViWoP Multimedia
• Nella stanza di Virginia
• Sulle vie della parità – concorso nazionale
• Le sorelle del Virginia Woolf Project
• Sulle vie della parità – concorso nazionale
• Regolamento – Privacy – Copyright

Le nostre sorelle – Our sisters

Sei associazione? Diventa nostra sorella! Partecipa attivamente al Virginia Woolf Project : ci daremo un sostegno reciproco! Scrivici tramite il form nella pagina Regolamento Are you an association? Become our sister! Actively participate in the Virginia Woolf Project : we will give each other mutual support! Write to us via the form on the Rules page

Casa Delle Donne – Terni

Women in white society – Wiws

Italian Virginia Woolf Society – IVWS

EnterprisinGirls

Toponomastica femminile – Women toponomy

IFE Italia – FAE

Se Non Ora, Quando? Snoq Lodi – If Not Now, When?

Virginia Woolf Project su Facebook

Virginia Woolf Project - VIWOP

Virginia Woolf Project su Instagram

© 2024 Virginia Woolf Project — Powered by WordPress

Tema di Anders Noren — Torna su ↑

Privacy Overview

• Divisions and Offices
• Grants Search
• Manage Your Award
• NEH's Application Review Process
• Professional Development
• Grantee Communications Toolkit
• NEH Virtual Grant Workshops
• Awards & Honors
• American Tapestry
• Humanities Magazine
• NEH Resources for Native Communities
• Search Our Work
• Office of Communications
• Office of Congressional Affairs
• Office of Data and Evaluation
• Budget / Performance
• Contact NEH
• Equal Employment Opportunity
• Human Resources
• Information Quality
• National Council on the Humanities
• Office of the Inspector General
• Privacy Program
• State and Jurisdictional Humanities Councils
• Office of the Chair
• NEH-DOI Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative Partnership
• NEH Equity Action Plan
• GovDelivery

Virginia Woolf Was More Than Just a Women’s Writer

She was a great observer of everyday life..

Virginia Woolf, in one of the more lively and often-seen photos of her from the 1930s.

HIP / Art Resource, NY

Virginia Woolf, that great lover of language, would surely be amused to know that, some seven decades after her death, she endures most vividly in popular culture as a pun—within the title of Edward Albee’s celebrated drama,  Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?  In Albee’s play, a troubled college professor and his equally pained wife taunt each other by singing “Who’s Afraid of the Big, Bad Wolf?,” substituting the iconic British writer’s name for that of the fairy-tale villain.

The Woolf reference seems to have no larger meaning, but, perhaps inadvertently, it gives a note of authenticity to the play’s campus setting. Woolf’s experimental novels are much discussed within academia, and her pioneering feminism has given her a special place in women’s studies programs across the country.

It’s a reputation that runs the risk of pigeonholing Woolf as a “women’s writer” and, as a frequent subject of literary theory, the author of books meant to be studied rather than enjoyed. But, in her prose, Woolf is one of the great pleasure-givers of modern literature, and her appeal transcends gender. Just ask Michael Cunningham, author of  The Hours , the popular and critically acclaimed novel inspired by Woolf’s classic fictional work,  Mrs. Dalloway .

“I read  Mrs. Dalloway  for the first time when I was a sophomore in high school,” Cunningham told readers of the  Guardian  newspaper in 2011. “I was a bit of a slacker, not at all the sort of kid who’d pick up a book like that on my own (it was not, I assure you, part of the curriculum at my slacker-ish school in Los Angeles). I read it in a desperate attempt to impress a girl who was reading it at the time. I hoped, for strictly amorous purposes, to appear more literate than I was.”

Cunningham didn’t really understand all of the themes of  Dalloway  when he first read it, and he didn’t, alas, get the girl who had inspired him to pick up Woolf’s novel. But he fell in love with Woolf’s style. “I could see, even as an untutored and rather lazy child, the density and symmetry and muscularity of Woolf’s sentences,” Cunningham recalled. “I thought, wow, she was doing with language something like what Jimi Hendrix does with a guitar. By which I meant she walked a line between chaos and order, she riffed, and just when it seemed that a sentence was veering off into randomness, she brought it back and united it with the melody.”

Woolf’s example helped drive Cunningham to become a writer himself. His novel  The Hours  essentially retells  Dalloway  as a story within a story, alternating between a variation of Woolf’s original narrative and a fictional speculation on Woolf herself. Cunningham’s 1998 novel won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, then was adapted into a 2002 film of the same name, starring Nicole Kidman as Woolf.

“I feel certain she’d have disliked the book—she was a ferocious critic,” Cunningham said of Woolf, who died in 1941. “She’d probably have had reservations about the film as well, though I like to think that it would have pleased her to see herself played by a beautiful Hollywood movie star.”

Kidman created a buzz for the movie by donning a false nose to mute her matinee-perfect face, evoking Woolf as a woman whom family friend Nigel Nicolson once described as “always beautiful but never pretty.”

Woolf, a seminal figure in feminist thought, would probably not have been surprised that a big-screen treatment of her life would spark so much talk about how she  looked  rather than what she  did . But she was also keenly intent on grounding her literary themes within the world of sensation and physicality, so maybe there’s some value, while considering her ideas, in also remembering what it was like to see and hear her.

We know her best in profile. Many pictures of Woolf show her glancing off to the side, like the figure on a coin. The most notable exception is a 1939 photograph by Gisele Freund in which Woolf peers directly into the camera. Woolf hated the photograph—perhaps because, on some level, she knew how deftly Freund had captured her subject. “I loathe being hoisted about on top of a stick for anyone to stare at,” lamented Woolf, who complained that Freund had broken her promise not to circulate the picture.

The most striking aspect of the photo is the intensity of Woolf’s gaze. In both her conversation and her writing, Woolf had a genius for not only looking at a subject, but looking  through  it, teasing out inferences and implications at multiple levels. It’s perhaps why the sea figures so prominently in her fiction, as a metaphor for a world in which the bright currents we see at the surface of reality reveal, upon closer inspection, a depth that goes downward for miles.

Take, for example, Woolf’s widely anthologized essay, “The Death of the Moth,” in which she notices a moth’s last moments of life, then records the experience as a window into the fragility of all existence. “The insignificant little creature now knew death,” Woolf reports.

As I looked at the dead moth, this minute wayside triumph of so great a force over so mean an antagonist filled me with wonder. . . . The moth having righted himself now lay most decently and uncomplainingly composed. Oh yes, he seemed to say, death is stronger than I am.

Woolf takes an equally miniaturist tack in “The Mark on the Wall,” a sketch in which the narrator studies a mark on the wall ultimately revealed as a snail. Although the premise sounds militantly boring—the literary equivalent of watching paint dry—the mark on the wall works as a locus of concentration, like a hypnotist’s watch, allowing the narrator to consider everything from Shakespeare to World War I. In its subtle tracking of how the mind free-associates and its ample use of interior monolog, the sketch serves as a keynote of sorts for the modernist literary movement that Woolf worked so tirelessly to advance.

Woolf’s penetrating sensibility took some getting used to, since she expected those around her to look at the world just as unblinkingly. She didn’t seem to have much patience for small talk. Renowned scholar Hermione Lee wrote an exhaustive 1997 biography of Woolf, yet confesses some anxiety about the prospect, were it possible, of greeting Woolf in person. “I think I would have been afraid of meeting her,” Lee wrote. “I am afraid of not being intelligent enough for her.”

Nicolson, the son of Woolf’s close friend and onetime lover, Vita Sackville-West, had fond memories of hunting butterflies with Woolf when he was a boy—an outing that allowed Woolf to indulge a pastime she’d enjoyed in childhood. “Virginia could tolerate children for short periods, but fled from babies,” he recalled. Nicolson also remembered Woolf’s distaste for bland generalities, even when uttered by youngsters. She once asked the young Nicolson for a detailed report on his morning, including the quality of the sun that had awakened him, and whether he had first put on his right or left sock while dressing.

“It was a lesson in observation, but it was also a hint,” he wrote many years later. “‘Unless you catch ideas on the wing and nail them down, you will soon cease to have any.’ It was advice that I was to remember all my life.”

Thanks to a commentary Woolf did for the BBC, we don’t have to guess what she sounded like. In the 1937 recording, widely available online, Woolf reflects on how the English language pollinates and blooms into new forms. “Royal words mate with commoners,” she tells listeners in a subversive reference to the recent abdication of King Edward VIII, who had forfeited his throne to marry American Wallis Simpson. Woolf’s voice is plummy and patrician, like an English version of Eleanor Roosevelt. Not surprising, perhaps, given Woolf’s origin in one of England’s most prominent families.

She was born Adeline Virginia Stephen on January 25, 1882, the daughter of Sir Leslie Stephen, a celebrated essayist, editor, and public intellectual, and Julia Prinsep Duckworth Stephen. Julia was, according to Woolf biographer Panthea Reid, “revered for her beauty and wit, her self-sacrifice in nursing the ill, and her bravery in facing early widowhood.” Here’s how Woolf scholar Mark Hussey describes the blended household of Virginia’s childhood:

Her parents, Leslie and Julia Stephen, both previously widowed, began their marriage in 1878 with four young children: Laura (1870–1945), the daughter of Leslie Stephen and his first wife, Harriet Thackery (1840–1875); and George (1868–1934), Gerald (1870–1937), and Stella Duckworth (1869–1897), the children of Julia Prinsep (1846–1895) and Herbert Duckworth (1833–1870).

Together, Leslie and Julia had four more children: Virginia, Vanessa (1879–1961), and brothers Thoby (1880–1906) and Adrian (1883–1948). They all lived at 22 Hyde Park Gate in London.

Although Virginia’s brothers and half-brothers got university educations, Woolf was taught mostly at home—a slight that informed her thinking about how society treated women. Woolf’s family background, though, brought her within the highest circles of British cultural life.

“Woolf’s parents knew many of the intellectual luminaries of the late Victorian era well,” Hussey notes, “counting among their close friends novelists such as George Meredith, Thomas Hardy, and Henry James. Woolf’s great-aunt Julia Margaret Cameron was a pioneering photographer who made portraits of the poets Alfred Tennyson and Robert Browning, of the naturalist Charles Darwin, and of the philosopher and historian Thomas Carlyle, among many others.”

Woolf also had free range over her father’s mammoth library and made the most of it. Reading was her passion—and an act, like any passion, to be engaged actively, not sampled passively. In an essay about her father, Woolf recalled his habit of reciting poetry as he walked or climbed the stairs, and the lesson she took from it seems inescapable. Early on, she learned to pair literature with vitality and movement, and that sensibility runs throughout her lively critical essays, gathered in numerous volumes, including her seminal 1925 collection,  The Common Reader . The title takes its cue from Woolf’s appeal to the kind of reader who, like her, was essentially self-educated rather than a professional scholar.

In a 1931 essay, “The Love of Reading,” Woolf describes what it’s like to encounter a literary masterpiece:

The great writers thus often require us to make heroic efforts in order to read them rightly. They bend us and break us. To go from Defoe to Jane Austen, from Hardy to Peacock, from Trollope to Meredith, from Richardson to Rudyard Kipling is to be wrenched and distorted, to be thrown violently this way and that.

As Woolf saw it, reading was a mythic act, not simply a cozy fireside pastime. John Sparrow, reviewing Woolf’s work in the  Spectator , connected her view of reading with her broader literary life: “She writes vividly because she reads vividly.”

The Stephen family’s summers in coastal Cornwall also shaped Woolf indelibly, exposing her to the ocean as a source of literary inspiration—and creating memories she would fictionalize for her acclaimed novel,  To the Lighthouse .

