The essay Archives

Granite and Rainbow

January 14, 2016 by Roy Johnson

essays on literature, biography, and cultural history

Granite and Rainbow (1958) is the third and final volume of Virginia Woolf’s essays to be collected, edited, and published by her husband Leonard Woolf after her death in 1941. She published