Darker experiences shadowed Woolf’s youth. In writings not widely known until after her death, she described being sexually abused by her older stepbrothers, George and Gerald Duckworth. Scholars have often discussed how this trauma might have complicated her mental health, which challenged her through much of her life. She had periodic nervous breakdowns, and depression ultimately claimed her life.

“Virginia was a manic-depressive, but at that time the illness had not yet been identified and so could not be treated,” notes biographer Reid. “For her, a normal mood of excitement or depression would become inexplicably magnified so that she could no longer find her sane, balanced self.”

The writing desk became her refuge. “The only way I keep afloat is by working,” Woolf confessed. “Directly I stop working I feel that I am sinking down, down.”

Woolf’s mother died in 1895, and her father died in 1904. After her father’s death, Virginia and the other Stephen siblings, now grown, moved to London’s Bloomsbury neighborhood. “It was a district of London,” noted Nicolson, “that in spite of the elegance of its Georgian squares was considered . . . to be faintly decadent, the resort of raffish divorcées and indolent students, loose in its morals and behavior.”

Bloomsbury’s bohemian sensibility suited Woolf, who joined with other intellectuals in her newfound community to form the Bloomsbury Group, an informal social circle that included Woolf’s sister Vanessa, an artist; Vanessa’s husband, the art critic Clive Bell; artist Roger Fry; economist John Maynard Keynes; and writers Lytton Strachey and E. M. Forster. Through Bloomsbury, Virginia also met writer Leonard Woolf, and they married in 1912.

The Bloomsbury Group had no clear philosophy, although its members shared an enthusiasm for leftish politics and a general willingness to experiment with new kinds of visual and literary art.

The Voyage Out , Woolf’s debut novel published in 1915, follows a fairly conventional form, but its plot—a female protagonist exploring her inner life through an epic voyage—suggested that what women saw and felt and heard and experienced was worthy of fiction, independent of their connection to men. In a series of lectures published in 1929 as  A Room of One’s Own , Woolf pointed to the special challenges that women faced in finding the basic necessities for writing—a small income and a quiet place to think.  A Room of One’s Own  is a formative feminist document, but critic Robert Kanigel argues that men are cheating themselves if they don’t embrace the book, too. “Woolf’s is not a Spartan, clippity-clop style such as the one Ernest Hemingway was perfecting in Paris at about the same time,” Kanigel observes. “This is leisurely, ruminative, with long paragraphs that march up and down the page, long trains of thought, and rich digressions almost hypnotic in their effect. And once trapped within the sweet, sticky filament of her web of words, one is left with no wish whatever to be set free.”

During the Woolfs’ marriage, Virginia had flirtations with women and an affair with Sackville-West, a fellow author in her social circle. Even so, Leonard and Virginia remained close, buying a small printing press and starting a publishing house, Hogarth Press, in 1917. Leonard thought it might be a soothing diversion for Virginia—perhaps the first and only case of anyone entering book publishing to advance their sanity.

If Virginia Woolf had never published a single word of her own, her role in Hogarth would have secured her a place in literary history. Thanks to the Woolfs’ tiny press, the world got its first look at the early work of Katherine Mansfield, T. S. Eliot, and Forster. The press also published Virginia’s work, of course, including novels of increasingly daring scope. In  To the Lighthouse , a family summers along the coast, the lighthouse on the horizon suggesting an assuringly fixed universe. But, as the novel unfolds over a decade, we see the subtle working of time and how it shapes the perceptions of various characters.

A young Eudora Welty picked up  To the Lighthouse  and found her own world changed. “Blessed with luck and innocence, I fell upon the novel that once and forever opened the door of imaginative fiction for me, and read it cold, in all its wonder and magnitude,” Welty recalled.

The Woolfs divided their time between London, a city that Virginia loved and often wrote about, and Monk’s House, a modest country home in Sussex the couple was able to buy as Virginia’s career bloomed. Even as she welcomed literary experiment, Woolf grew wistful about the future of the traditional letter, which she saw being eclipsed by the speed of news-gathering and the telephone. Almost as if to disprove her own point, Woolf wrote as many as six letters a day.

“Virginia Woolf was a compulsive letter writer,” said English critic V. S. Pritchett. “She did not much care for the solitude she needed but lived for news, gossip, and the expectancy of talk.”

Her letters, published in several volumes, shimmer with brilliant detail. In a letter written during World War II, for example, Woolf interrupts her message to Benedict Nicolson to go outside and watch the German bombers flying over her house. “The raiders began emitting long trails of smoke,” she reports. “I wondered if a bomb was going to fall on top of me. . . . Then I dipped into your letter again.”

The war proved too much for her. Distraught by its destruction, sensing another nervous breakdown, and worried about the burden it would impose on Leonard, Virginia stuffed her pockets with stones and drowned herself in the River Ouse near Monk’s House on March 28, 1941.

But Cunningham says it would be a mistake to define Woolf by her death. “She did, of course, have her darker interludes,” he concedes. “But when not sunk in her periodic depressions, [she] was the person one most hoped would come to the party; the one who could speak amusingly on just about any subject; the one who glittered and charmed; who was interested in what other people had to say (though not, I admit, always encouraging about their opinions); who loved the idea of the future and all the wonders it might bring.”

Her influence on subsequent generations of writers has been deep. You can see flashes of her vivid sensitivity in the work of Annie Dillard, a bit of her wry critical eye in the recent essays of Rebecca Solnit. Novelist and essayist Daphne Merkin says that despite her edges, Woolf should be remembered as “luminous and tender and generous, the person you would most like to see coming down the path.” Woolf’s legacy marks Merkin’s work, too, although there’s never been anyone else quite like Virginia Woolf.

“The world of the arts was her native territory; she ranged freely under her own sky, speaking her mother tongue fearlessly,” novelist Katherine Anne Porter said of Woolf. “She was at home in that place as much as anyone ever was.”

Danny Heitman is the editor of Phi Kappa Phi’s Forum magazine and a columnist for the  Advocate newspaper in Louisiana. He writes frequently about arts and culture for national publications, including the Wall Street Journal and the  Christian Science Monitor.

Funding information

NEH has funded numerous projects related to Virginia Woolf, including  four  separate  r esearch  fellowships  since 1995 and  three education seminars for schoolteachers  on Woolf’s major novels. In 2010, Loyola University in Chicago, Illinois, received $175,000 to support  WoolfOnline , which documents the biographical, textual, and publication history of To the Lighthouse.

SUBSCRIBE FOR HUMANITIES MAGAZINE PRINT EDITION Browse all issues   Sign up for HUMANITIES Magazine newsletter

• Search Menu
• Sign in through your institution
• Browse content in Arts and Humanities
• Browse content in Archaeology
• Anglo-Saxon and Medieval Archaeology
• Archaeological Methodology and Techniques
• Archaeology by Region
• Archaeology of Religion
• Archaeology of Trade and Exchange
• Biblical Archaeology
• Contemporary and Public Archaeology
• Environmental Archaeology
• Historical Archaeology
• History and Theory of Archaeology
• Industrial Archaeology
• Landscape Archaeology
• Mortuary Archaeology
• Prehistoric Archaeology
• Underwater Archaeology
• Zooarchaeology
• Browse content in Architecture
• Architectural Structure and Design
• History of Architecture
• Residential and Domestic Buildings
• Theory of Architecture
• Browse content in Art
• Art Subjects and Themes
• History of Art
• Industrial and Commercial Art
• Theory of Art
• Biographical Studies
• Byzantine Studies
• Browse content in Classical Studies
• Classical History
• Classical Philosophy
• Classical Mythology
• Classical Literature
• Classical Reception
• Classical Art and Architecture
• Classical Oratory and Rhetoric
• Greek and Roman Epigraphy
• Greek and Roman Law
• Greek and Roman Archaeology
• Greek and Roman Papyrology
• Late Antiquity
• Religion in the Ancient World
• Digital Humanities
• Browse content in History
• Colonialism and Imperialism
• Diplomatic History
• Environmental History
• Genealogy, Heraldry, Names, and Honours
• Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing
• Historical Geography
• History by Period
• History of Agriculture
• History of Education
• History of Emotions
• History of Gender and Sexuality
• Industrial History
• Intellectual History
• International History
• Labour History
• Legal and Constitutional History
• Local and Family History
• Maritime History
• Military History
• National Liberation and Post-Colonialism
• Oral History
• Political History
• Public History
• Regional and National History
• Revolutions and Rebellions
• Slavery and Abolition of Slavery
• Social and Cultural History
• Theory, Methods, and Historiography
• Urban History
• World History
• Browse content in Language Teaching and Learning
• Language Learning (Specific Skills)
• Language Teaching Theory and Methods
• Browse content in Linguistics
• Applied Linguistics
• Cognitive Linguistics
• Computational Linguistics
• Forensic Linguistics
• Grammar, Syntax and Morphology
• Historical and Diachronic Linguistics
• History of English
• Language Acquisition
• Language Variation
• Language Families
• Language Evolution
• Language Reference
• Lexicography
• Linguistic Theories
• Linguistic Typology
• Linguistic Anthropology
• Phonetics and Phonology
• Psycholinguistics
• Sociolinguistics
• Translation and Interpretation
• Writing Systems
• Browse content in Literature
• Bibliography
• Children's Literature Studies
• Literary Studies (Asian)
• Literary Studies (European)
• Literary Studies (Eco-criticism)
• Literary Studies (Modernism)
• Literary Studies (Romanticism)
• Literary Studies (American)
• Literary Studies - World
• Literary Studies (1500 to 1800)
• Literary Studies (19th Century)
• Literary Studies (20th Century onwards)
• Literary Studies (African American Literature)
• Literary Studies (British and Irish)
• Literary Studies (Early and Medieval)
• Literary Studies (Fiction, Novelists, and Prose Writers)
• Literary Studies (Gender Studies)
• Literary Studies (Graphic Novels)
• Literary Studies (History of the Book)
• Literary Studies (Plays and Playwrights)
• Literary Studies (Poetry and Poets)
• Literary Studies (Postcolonial Literature)
• Literary Studies (Queer Studies)
• Literary Studies (Science Fiction)
• Literary Studies (Travel Literature)
• Literary Studies (War Literature)
• Literary Studies (Women's Writing)
• Literary Theory and Cultural Studies
• Mythology and Folklore
• Shakespeare Studies and Criticism
• Browse content in Media Studies
• Browse content in Music
• Applied Music
• Dance and Music
• Ethics in Music
• Ethnomusicology
• Gender and Sexuality in Music
• Medicine and Music
• Music Cultures
• Music and Religion
• Music and Culture
• Music and Media
• Music Education and Pedagogy
• Music Theory and Analysis
• Musical Scores, Lyrics, and Libretti
• Musical Structures, Styles, and Techniques
• Musicology and Music History
• Performance Practice and Studies
• Race and Ethnicity in Music
• Sound Studies
• Browse content in Performing Arts
• Browse content in Philosophy
• Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art
• Epistemology
• Feminist Philosophy
• History of Western Philosophy
• Metaphysics
• Moral Philosophy
• Non-Western Philosophy
• Philosophy of Science
• Philosophy of Action
• Philosophy of Law
• Philosophy of Religion
• Philosophy of Language
• Philosophy of Mind
• Philosophy of Perception
• Philosophy of Mathematics and Logic
• Practical Ethics
• Social and Political Philosophy
• Browse content in Religion
• Biblical Studies
• Christianity
• East Asian Religions
• History of Religion
• Judaism and Jewish Studies
• Qumran Studies
• Religion and Education
• Religion and Health
• Religion and Politics
• Religion and Science
• Religion and Law
• Religion and Art, Literature, and Music
• Religious Studies
• Browse content in Society and Culture
• Cookery, Food, and Drink
• Cultural Studies
• Customs and Traditions
• Ethical Issues and Debates
• Hobbies, Games, Arts and Crafts
• Natural world, Country Life, and Pets
• Popular Beliefs and Controversial Knowledge
• Sports and Outdoor Recreation
• Technology and Society
• Travel and Holiday
• Visual Culture
• Browse content in Law
• Arbitration
• Browse content in Company and Commercial Law
• Commercial Law
• Company Law
• Browse content in Comparative Law
• Systems of Law
• Competition Law
• Browse content in Constitutional and Administrative Law
• Government Powers
• Judicial Review
• Local Government Law
• Military and Defence Law
• Parliamentary and Legislative Practice
• Construction Law
• Contract Law
• Browse content in Criminal Law
• Criminal Procedure
• Criminal Evidence Law
• Sentencing and Punishment
• Employment and Labour Law
• Environment and Energy Law
• Browse content in Financial Law
• Banking Law
• Insolvency Law
• History of Law
• Human Rights and Immigration
• Intellectual Property Law
• Browse content in International Law
• Private International Law and Conflict of Laws
• Public International Law
• IT and Communications Law
• Jurisprudence and Philosophy of Law
• Law and Politics
• Law and Society
• Browse content in Legal System and Practice
• Courts and Procedure
• Legal Skills and Practice
• Primary Sources of Law
• Regulation of Legal Profession
• Medical and Healthcare Law
• Browse content in Policing
• Criminal Investigation and Detection
• Police and Security Services
• Police Procedure and Law
• Police Regional Planning
• Browse content in Property Law
• Personal Property Law
• Study and Revision
• Terrorism and National Security Law
• Browse content in Trusts Law
• Wills and Probate or Succession
• Browse content in Medicine and Health
• Browse content in Allied Health Professions
• Arts Therapies
• Clinical Science
• Dietetics and Nutrition
• Occupational Therapy
• Operating Department Practice
• Physiotherapy
• Radiography
• Speech and Language Therapy
• Browse content in Anaesthetics
• General Anaesthesia
• Neuroanaesthesia
• Browse content in Clinical Medicine
• Acute Medicine
• Cardiovascular Medicine
• Clinical Genetics
• Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics
• Dermatology
• Endocrinology and Diabetes
• Gastroenterology
• Genito-urinary Medicine
• Geriatric Medicine
• Infectious Diseases
• Medical Oncology
• Medical Toxicology
• Pain Medicine
• Palliative Medicine
• Rehabilitation Medicine
• Respiratory Medicine and Pulmonology
• Rheumatology
• Sleep Medicine
• Sports and Exercise Medicine
• Clinical Neuroscience
• Community Medical Services
• Critical Care
• Emergency Medicine
• Forensic Medicine
• Haematology
• History of Medicine
• Browse content in Medical Dentistry
• Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery
• Paediatric Dentistry
• Restorative Dentistry and Orthodontics
• Surgical Dentistry
• Medical Ethics
• Browse content in Medical Skills
• Clinical Skills
• Communication Skills
• Nursing Skills
• Surgical Skills
• Medical Statistics and Methodology
• Browse content in Neurology
• Clinical Neurophysiology
• Neuropathology
• Nursing Studies
• Browse content in Obstetrics and Gynaecology
• Gynaecology
• Occupational Medicine
• Ophthalmology
• Otolaryngology (ENT)
• Browse content in Paediatrics
• Neonatology
• Browse content in Pathology
• Chemical Pathology
• Clinical Cytogenetics and Molecular Genetics
• Histopathology
• Medical Microbiology and Virology
• Patient Education and Information
• Browse content in Pharmacology
• Psychopharmacology
• Browse content in Popular Health
• Caring for Others
• Complementary and Alternative Medicine
• Self-help and Personal Development
• Browse content in Preclinical Medicine
• Cell Biology
• Molecular Biology and Genetics
• Reproduction, Growth and Development
• Primary Care
• Professional Development in Medicine
• Browse content in Psychiatry
• Addiction Medicine
• Child and Adolescent Psychiatry
• Forensic Psychiatry
• Learning Disabilities
• Old Age Psychiatry
• Psychotherapy
• Browse content in Public Health and Epidemiology
• Epidemiology
• Public Health
• Browse content in Radiology
• Clinical Radiology
• Interventional Radiology
• Nuclear Medicine
• Radiation Oncology
• Reproductive Medicine
• Browse content in Surgery
• Cardiothoracic Surgery
• Gastro-intestinal and Colorectal Surgery
• General Surgery
• Neurosurgery
• Paediatric Surgery
• Peri-operative Care
• Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery
• Surgical Oncology
• Transplant Surgery
• Trauma and Orthopaedic Surgery
• Vascular Surgery
• Browse content in Science and Mathematics
• Browse content in Biological Sciences
• Aquatic Biology
• Biochemistry
• Bioinformatics and Computational Biology
• Developmental Biology
• Ecology and Conservation
• Evolutionary Biology
• Genetics and Genomics
• Microbiology
• Molecular and Cell Biology
• Natural History
• Plant Sciences and Forestry
• Research Methods in Life Sciences
• Structural Biology
• Systems Biology
• Zoology and Animal Sciences
• Browse content in Chemistry
• Analytical Chemistry
• Computational Chemistry
• Crystallography
• Environmental Chemistry
• Industrial Chemistry
• Inorganic Chemistry
• Materials Chemistry
• Medicinal Chemistry
• Mineralogy and Gems
• Organic Chemistry
• Physical Chemistry
• Polymer Chemistry
• Study and Communication Skills in Chemistry
• Theoretical Chemistry
• Browse content in Computer Science
• Artificial Intelligence
• Computer Architecture and Logic Design
• Game Studies
• Human-Computer Interaction
• Mathematical Theory of Computation
• Programming Languages
• Software Engineering
• Systems Analysis and Design
• Virtual Reality
• Browse content in Computing
• Business Applications
• Computer Security
• Computer Games
• Computer Networking and Communications
• Digital Lifestyle
• Graphical and Digital Media Applications
• Operating Systems
• Browse content in Earth Sciences and Geography
• Atmospheric Sciences
• Environmental Geography
• Geology and the Lithosphere
• Maps and Map-making
• Meteorology and Climatology
• Oceanography and Hydrology
• Palaeontology
• Physical Geography and Topography
• Regional Geography
• Soil Science
• Urban Geography
• Browse content in Engineering and Technology
• Agriculture and Farming
• Biological Engineering
• Civil Engineering, Surveying, and Building
• Electronics and Communications Engineering
• Energy Technology
• Engineering (General)
• Environmental Science, Engineering, and Technology
• History of Engineering and Technology
• Mechanical Engineering and Materials
• Technology of Industrial Chemistry
• Transport Technology and Trades
• Browse content in Environmental Science
• Applied Ecology (Environmental Science)
• Conservation of the Environment (Environmental Science)
• Environmental Sustainability
• Environmentalist Thought and Ideology (Environmental Science)
• Management of Land and Natural Resources (Environmental Science)
• Natural Disasters (Environmental Science)
• Nuclear Issues (Environmental Science)
• Pollution and Threats to the Environment (Environmental Science)
• Social Impact of Environmental Issues (Environmental Science)
• History of Science and Technology
• Browse content in Materials Science
• Ceramics and Glasses
• Composite Materials
• Metals, Alloying, and Corrosion
• Nanotechnology
• Browse content in Mathematics
• Applied Mathematics
• Biomathematics and Statistics
• History of Mathematics
• Mathematical Education
• Mathematical Finance
• Mathematical Analysis
• Numerical and Computational Mathematics
• Probability and Statistics
• Pure Mathematics
• Browse content in Neuroscience
• Cognition and Behavioural Neuroscience
• Development of the Nervous System
• Disorders of the Nervous System
• History of Neuroscience
• Invertebrate Neurobiology
• Molecular and Cellular Systems
• Neuroendocrinology and Autonomic Nervous System
• Neuroscientific Techniques
• Sensory and Motor Systems
• Browse content in Physics
• Astronomy and Astrophysics
• Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics
• Biological and Medical Physics
• Classical Mechanics
• Computational Physics
• Condensed Matter Physics
• Electromagnetism, Optics, and Acoustics
• History of Physics
• Mathematical and Statistical Physics
• Measurement Science
• Nuclear Physics
• Particles and Fields
• Plasma Physics
• Quantum Physics
• Relativity and Gravitation
• Semiconductor and Mesoscopic Physics
• Browse content in Psychology
• Affective Sciences
• Clinical Psychology
• Cognitive Neuroscience
• Cognitive Psychology
• Criminal and Forensic Psychology
• Developmental Psychology
• Educational Psychology
• Evolutionary Psychology
• Health Psychology
• History and Systems in Psychology
• Music Psychology
• Neuropsychology
• Organizational Psychology
• Psychological Assessment and Testing
• Psychology of Human-Technology Interaction
• Psychology Professional Development and Training
• Research Methods in Psychology
• Social Psychology
• Browse content in Social Sciences
• Browse content in Anthropology
• Anthropology of Religion
• Human Evolution
• Medical Anthropology
• Physical Anthropology
• Regional Anthropology
• Social and Cultural Anthropology
• Theory and Practice of Anthropology
• Browse content in Business and Management
• Business Strategy
• Business History
• Business Ethics
• Business and Government
• Business and Technology
• Business and the Environment
• Comparative Management
• Corporate Governance
• Corporate Social Responsibility
• Entrepreneurship
• Health Management
• Human Resource Management
• Industrial and Employment Relations
• Industry Studies
• Information and Communication Technologies
• International Business
• Knowledge Management
• Management and Management Techniques
• Operations Management
• Organizational Theory and Behaviour
• Pensions and Pension Management
• Public and Nonprofit Management
• Strategic Management
• Supply Chain Management
• Browse content in Criminology and Criminal Justice
• Criminal Justice
• Criminology
• Forms of Crime
• International and Comparative Criminology
• Youth Violence and Juvenile Justice
• Development Studies
• Browse content in Economics
• Agricultural, Environmental, and Natural Resource Economics
• Asian Economics
• Behavioural Finance
• Behavioural Economics and Neuroeconomics
• Econometrics and Mathematical Economics
• Economic Systems
• Economic Methodology
• Economic History
• Economic Development and Growth
• Financial Markets
• Financial Institutions and Services
• General Economics and Teaching
• Health, Education, and Welfare
• History of Economic Thought
• International Economics
• Labour and Demographic Economics
• Law and Economics
• Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics
• Microeconomics
• Public Economics
• Urban, Rural, and Regional Economics
• Welfare Economics
• Browse content in Education
• Adult Education and Continuous Learning
• Care and Counselling of Students
• Early Childhood and Elementary Education
• Educational Equipment and Technology
• Educational Strategies and Policy
• Higher and Further Education
• Organization and Management of Education
• Philosophy and Theory of Education
• Schools Studies
• Secondary Education
• Teaching of a Specific Subject
• Teaching of Specific Groups and Special Educational Needs
• Teaching Skills and Techniques
• Browse content in Environment
• Applied Ecology (Social Science)
• Climate Change
• Conservation of the Environment (Social Science)
• Environmentalist Thought and Ideology (Social Science)
• Natural Disasters (Environment)
• Social Impact of Environmental Issues (Social Science)
• Browse content in Human Geography
• Cultural Geography
• Economic Geography
• Political Geography
• Browse content in Interdisciplinary Studies
• Communication Studies
• Museums, Libraries, and Information Sciences
• Browse content in Politics
• African Politics
• Asian Politics
• Chinese Politics
• Comparative Politics
• Conflict Politics
• Elections and Electoral Studies
• Environmental Politics
• Ethnic Politics
• European Union
• Foreign Policy
• Gender and Politics
• Human Rights and Politics
• Indian Politics
• International Relations
• International Organization (Politics)
• International Political Economy
• Irish Politics
• Latin American Politics
• Middle Eastern Politics
• Political Methodology
• Political Communication
• Political Philosophy
• Political Sociology
• Political Theory
• Political Behaviour
• Political Economy
• Political Institutions
• Politics and Law
• Politics of Development
• Public Administration
• Public Policy
• Quantitative Political Methodology
• Regional Political Studies
• Russian Politics
• Security Studies
• State and Local Government
• UK Politics
• US Politics
• Browse content in Regional and Area Studies
• African Studies
• Asian Studies
• East Asian Studies
• Japanese Studies
• Latin American Studies
• Middle Eastern Studies
• Native American Studies
• Scottish Studies
• Browse content in Research and Information
• Research Methods
• Browse content in Social Work
• Addictions and Substance Misuse
• Adoption and Fostering
• Care of the Elderly
• Child and Adolescent Social Work
• Couple and Family Social Work
• Direct Practice and Clinical Social Work
• Emergency Services
• Human Behaviour and the Social Environment
• International and Global Issues in Social Work
• Mental and Behavioural Health
• Social Justice and Human Rights
• Social Policy and Advocacy
• Social Work and Crime and Justice
• Social Work Macro Practice
• Social Work Practice Settings
• Social Work Research and Evidence-based Practice
• Welfare and Benefit Systems
• Browse content in Sociology
• Childhood Studies
• Community Development
• Comparative and Historical Sociology
• Economic Sociology
• Gender and Sexuality
• Gerontology and Ageing
• Health, Illness, and Medicine
• Marriage and the Family
• Migration Studies
• Occupations, Professions, and Work
• Organizations
• Population and Demography
• Race and Ethnicity
• Social Theory
• Social Movements and Social Change
• Social Research and Statistics
• Social Stratification, Inequality, and Mobility
• Sociology of Religion
• Sociology of Education
• Sport and Leisure
• Urban and Rural Studies
• Browse content in Warfare and Defence
• Defence Strategy, Planning, and Research
• Land Forces and Warfare
• Military Administration
• Military Life and Institutions
• Naval Forces and Warfare
• Other Warfare and Defence Issues
• Peace Studies and Conflict Resolution
• Weapons and Equipment

• < Previous chapter
• Next chapter >

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
• Cite Icon Cite
• Permissions Icon Permissions

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 ).

Google Scholar

Google Preview

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Tomlinson, Feminism and Affect , 19.

  Tomlinson, Feminism and Affect , 57.

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

  Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion , 13.

• About Oxford Academic
• Publish journals with us
• University press partners
• What we publish
• New features  
• Open access
• Institutional account management
• Rights and permissions
• Get help with access
• Accessibility
• Advertising
• Media enquiries
• Oxford University Press
• Oxford Languages
• University of Oxford

Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide

• Copyright © 2024 Oxford University Press
• Cookie settings
• Cookie policy
• Privacy policy
• Legal notice

This Feature Is Available To Subscribers Only

Sign In or Create an Account

This PDF is available to Subscribers Only

For full access to this pdf, sign in to an existing account, or purchase an annual subscription.

Virginia Woolf on the Language of Film and the Evils of Cinematic Adaptations of Literature

By maria popova.

In the spring of 1926, when film was still young and silent, Virginia Woolf found herself at once captivated and concerned by the seventh art and penned an essay exploring its perils and its promise. “The Cinema” was originally published in the New York journal Arts , and a slightly edited version titled “The Movies and Reality” appeared in The New Republic shortly thereafter. It can now be found in The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 4, 1925-1928 ( public library ).

Woolf begins with a reserved meditation on the nature of moving images, which at first glance appear to speak to our most primitive underpinnings and invite a strange kind of cerebral resignation, but upon deeper reflection serve as a lubricant between brain and body:

People say that the savage no longer exists in us, that we are at the fag-end of civilization, that everything has been said already, and that it is too late to be ambitious. But these philosophers have presumably forgotten the movies. They have never seen the savages of the twentieth century watching the pictures. They have never sat themselves in front of the screen and thought how for all the clothes on their backs and the carpets at their feet, no great distance separates them from those bright-eyed naked men who knocked two bars of iron together and heard in that clangour a foretaste of the music of Mozart. The bars in this case, of course, are so highly wrought and so covered over with accretions of alien matter that it is extremely difficult to hear anything distinctly. All is hubble-bubble, swarm and chaos. We are peering over the edge of a cauldron in which fragments of all shapes and savours seem to simmer; now and again some vast form heaves itself up and seems about to haul itself out of chaos. Yet at first sight the art of the cinema seems simple, even stupid. There is the king shaking hands with a football team; there is Sir Thomas Lipton’s yacht; there is Jack Horner winning the Grand National. The eye licks it all up instantaneously, and the brain, agreeably titillated, settles down to watch things happening without bestirring itself to think. For the ordinary eye, the English unaesthetic eye, is a simple mechanism which takes care that the body does not fall down coal-holes, provides the brain with toys and sweetmeats to keep it quiet, and can be trusted to go on behaving like a competent nursemaid until the brain comes to the conclusion that it is time to wake up. What is its purpose, then, to be roused suddenly in the midst of its agreeable somnolence and asked for help? The eye is in difficulties. The eye wants help. The eye says to the brain, ‘Something is happening which I do not in the least understand. You are needed.’ Together they look at the king, the boat, the horse, and the brain sees at once that they have taken on a quality which does not belong to the simple photograph of real life.

Woolf considers the escapist nature of the cinematic experience, and the comforting safety that lies in that escapism:

[The moving pictures] become not more beautiful in the sense in which pictures are beautiful, but shall we call it (our vocabulary is miserably insufficient) more real, or real with a different reality from that which we perceive in daily life? We behold them as they are when we are not there. We see life as it is when we have no part in it. As we gaze we seem to be removed from the pettiness of actual existence. The horse will not knock us down. The king will not grasp our hands. The wave will not wet our feet. From this point of vantage, as we watch the antics of our kind, we have time to feel pity and amusement, to generalize, to endow one man with the attributes of the race. Watching the boat sail and the wave break, we have time to open our minds wide to beauty and register on top of it the queer sensation — this beauty will continue, and this beauty will flourish whether we behold it or not.

Woolf, who nearly three decades earlier had written of imitation as essential for the arts , proceeds with a rather scathing admonition against cinematic adaptations of literature (cue in Life of Pi …) and argues, aptly for the era, that cinema has to find its own stylistic and narrative voice to fully deserve the label of a new art:

But the picture-makers seem dissatisfied with such obvious sources of interest as the passage of time and the suggestiveness of reality. They despise the flight of gulls, ships on the Thames, the Prince of Wales, the Mile End Road, Piccadilly Circus. They want to be improving, altering, making an art of their own — naturally, for so much seems to be within their scope. So many arts seemed to stand by ready to offer their help. For example, there was literature. All the famous novels of the world, with their well-known characters and their famous scenes, only asked, it seemed, to be put on the films. What could be easier and simpler? The cinema fell upon its prey with immense rapacity, and to the moment largely subsists upon the body of its unfortunate victim. But the results are disastrous to both. The alliance is unnatural. Eye and brain are torn asunder ruthlessly as they try vainly to work in couples. The eye says ‘Here is Anna Karenina.’ A voluptuous lady in black velvet wearing pearls comes before us. But the brain says, ‘That is no more Anna Karenina than it is Queen Victoria.’ For the brain knows Anna almost entirely by the inside of her mind — her charm, her passion, her despair. All the emphasis is laid by the cinema upon her teeth, her pearls, and her velvet. Then ‘Anna falls in love with Vronsky’ — that is to say, the lady in black velvet falls into the arms of a gentleman in uniform and they kiss with enormous succulence, great deliberation, and infinite gesticulation, on a sofa in an extremely well-appointed library, while a gardener incidentally mows the lawn. So we lurch and lumber through the most famous novels of the world. So we spell them out in words of one syllable, written, too, in the scrawl of an illiterate schoolboy. A kiss is love. A broken cup is jealousy. A grin is happiness. Death is a hearse. None of these things has the least connexion with the novel that Tolstoy wrote, and it is only when we give up trying to connect the pictures with the book that we guess from some accidental scene — like the gardener mowing the lawn — what the cinema might do if left to its own devices. But what, then, are its devices? If it ceased to be a parasite, how would it walk erect?

Woolf cites the 1920 German Expressionist masterpiece The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari as a paragon of what imaginative cinematic storytelling might look like, then considers symbolism and semiotics as vital tools in the emerging language of film:

If a shadow at a certain moment can suggest so much more than the actual gestures and words of men and women in a state of fear, it seems plain that the cinema has within its grasp innumerable symbols for emotions that have so far failed to find expression. Terror has besides its ordinary forms the shape of a tadpole; it burgeons, bulges, quivers, disappears. Anger is not merely rant and rhetoric, red faces and clenched fists. It is perhaps a black line wriggling upon a white sheet. … Is there, we ask, some secret language which we feel and see, but never speak, and, if so, could this be made visible to the eye? Is there any characteristic which thought possesses that can be rendered visible without the help of words? It has speed and slowness; dartlike directness and vaporous circumlocution. But it has, also, especially in moments of emotion, the picture-making power, the need to lift its burden to another bearer; to let an image run side by side along with it. The likeness of the thought is for some reason more beautiful, more comprehensible, more available, than the thought itself.

And yet, Woolf cautions, cinema, already visual by nature, can’t afford to literalize the metaphors of the poets:

As everybody knows, in Shakespeare the most complex ideas form chains of images through which we mount, changing and turning, until we reach the light of day. But obviously the images of a poet are not to be cast in bronze or traced by pencil. They are compact of a thousand suggestions of which the visual is only the most obvious or the uppermost. Even the simplest image ‘My luve’s like a red, red rose, that’s newly-sprung in June’ presents us with impressions of moisture and warmth and the glow of crimson and the softness of petals inextricably mixed and strung upon the lift of a rhythm which is itself the voice of the passion and hesitation of the lover. All this, which is accessible to words and to words alone, the cinema must avoid.

To thrive and blossom into a true art form, Woolf argues, cinema ought to invent is own language:

Yet if so much of our thinking and feeling is connected with seeing, some residue of visual emotion which is of no use either to painter or to poet may still await the cinema. That such symbols will be quite unlike the real objects which we see before us seems highly probable. Something abstract, something which moves with controlled and conscious art, something which calls for the very slightest help from words or music to make itself intelligible, yet justly uses them subserviently — of such movements and abstractions the films may in time to come be composed. Then indeed when some new symbol for expressing thought is found, the film-maker has enormous riches at his command. The exactitude of reality and its surprising power of suggestion are to be had for the asking. […] How all this is to be attempted, much less achieved, no one at the moment can tell us. We get intimations only in the chaos of the streets, perhaps, when some momentary assembly of colour, sound, movement, suggests that here is a scene waiting a new art to be transfixed. And sometimes at the cinema in the midst of its immense dexterity and enormous technical proficiency, the curtain parts and we behold, far off, some unknown and unexpected beauty. But it is for a moment only. For a strange thing has happened — while all the other arts were born naked, this, the youngest, has been born fully-clothed. It can say everything before it has anything to say. It is as if the savage tribe, instead of finding two bars of iron to play with, had found scattering the seashore fiddles, flutes, saxophones, trumpets, grand pianos by Erard and Bechstein, and had begun with incredible energy, but without knowing a note of music, to hammer and thump upon them all at the same time.

To trace the remarkable evolution of the seventh art between Woolf’s time and today, and the developments that propelled it, see 100 Ideas That Changed Film , then revisit Woolf on what makes love last , writing and consciousness , why the most fertile mind is the androgynous mind , the epiphany that revealed to her what it means to be an artist , and this wonderful illustrated biography of the beloved writer.

— Published February 25, 2013 — https://www.themarginalian.org/2013/02/25/virginia-woolf-on-the-cinema-1926/ —

www.themarginalian.org

PRINT ARTICLE

Email article, filed under, art books culture film history virginia woolf, view full site.

The Marginalian participates in the Bookshop.org and Amazon.com affiliate programs, designed to provide a means for sites to earn commissions by linking to books. In more human terms, this means that whenever you buy a book from a link here, I receive a small percentage of its price, which goes straight back into my own colossal biblioexpenses. Privacy policy . (TLDR: You're safe — there are no nefarious "third parties" lurking on my watch or shedding crumbs of the "cookies" the rest of the internet uses.)

• Tools and Resources
• Customer Services
• Publications
• 18th Century Literature
• 19th Century Literature
• 20th Century Literature
• African American Literature
• African Literature
• American Literature
• Biographical Studies
• British and Irish Literature
• Children's Literature Studies
• European Literature
• Fiction, Novelists, and Prose Writers
• Gender Studies
• Poetry and Poets
• Queer Studies
• Romanticism
• Science Fiction
• Travel Literature
• War Literature
• Women's Writing

Recently viewed (0)

• Save Search

• Find at OUP.com
• Google Preview

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

• Share This Facebook LinkedIn Twitter

You do not currently have access to this content

Please sign in to access the full content.

Access to the full content requires a subscription

• 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: 07 June 2024

• Cookie Policy
• Privacy Policy
• Legal Notice
• Accessibility
• [66.249.64.20|91.193.111.216]
• 91.193.111.216

Character limit 500 /500

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.

Rachel Cusk

Renaissance women, fady joudah, you might also like, how should one read a book, the novels of turgenev, byron and mr. briggs, new perspectives, enduring writing..

Support our award-winning little magazine. Subscribe to The Yale Review and receive four print issues per year.

• Current Students
• Bookable Spaces
• Click & Collect
• Book a Group Study Room
• Research Reserve
• Can't find your Library resources?
• Recommend a book not held by the Library
• Inter-Library Loans
• Academic staff - Recommend a journal or resource
• Databases, Journals and Reading Lists
• Faculty of Medical Sciences
• Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences
• Faculty of Science, Agriculture and Engineering
• Resource Guides
• New Library Resources
• Academic Skills Kit
• Enhance Your Skills
• Self-enrol courses
• FMS Peer Mentors
• Science, Agriculture and Engineering Peer Mentors
• HASS Peer Mentors
• Working in Partnership
• Be Well@NCL
• Study Well@NCL
• Funder DMP Requirements
• Guide to DMPOnline
• Handling of Personal and Sensitive Data
• Guide to data.ncl
• Data Access Statement
• Data Selection
• Preserving and Publishing Data
• data.ncl Reviewing Guidelines
• REF OA Status
• UKRI Policy: Research Articles
• UKRI Policy: Long-form Publications
• Wellcome Trust Policy
• CRUK Policy
• Breast Cancer Now Policy
• Horizon 2020 Policy
• NIHR Policy
• Versus Arthritis
• Parkinson's UK Policy
• Blood Cancer UK Policy
• Apply for long-form publications
• Apply for funds
• Publisher Deals
• Research Publications & Copyright Policy
• Research metrics
• Google Scholar
• Social Media
• Copyright in Publications
• Copyright in Research Data
• Copyright in Theses
• Systematic Reviews
• Case Studies
• UKRN Open Research Programme
• UKRN Newcastle
• ReproducibiliTea
• Open Research Awards
• Scanning and CLA requests
• Digital and Information Skills
• Academic and Study Skills
• Special Collections and Archives
• Request Embedded Teaching
• Resources for teaching
• How we support students
• Research Data Management Training
• Open Access Training
• Information Skills & Using Research Materials
• Academic Skills Development
• Managing Information Training
• Systematic Reviews Development & Support
• Explore our Collections Guide
• Search our Collections
• Plan Your Visit
• Virtual Reading Room Service
• Digitisation Service
• Copyright, Acknowledgement and Re-use
• Restricted access and closure of material
• Teaching using Special Collections
• Cabinet of Curiosities
• Engagement using Special Collections
• Discover our collections
• Past Exhibitions
• Voice from the Wall
• Peter Bennet
• Sean O'Brien Archive
• Michael Chaplin on the Chaplin (Michael) Archive
• Peter Lewis & Margaret Lewis on Flambard Archive
• Peter Mortimer on the IRON Press Archive
• Michael Chaplin on the Chaplin (Sid) Archive
• Selima Hill
• Universities at War
• Petre’s Gradual
• Pybus Operating Theatre Logbook
• Trevelyan Family Albums
• The Bloodaxe Archive
• Gertrude Bell Online
• The Courier Archive
• Brian Alderson Online
• Special Collections Blog
• Virtual Walking Tour of Newcastle University
• Joining the Library
• Sixth Form Study Skills
• Sixth Form Study Skills workshops
• Archives Alive workshops
• Impact report
• Our History
• News & Events

Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth essays

• Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth essays
• Newcastle University
• University Library
• Special Collections & Archives
• Teaching, Research and Engagement
• Research using Special Collections

These three first edition volumes of the Hogarth Essays were printed between 1924 and 1926 by Virginia and Leonard Woolf’s Hogarth Press.  The essays were written by significant twentieth-century writers, poets, artists, economists, and academics and give an insight into important debates and arguments of the time.  Contributors include Roger Fry, Robert Graves, Edith Sitwell, T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster, Bonamy Dobrée, and Willa Muir.

Originally the Hogarth Essays would have been published as individual volumes with cover illustrations by Virginia Woolf’s sister Vanessa Bell who was also a member of the Bloomsbury Group.  The essays have been rebound, sadly losing the original covers and dustjackets, but retaining the original front matter and title pages for each individual essay.  

The Essays include titles by significant twentieth-century writers, poets, artists, economists, and academics such as Roger Fry, Robert Graves, Edith Sitwell, T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster, Bonamy Dobrée, and Willa Muir.  Many were involved with the Bloomsbury Group, and were part of the Modernist movement in the early 20th Century. Their essays provide an insight into important debates and arguments of the time, including about the nature of poetry and the form of the novel, as well as critical pieces on works by Emily Brontë, Henry James and John Dryden.  

The very first essay in the series is Virginia Woolf’s ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’, published in 1924, and adapted from a speech Woolf delivered to the Cambridge Heretics Society – a group of students and intellectuals who challenged traditional authorities and prevailing religious dogmas. Her work responds to a critical essay by Arnold Bennett which argued that the new generation of novelists, including D. H. Lawrence, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Lytton Strachey, failed to create ‘real’ characters in their work. Bennett was also a novelist and journalist, he was criticised by the Bloomsbury Group as being part of an older tradition that needed to be broken with.

Reference: 824.91 HOG ,  The Hogarth essays: b first series  (1925), 20th Century Collection, Newcastle University Special Collections, GB 86.

Potential research ideas

You could use the publication as a starting point to explore modernism in literature and twentieth century culture more generally. Literary criticism often discusses the form of the novel, literary trends, styles and convention. What were the main criticisms discussed in the essays and how important were the Hogarth essays in setting the tone for the Modernist movement of the early 20 th  century?

You could also concentrate on the print run of the Hogarth Essays specifically look at the purpose and the scope of the Hogarth Essays.  How widely read were the Essays? Who were their readership? What key themes or debates did it popularise?  The Hogarth Essays were one of many popular collections of essays.  Perhaps this could lead to more detailed research into independent publishers of the 20 th  Century.  Were Hogarth Press doing anything differently?

Another way to begin research with the Hogarth Essays is to focus specifically on an author.  For example, in Virginia Woolf’s  Mr Bennett & Mrs Brown  what ideas and links can you find in her other works? Can you find traces of the Hogarth Essays in other works published by Virginia and Leonard Woolf?

Perhaps you are more interested in the physicality of the essays and of ownership, book history could be an interesting avenue of research. The original covers have been removed from these essays and they have been rebound.

Selected background reading

The second hogarth essays to be published was:.

Woolf, L., 1927.  Hunting the highbrow . London: L. & Virginia Woolf (Hogarth Press).

For further reading into Hogarth Press and Modernism:

McTaggart, U., 2010.  Opening the Door’: The Hogarth Press as Virginia Woolf's Outsiders' Society. Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, vol. 29, no. 1. Available at:   www.jstor.org/stable/41337032.  (Accessed on 21 Apr. 2020)

Howard, A., 2012.  Dismantling the Modernist Myth: Samuel Beckett and Virginia Woolf in the Literary Marketplace .  Journal of Modern Literature, vol. 36, no. 1, Available at:  https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/jmodelite.36.1.153  (Accessed on 21 Apr. 2020)

Potter, R. (2012)  Modernist literature.  Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Battershill, C., 2018.  Modernist lives biography and autobiography at Leonard and Virgina Woolf's Hogarth Press .  London: Bloomsbury Academic.

What can I find here in Special Collections?

Our  20th Century Collection and  21st Century Collection  include published works associated with the press:

• Another from the series of Hogarth Essays: Graves, R., 1926.  Impenetrability: or, The proper habit of English .  London: L. & Virginia Woolf. 20th C Collection.  821.91 GRA. Twentieth Century Collection. Newcastle University, GB 186.
• Sitwell, E., 1965.  Collected poems. ,  London: Macmillan. 20th C. Coll. 821.91 SIT. Twentieth Century Collection. Newcastle University, GB 186.

The  20th Century Pamphlets includes pamphlets and short publications on world affairs in the Twentieth Century. Many themes are covered largely politics, economics, civil liberty, democracy and religion.  Titles include:

• West, Ranyard. – Psychology and world order
• Hadham, John – God and human progress
• Mao Tse-tung – Problems of art and literature
• Plekhanov, G.V. – The materialist conception of history

The  Thomas Sharp Archive includes letters to and from Leonard Woolf. Sharp was a significant figure in town planning and a major influence on the development of ideas of townscape.  He was approached by Leonard Woolf to write articles about the subject. 

• Woolf, L., 1940. Letter from Woolf to Sharp requesting that he write an article about Reconstruction [manuscript]. THS 5.2.39. Thomas Sharp Archive. Newcastle University, GB 186.
• Sharp, Thomas., 1934. Letter from Sharp to Leonard Wolfe about the agreement for the publication of  A Derelict Area  [manuscript]. THS 41.3.13. Thomas Sharp Archive. Newcastle University, GB 186.

Other correspondence from literary figures and contemporaries can be found in the Jack Common Archive . Common corresponded with E.M. Forster and George Orwell.

What can I find elsewhere?

As publishers and authors Leonard and Virginia Woolf had a large network of important and interesting literary and cultural figures of the 20 th  Century.  To get a better understanding of these relationships and how they might relate to Modernism and works published by Hogarth Press you could look at their personal papers.

• Virginia Woolf’s papers are held in several repositories, but mainly at the  British Library .
• Hogarth Press papers can also be found across  Sussex University, University of Reading and the Archives of the British Psychoanalytical Society .
• Leonard Woolf’s papers can be found in a number of repositories across the country but  Sussex University and King’s College Cambridge  have significant correspondence collections.

For essays and pamphlets published by the Hogarth Press it could be useful to search the  Library Hub Discover  for relevant titles. For example:

• A copy of Thomas Sharp’s pamphlet  A Derelict Area: a study of the south-west Durham coalfield , published in 1935 by the Hogarth Press can be found at Durham University.
• Explore this item
• Potential research question
• Background reading
• Related items in Special Collections
• Related items elsewhere
• Explore more curiosities (back to cabinet)

The Unsaid: The Silence of Virginia Woolf

By Hisham Matar

This essay is from an introduction to a new Italian translation,  by Anna Nadotti, of “To the Lighthouse,” which will be published later this month by Einaudi.

Here is where the artist Adeline Virginia Stephen was born. She lived in this house, at 22 Hyde Park Gate, in west London, for the first twenty-two years of her life. The whitewashed Victorian façade holds the sunlight brightly when the weather is good. It’s a short walk from here to Yeoman’s Row, and in July, 1902, when she was twenty, she went there to have her portrait taken. She was accompanied, I imagine, by her seventy-year-old father, the noted man of letters Sir Leslie Stephen. I picture them moving side by side: she in the white summer dress worn in the portrait, and he in one of the dark suits he was often cased in, his long, unkempt beard hiding the knot of his black silk necktie. They might have gone around the giant dome of the Royal Albert Hall and into Kensington Gore. Then left on to Princes Consort Road, crossing Exhibition Road, continuing to Princes Gardens, before needling through the quiet back mews till they reach Brompton Road. Second on the right is Yeoman’s Row, where the photographer George Charles Beresford had set up his studio that same year.

It was no doubt an anxious time for Beresford. This was an unexpected turn in his career. After spending four years working as a civil engineer in British India, he had contracted malaria and was forced to return to England. He studied art, and now was hoping to establish himself as a leading photographic portraitist. He would do well. A few days from now, the grand Auguste Rodin would walk through the door and sit facing slightly up, pointing his large temple, with its clump of bulging veins, toward the light. Beresford succeeded in capturing something frivolous and majestic in the French sculptor. The following year, he photographed a somewhat bored and melancholy young Winston Churchill. The year after that, Joseph Conrad sat looking into his lens, unable to altogether conceal his quiet, exile’s anxiety. Between 1902 and 1932, Beresford photographed some of the most noted artists, politicians, intellectuals and socialites of the time. Many of the negatives are now held at the National Portrait Gallery.

What Beresford couldn’t have known that day was that his twenty-year-old sitter, Sir Leslie Stephen’s fourth daughter, was destined to become a writer without whom the pantheon of literature would be incomplete. And certainly it couldn’t have occurred to her, least of all to her father, in the fifteen or twenty minutes it would have taken them to walk from Hyde Park Gate to Yeoman’s Row, that one of the photographs Beresford was to take that afternoon was going to become the most iconic likeness of the artist we would later come to know as Virginia Woolf.

In all the four portraits Beresford took, he had the author sitting and looking away from the camera. He was obviously inspired by the Pre-Raphaelites. Or perhaps, what with the strong and abundant hair tied loosely in a bun, and the jaw running in an uninterrupted arc from the careful chin to the over-attentive ear, it was his sitter’s profile that brought to mind those Victorian painters. It’s the first of these pictures—I suspect it was the first because it lacks the self-consciousness of the other three—that was to be the most successful. In it she is looking away more naturally than in the others, as if a private thought had caught her attention. There is determination in the neck. The open shell of the ear is unusually large, tensing the rim. It hints at the great danger of listening, as if acknowledging that ears cannot choose not to hear what is directed at them. More than most, she would have known the danger of that, the lasting stain of language. She seems to be concerned with this, trying to accept the vulnerability. Her cheek, occupying the central space in the photograph, seems full with utterance. Those shut lips are concealing an ocean of words. What Beresford managed to capture, and what eludes him in the following three portraits, is depth and its promise; an instinctive devotion to reality, to what Woolf was to later call “the white light of truth.”

One cannot help but read in the portrait signs of the conflicting forces the author was to contend with for the remainder of her life: the discrepancy between the reality of men and women; the need as an artist to be veiled yet available, attentive to her individual potential yet resistant to public prescriptions and constraints; and one’s exposure to history and madness. Seen from our time, the photograph is a classical representation of the artist at the dawn of the twentieth century—the century of two world wars—where death and horror threatened to obliterate art and poetry. Here is the fragile, androgynous figure of a great novelist silently and only obliquely aware of the arsenal of her gifts and the demands of her time. It is as if Beresford had shone a light into a psychological space rather than onto a body. His lens is looking down into the depth, from which a light bounces back. It brings to mind a sentence about Mrs. Ramsay, one of many extraordinary sentences in “To the Lighthouse”:

It could not last, she knew, but at the moment her eyes were so clear that they seemed to go round the table unveiling each of these people, and their thoughts and their feelings, without effort like a light stealing under water so that its ripples and the reeds in it and the minnows balancing themselves, and the sudden silent trout are all lit up hanging, trembling.

In “To the Lighthouse,” Woolf’s fifth novel, she mastered a sort of sentence that she had been edging toward, a sentence we can now call her own: a freely progressing, long, fractured series of observations and insights, unburdened and unhurried by the need to tell the “story,” yet moving with the unrelenting progression of a scalpel. It steals away, like “a light stealing under water,” revealing not merely information but the cadence and temper of inner lives, and how they resonate against the images and sensations of the physical world. It has a precise power that is disinterested in overpowering reality. The momentum sweeps you away till that last word, “trembling,” and the echo it sends back. That earlier “at the moment” hinges it to the subjective, freeing it from any claim of authority. Yet the result is superbly authoritative. The acoustic quality of Woolf’s prose in “To the Lighthouse” reverberates, and therefore her sentences are not easy to drop or leave behind. They mark indelibly.

The book tells of a family, very much like Woolf’s own, vacationing at their summer home by the sea in the Scottish Hebrides. Mr. Ramsay is a London professor, much admired; and Mrs. Ramsay is beautiful but no longer young. Along with their eight children and servants, the Ramsays are joined by a number of guests: friends and several young devotees of the professor. Among the guests is Lily Briscoe, a painter. She conceives of color as “the light of a butterfly’s wing lying upon the arches of a cathedral.” Trying to explain her painterly intentions to the widower and botanist William Bankes, she says, “A light here required a shadow there,” a statement that could apply to every human enterprise. It is echoed later, when Mrs. Ramsay notes, “Wherever they put the light (and James could not sleep without a light) there was always a shadow somewhere.” James is “her youngest, her cherished” six-year-old son. Reading to him, Mrs. Ramsay notices that “it was getting late. The light in the garden told her that; and the whitening of the flowers and something grey in the leaves conspired together, to rouse in her a feeling of anxiety.” Later, when Lily Briscoe suspects what Mrs. Ramsay was thinking—that Lily would marry Mr. Banks—the painter feels exposed and, observing the others, perceives that “for one moment, there was a sense of things having been blown apart, of space, of irresponsibility as the ball soared high, and they followed it and lost it and saw the one star and the draped branches. In the failing light they all looked sharp-edged and ethereal and divided by great distances.” Light is a reoccurring motif in the book. It flutters and is impermanent. Concealing and revealing. It is the unpredictable and forever changing temperament of the physical world. Light, in “To the Lighthouse,” is what history is to human life. Indeed, the entire novel is like a flash of lightening that momentarily floods the forest. Instead of disbanding the dark, it leaves an unforgettable recognition of it.

Several flashes preceded the lightening. Woolf’s first book, “The Voyage Out,” published in 1915, when the author was thirty-three, tells of the misunderstandings and mismatched yearnings of a group of Edwardians aboard a ship for South America. It has traces of what will come to interest Woolf in later books, such as the distance that exists between what is thought and what is spoken; the tragic lack of correspondence between intention and expression; and what these reveal about the nature of love. As we are told of Helen, one of the characters aboard the ship: “She tried to console herself with the reflection that one never knows how far other people feel the things they might be supposed to feel.” The consolation is that of truth. In the opening pages, there is a vivid description of the ship pulling away from the coast, dislodging itself from London through the River Thames till it leaks naked into the open sea. It is a fitting image of what Virginia Woolf helped do to the novel, stripping it from convention. One of the characteristics of modernism, in which she played a central role, is the detachment from the subject, the cleaving away from a sense of unitary existence. From this first book, you can see her interest in discontinuities and consciousness. Embedded in it is the melancholic acknowledgment of the impossibility of ever having a complete view. Like the fall of Adam and Eve, modernism is a loss of innocence. It doesn’t accept only that God’s view of things is unattainable; it doesn’t believe such a view exists. It refuses to ignore the rupture.

In 1919, four years after “The Voyage Out,” Woolf published her second novel, “Night and Day.” Again, Edwardian society, class, love, marriage, and the uncertainty of emotional intentions are among the themes developed further in this long novel, which, in length at least, contradicts its author’s later advice that “women’s books should be shorter, more concentrated, than those of men.” Modelled loosely on the author’s family and their circle, the novel tells of the intertwining loves and affections of four main characters: Katharine Hilbery, Mary Datchet, Ralph Denham, and William Rodney. It takes literature’s old interest in the misapprehensions and unrequited sentiments of lovers and turns them into a meditation on the question of whether it is ever possible to know anyone’s true feelings; whether love and marriage can be trusted to mean what we think they mean; and the curious discrepancies between the body and the heart. Although, like “The Voyage Out,” “Night and Day” remains, in its structure, its scenes and dialogues, a conventional narrative, reading it you get the sense of the modern novel jarring against its romantic antecedent. In this exchange between Katharine Hilbery and William Rodney, you can almost hear the author thinking about the subject:

“What is this romance?” she mused.

“Ah, that’s the question. I’ve never come across a definition that satisfied me, though there are some very good ones”—he glanced in the direction of his books.

“It’s not altogether knowing the other person, perhaps—it’s ignorance,” she hazarded.

“Some authorities say it’s a question of distance—romance in literature, that is—”

“Possibly, in the case of art. But in the case of people it may be—” she hesitated.

Katharine Hilbery never finished her sentence. It hangs suspended for eternity. Perhaps to hesitate is the most appropriate modern gesture. Perhaps, in the face of our inequality, in the face of our unknowability, and in the absence of God, everything is infused with doubt.

But here Virginia Woolf is at the border, yet to achieve the required transformation. Her first encounter with James Joyce’s “Ulysses,” which took place at the time of writing “Night and Day,” perturbed her. She reacted to the book even before she’d had a chance to read it. Watching her husband Leonard reading it, she noted in her diary: “[He] is already 30 pages deep. I look, and sip, and shudder.” This animalistic fear, which only a novelist knows, that sets in when sensing some other’s pen edging toward a glorious prey, is a sickness but also an augury. She admitted that she was “bewildered and befogged” by Joyce, who was “about a fortnight younger than I am.” (In fact, he was only a week younger.) She noted that her friend T. S. Eliot, the other protagonist in the modernist revolution, “was for the first time in my knowledge, rapt, enthusiastic,” on reading “Ulysses.” Later, she tried in her diary to protect herself. Turning to a common English reflex, snobbery, she pretended to have arrived at a conclusion about the Irishman’s magnum opus: “I bought the blue paper book, & read it here one summer I think with spasms of wonder, of discovery, & then again with long lapses of intense boredom.” “Genius it has I think; but of the inferior water… . It is underbred, not only in the obvious sense, but in the literary sense.”

But it was “Ulysses,” and the bewilderment caused by “Ulysses,” a novel that restricts itself to a day in the lives of two characters, that showed Woolf a new path. Whatever she professed to think of it, everything she was to write from then on owes if not debts of influence then debts of provocation to James Joyce. It was engaging with his work that helped her write, in the essay “Modern Fiction,” what is possibly one of the most lucid and passionate advocacies for fiction:

If a writer were a free man and not a slave, if he could write what he chose, not what he must, if he could base his work upon his own feeling and not upon convention, there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the accepted style, and perhaps not a single button sewn on as the Bond Street tailors would have it. Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. Is it not the task of the novelist to convey this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit, whatever aberration or complexity it may display, with as little mixture of the alien and external as possible? We are not pleading merely for courage and sincerity; we are suggesting that the proper stuff of fiction is a little other than custom would have us believe it.

So one does not need the epic. You can do as much, perhaps more, with as little as two characters and a day. And you no longer cast your net in order to catch the whole sea. Instead, you angle for the one perfect fish.

The industrious intellect and imagination of a novelist might at times be superficially motivated by a fervor for recognition, or the desire to compete with an admired contemporary, but few works of any worth were sustained by vanity alone. What is required is the persistent need to envisage the world anew, to remake the self, or reorientate her, like a sitter adjusting her posture in order to gain a different view. Once ego’s noise subsides, the old obsessions return. One of the most persistent of these was the political and private life of women. She revealed with savage accuracy the patronizing tactics of men. The effect is not only the result of her talent for social satire—shown in abundance in her earlier fiction—but also of the rebellious instinct of a curious and unsentimental consciousness trapped inside the confines of feminine domesticity. How would she have written if she were not a member of the sex, as she tells us in “A Room of One’s Own,” that had to sit “indoors all these millions of years”? In the same essay, Woolf offers her recommendations for what a woman writer needs: “Five hundred a year and a room with a lock on the door.” A poignant and pragmatic conclusion, but a domestic one, a private remedy to a public problem.

In the end, what transformed the place of women in Britain was not “five hundred a year and a room with a lock on the door” but the most cataclysmic event of the time, the First World War. The war exposed the extent and danger of social inequalities. Forty per cent of the men who volunteered for military service were not physically fit to serve. The dire state of the health of the nation was revealed, and suddenly the collective well-being of society began to gain precedence over individual liberty. It paved the way toward a nationalized health service. And the men who went to fight left behind their jobs. No less than a third of the male workforce joined the Army. Women filled the gap. As the suffragette Ray Strachey, Woolf’s sister-in-law, put it: “Middle-aged women who had been quiet mothers of families were suddenly transformed into efficient plumbers, chimney sweeps, or grave diggers; flighty and giggling young girls turned into house-painters and electricians; ladies whose lives had been spent in the hunting-field turned into canal boatmen and ploughmen.” Nearly a million of them went into engineering. After the war, it became no longer acceptable to have half of the population indoors. It was women’s extraordinary contribution to the war that granted them the vote. When the men returned, male resentment in the workplace grew. Feminism became necessary to secure and advance the gains made by women. Virginia Woolf was one of its most eloquent exponents. In fact, “A Room of One’s Own,” what is still today a necessary and powerful argument for women’s rights, would not have been possible were it not for the historical transformations the war forced through. Her referring to the war as a “preposterous masculine fiction” was a tactic to elevate and distinguish feminine reason. The war killed nine hundred and fifty thousand men from Britain and the Empire and left 1.5 million wounded. The economic and military might of the British Empire was no longer supreme.

Yet the war offered Woolf the novelist an opportunity to turn the restrictions of her gender to an unexpected advantage. She did not have the option to write directly about the war: the story of its conflicts and the drama of its battles. Instead, in her next novel,” Jacob’s Room,” she becomes a miniaturist: interested in the tremors of the war on the intimate lives of men and women. Gearing up for the challenge, she wrote in her diary, “I figure the approach will be entirely different this time: No scaffolding; scarcely a brick to be seen; all crepuscular, but the heart, the passion, the humour, everything as bright as fire in the mist.” The word “crepuscular” brings to mind a line from Samuel Beckett, when Pozzo tells Vladimir, in “Waiting for Godot,” “But I see what it is, you are not from these parts, you don’t know what our twilights can do.” “Jacob’s Room” inhabits the twilight. It tells the early life of Jacob Flanders through the women who knew him. He later dies in the war, but we don’t follow him there. It’s Woolf’s first modernist novel, a Joycean experiment in how much one can exclude.

When your power is limited, when you cannot vote, when your opinions and contributions are dismissed solely because of your gender, then the disgrace of witnessing your own people butcher and be butchered must not only cause you to revisit everything you assumed about human nature but also asks you to view it from the distance of the outsider. The war, like a flame eating moths, annihilated those presumptions. It delivered Woolf, perhaps more vividly and abruptly than her male contemporaries, to the hard face of the truth, of what we are capable of doing. It is hard not to in part attribute her sobriety and keenness of vision to her marginal status as a woman. Her prose becomes more sharply invested with the visual and material world. It fills up with shifting and precise, unfixed and yet vivid resonances. Her writing comes to have the double effect of heightening our sense of reality and making that reality seem questionable or impermanent. This is the departure that “Jacob’s Room” achieves. It does not do away entirely, as was Woolf’s intention, with conventional narrative structure—scenes are set with relatively familiar descriptive modes of places, objects, how people are seated—but her doubts mature into a sort of existential uncertainty. The scalpel grows sharper.

This method of hinting obliquely and only through suggestion at horror has influenced the course of the novel. The profound works of W. G. Sebald, for example, a German writer burdened with the question of how to address the ruination of the Second World War, is a literary event made in some way possible by Virginia Woolf. She helped show him how direct documentation is not necessarily the best course to follow. In the last interview he gave before his untimely death, in 2001, Sebald credited the insight to reading Virginia Woolf, and particularly her essay “The Death of the Moth,”

the wonderful example of her description of a moth coming to its end on a windowpane somewhere in Sussex, and this is a passage of some two pages only, I think. And it’s written somewhere, chronologically speaking, between the battlefields of the Somme and the concentration camps erected by my compatriots. There is no reference made to the battlefields of the Somme in this passage, but one knows as a reader of Virginia Woolf that she was greatly perturbed by the First World War, by its aftermath, by the damage it did to people’s souls—the souls of those who got away and, naturally, of those who perished. I think that a subject which at first glance seems quite far removed from the undeclared concern of a book can encapsulate that concern.

Sebald was an inheritor of a dark history, interested in the shame of the progeny. Like the South African author J. M. Coetzee, his contemporary, Sebald was concerned with how to convey not savagery and guilt but their inheritance. Woolf, excluded from the vote and therefore from politics and the decisions that lead countries to war and peace, shared with them the condition of being implicated in the actions of others. It seems every great novelist is conscious of being both implicated in and subject to history. The war helped Woolf understand this. Still, she was heavily criticized for what was perceived as an evasion. She was subjected to passionate calls by noted figures, such as her esteemed friend Katherine Mansfield, to write directly about the war. She kept her poise. Hers is a singular example of literary independence. And now we can see that her decision of expressing the tremors of the masculine epic of war through domestic life was poignantly subversive, true, and truly free.

As a sentence in “Jacob’s Room” puts it, “There is something absolute in us which despises qualification.”

There was a relationship between Woolf’s mental illness and her writing. Bouts of mental crises hit her between novels. The edges of sanity revealed what seemed to her to be the true workings of the mind. With each book she became more obsessed with language and how when we speak we often fall short of or else exceed what we intended to express. Talking as a betrayal: saying too much, or not enough. The birth of psychoanalysis at the time added to this. Woolf knew of the writings of Sigmund Freud. Her friend Lytton Strachey’s brother, James Strachey, was the Austrian’s translator. To Woolf and her Bloomsbury friends, psychoanalysis must have confirmed what they already suspected, that social norms and accepted forms of behavior were often there to veil the gulf that exists between what is professed and the truth. Perhaps it confirmed Woolf’s instinct, one that persisted from the start, and to which she often attributed her estrangement from the world, that all is not what appears. Woolf was aware of Freud’s proposition that close observation of uncensored thought and speech, the ways in which we reveal and interrupt ourselves, can cause deeply buried truths to arise. She was aware of the danger. She might have agreed with Karoline von Günderrode who, in Christa Wolf’s novel “No Place on Earth,” scans the large room where a party is gathered and thinks, “How fortunate that our thoughts do not dance in visible letters above our heads. If they did, any contact between human beings, even a harmless social gathering such as this, could easily become a convocation of murderers.” But Woolf cannot be reduced to a psychoanalytical novelist. She sort of discards Freud or, as the expression goes, she takes him in her stride. In this way, she is truer to our time where, if we look at Freud at all, then it is perhaps with gratitude but also with that amused affection one pays an eccentric uncle. Nonetheless, Uncle Freud nudged her along a little.

Three years after “Jacob’s Room,” in 1925, when Virginia Woolf was forty-three, she resurrected Clarissa Dalloway, a character from “The Voyage Out,” and placed her centre stage. It was to be her best novel yet. Instead of the hills where the grass softens the heavens and in the late evening “the flamingo hours fluttered softly through the sky,” in “Mrs. Dalloway” the most passionately described landscape is that of the city. One of the novel’s principle characters is the noisy, rumbling, chaotic, and democratic London. As in ancient Greek drama, and Joyce’s “Ulysses,” the novel takes place in a single day. There’s an inward drive to the narrative. The exceptional sensitivity toward the smallest turns of mind and the piercing perceptions of the most agile twists in moods are illuminated. What takes our breath away in literature is not the new but the encounter with what has been silently known. “Mrs. Dalloway” is extraordinary, but it is not Woolf’s finest novel.

She was right in that “books continue each other, in spite of our habit of judging them separately”; we ought to take the writer in her totality. But in my mind “To the Lighthouse” is the culmination of everything Woolf has been working toward. She spoke about the interdependence of words, how they color and infect one another, that there is no pure meaning, that each word is nudged and changed by those strung to it. Like the words we have invented, we, too, cannot exist outside history. But what also appears here is a new silence. All great writing is infected with silence, but it is very rare indeed to observe a master wielding that vacuum blankness of the unsaid with such elegant precision. Part of the effect is that you feel you are inside a mind, inhabiting another’s interiority. But there also is the register of history, in the vast expanse of the sea welded in a continuous fabric to the sky. Everything out there is unknown, and the lighthouse has no hope to illuminate where we are heading. All it does is call attention to itself and the rock it stands on. It is a perpetual circular warning, a white scream. We are trapped in history, poised between two world wars.

Novelists often find themselves or themselves create situations in which they are obliged to speak about one of their books, a book they are no longer writing. A process of justification and rationalization and remembering ensues. More often than not, this ends up with over-defended stories that attempt to explain motives and intentions that are now long in the past, and therefore might be accurately remembered but are, more often than not, invented under obligation to explain oneself or else to retrospectively attempt to reenter that pure space where one was a servant of and a contributor to, with all one has got, the mechanism of a work of fiction. It is very rare to hear a novelist speak accurately about writing a novel because it is extremely difficult to explain.

Virginia Woolf was a rare example. She wrote well about her writing. She described working on “To the Lighthouse” as a process “without any premeditation.” And I believe her. What she arrived at here was not the outcome of calculated stylistic intent but, rather, the result of a long process of observation and then surrender and fidelity to the outcomes. History—the horrific events of a war that ravished the world with monstrous appetite, and the great social changes that followed—might have accelerated her progress in the form. But mostly it was the unique talent and keenness of vision that made her write some of the most luminous fiction of the twentieth century.

Books & Fiction

By signing up, you agree to our User Agreement and Privacy Policy & Cookie Statement . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

By Joshua Rothman

By Rebecca Mead

By Thomas Mallon

By Garth Greenwell

Advertisement

Supported by

Critic’s Notebook

When the Stage Harnesses the Power of the Movies

Adaptations of films will be a factor at the Tonys this year. Surprisingly the best of these shows are not always the most faithful.

• Share full article

By Alissa Wilkinson

A passing glance at this year’s Tony nominations might trick a glancer into thinking the wrong artistic medium has crept onto the list. Among the nominees are “The Notebook,” “The Outsiders” and “Days of Wine and Roses,” based on three movies: a 2004 Nicholas Sparks romance, a 1983 coming-of-age crime drama directed by Francis Ford Coppola and a 1962 Blake Edwards melodrama about alcoholism. (They were, in turn, based on best-selling novels and a TV play.)

It’s not that movie adaptations are uncommon in theater — a number of mega-budget shows have been driven by silver-screen nostalgia, whether it’s “Back to the Future” and “Aladdin” or that stalwart of the Broadway economy, “The Lion King.” Splashy musicals, in particular, often come from recognizable cinematic sources: There’s “Mean Girls,” “Moulin Rouge,” “Kinky Boots” and many more. Not all of them are hits, as “American Psycho,” “Almost Famous” and “New York, New York” prove.

Given how much theater relies on visitors buying tickets to an experience they know they’ll enjoy, it makes sense. Though there’s plenty of artistry on display in these productions, blockbuster adaptations can feel, to financiers, like slam dunks, safer bets than original material. The same nostalgia that drives sequels and reboots in cinema is at play: We know audiences like it, so let’s give them some more.

But intellectual property that’s bankable isn’t everything, and increasingly, interesting theater comes from movie sources hailing from left field. “ Teeth ,” for instance, a musical by Michael R. Jackson and Anna K. Jacobs, made a bloody, buzzy Off Broadway splash this winter at Playwrights Horizons; it’s based on a 2008 indie horror classic about a young woman with vagina dentata. Over at St. Ann’s in Brooklyn, Tobias Menzies starred in “ The Hunt ,” adapted by David Farr from Thomas Vinterberg’s 2013 Norwegian thriller.

Sitting in the audience, I was delighted by these shows even in the moments when they didn’t quite work. They felt inventive and thoughtful, as if the creators had ingested the films and then made them their own. After each curtain call, I left the theater thinking about what made the adaptation so interesting, and what it showed about the power of both cinema and theater.

For instance, “ Days of Wine and Roses ,” a morality tale about the evils of booze, is based on a film that leans into pedantic after-school special territory. But the production rode not on plot so much as on the musical performances of its stars, Brian d’Arcy James and Kelli O’Hara, who landed a nomination apiece — and they were splendid. The acting was also key to “ The Outsiders ,” which, despite its pedigree (and its own source material, S.E. Hinton’s best-selling novel), is more cult classic than mainstream favorite. Its excellent translation to the stage stands brilliantly on its own legs in large part because of its kinetic cast: The performances are loaded with all the charisma and longing these teenage characters demand. Both theatrical productions also depend on songs that were not present in their source films, exposing fresh, raw nerves in the stories.

These join a relatively recent spate of adaptations of independent films, the kind found at Sundance, that have graced New York’s stages in recent years and garnered both fans and awards. The films of 2007, for instance, have provided great fodder years after their release: “Once” (based on John Carney’s movie musical) opened on Broadway in 2012 , “Waitress” (based on Adrienne Shelly’s romantic drama) opened in 2016 , and “The Band’s Visit” (based on Eran Kolirin’s comedy) opened in 2017. Each film told an intimate story about friendship and love found in unexpected places, and onstage they eschewed splash and flash to retain that sense of modest humanity. As films, they’d all had a measure of success and acclaim. Onstage, they were phenomena.

Even documentaries can translate to the stage: See “ Grey Gardens ” (2006), based on the groundbreaking 1975 Maysles brothers film, or the forthcoming “The Queen of Versailles,” based on Lauren Greenfield’s 2012 documentary.

And unlikely pairings crop up, too, in Stephen Sondheim’s final work , “Here We Are,” which premiered Off Broadway last year. It draws on two movies directed by Luis Buñuel: “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie” (1972) and “The Exterminating Angel” (1962). Both are masterworks of cinema, but they’re more often seen at the art house or in the classroom than on, say, an airplane. Buñuel is not exactly a laid-back crowd-pleaser. The show wasn’t either , but it was at least an intriguing concept.

The border between theater and film, of course, has always been porous. Stage adaptations of films have had their reverse counterparts since Hollywood’s early decades, when plays and musicals were translated into a great deal of the silver screen’s most iconic works, like “Casablanca” and “A Streetcar Named Desire.” Playwrights often made the shift to Hollywood to work as screenwriters, and over the decades that bicoastal move has been common. The stage was loaded with ripe material for studios, to be sure, but some plays also came with the imprimatur of serious art, which meant elements that might have been eschewed in the decades of the censorious Hays Code could slip through. The film adaptation of Edward Albee’s 1962 play “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf,” which contained profanity technically proscribed in Hollywood at the time, was one of the films responsible for the disintegration of the Code.

But when it comes to contemporary film-to-stage adaptations, there seems to be two camps. There are the nostalgia shows, based on popular intellectual property and an expectation that the audience knows and loves the material. “ Back to the Future, ” for instance, currently on Broadway, is more or less an eye-popping, one-to-one transfer from film to stage, featuring songs loaded with jokes that mostly functioned as fan service. An extreme recent example of this was Ian Shaw and Joseph Nixon’s play “ The Shark Is Broken ,” which took as its setting the filming of “Jaws,” and made no sense at all if you weren’t steeped in “Jaws” lore.

The other camp faces bigger hurdles. You might not have even heard of the original, and so the productions can’t rely upon the audience’s memories. These shows also take for granted that fans who do know the underlying story are ready to encounter it in a new way. “ The Notebook ,” based on a weepie classic that fans rewatch endlessly, opted to reimagine its material, leaving the basic plot and emotional core intact while significantly mixing up how it’s presented. The result works powerfully, even if you’ve never seen the movie; if you have, it’s like a fresh lens, a cover of a favorite song that works all on its own.

In a time when theater, always precarious, feels as if it’s teetering on the brink, and Hollywood is barely hanging on, it’s fascinating to see theater-makers turning toward less obviously commercial movie properties for new works. For the work to actually succeed, there needs to be a willingness to experiment with the underlying property.

What’s striking to me, watching the second category of shows as a film critic, is the kind of fresh insight they bring to the underlying material. After all, theater presents restrictions to artists that filmmakers don’t encounter — there’s no editing, no multiple takes, no reliance on green screens, no “fixing it in post.” And the way plots and characters operate in many films aims for a realism that’s almost inherently absent on the stage. Theater requires the audience to engage in a much higher level of suspension of disbelief, and so the writing changes, forced into finding a truly fresh angle on the original. For film fans weary of reboots that barely bother to reimagine their source material in interesting ways, theatrical adaptations feel like a shot in the arm.

There are more to come. Productions of “Death Becomes Her” (based on Robert Zemeckis’s 1992 satirical black comedy) and “Good Night, and Good Luck” (based on the 2005 drama directed by George Clooney, who will star in the Broadway show) have been announced in recent weeks. And while Disney has been in the theater game for a long time, producing shows at the New Amsterdam Theater, other film companies are eyeing the stage too. In 2023, the indie darling movie production company A24 bought the Cherry Lane Theater , a small but venerable venue in Greenwich Village. Netflix, meanwhile, is a co-producer on “Patriots,” which nabbed a Tony nomination for its star, Michael Stuhlbarg.

Nobody quite knows what the future holds for the entertainment industry, and theater is, if anything, an even riskier business than movies. But it’s exciting to see the age-old relationship between the cinema and the stage take on a new tenor — and perhaps it can help reinvigorate both arts.

Alissa Wilkinson is a Times movie critic. She’s been writing about movies since 2005. More about Alissa Wilkinson

Explore More in TV and Movies

Not sure what to watch next we can help..

Leslye Headland’s new “Star Wars” show, The Acolyte,” is a dream come true, but she knows it carries enormous expectations .

Once relegated to supporting roles, the comedian Michelle Buteau  is a star of the film “Babes” and is moving to a bigger stage, Radio City Music Hall, for her new special.

American audiences used to balk at subtitles. But recent hits like “Shogun” and “Everything Everywhere All at Once” show how much that has changed .

If you are overwhelmed by the endless options, don’t despair — we put together the best offerings   on Netflix , Max , Disney+ , Amazon Prime  and Hulu  to make choosing your next binge a little easier.

Sign up for our Watching newsletter  to get recommendations on the best films and TV shows to stream and watch, delivered to your inbox.

We will keep fighting for all libraries - stand with us!

Internet Archive Audio

• This Just In
• Grateful Dead
• Old Time Radio
• 78 RPMs and Cylinder Recordings
• Audio Books & Poetry
• Computers, Technology and Science
• Music, Arts & Culture
• News & Public Affairs
• Spirituality & Religion
• Radio News Archive

• Flickr Commons
• Occupy Wall Street Flickr
• NASA Images
• Solar System Collection
• Ames Research Center

• All Software
• Old School Emulation
• MS-DOS Games
• Historical Software
• Classic PC Games
• Software Library
• Kodi Archive and Support File
• Vintage Software
• CD-ROM Software
• CD-ROM Software Library
• Software Sites
• Tucows Software Library
• Shareware CD-ROMs
• Software Capsules Compilation
• CD-ROM Images
• ZX Spectrum
• DOOM Level CD

• Smithsonian Libraries
• FEDLINK (US)
• Lincoln Collection
• American Libraries
• Canadian Libraries
• Universal Library
• Project Gutenberg
• Children's Library
• Biodiversity Heritage Library
• Books by Language
• Additional Collections

• Prelinger Archives
• Democracy Now!
• Occupy Wall Street
• TV NSA Clip Library
• Animation & Cartoons
• Arts & Music
• Computers & Technology
• Cultural & Academic Films
• Ephemeral Films
• Sports Videos
• Videogame Videos
• Youth Media

Search the history of over 866 billion web pages on the Internet.

Mobile Apps

• Wayback Machine (iOS)
• Wayback Machine (Android)

Browser Extensions

Archive-it subscription.

• Explore the Collections
• Build Collections

Save Page Now

Capture a web page as it appears now for use as a trusted citation in the future.

Please enter a valid web address

• Donate Donate icon An illustration of a heart shape

Selected essays

Bookreader item preview, share or embed this item, flag this item for.

• Graphic Violence
• Explicit Sexual Content
• Hate Speech
• Misinformation/Disinformation
• Marketing/Phishing/Advertising
• Misleading/Inaccurate/Missing Metadata

plus-circle Add Review comment Reviews

231 Previews

15 Favorites

DOWNLOAD OPTIONS

No suitable files to display here.

PDF access not available for this item.

IN COLLECTIONS

Uploaded by station52.cebu on August 1, 2022

SIMILAR ITEMS (based on metadata)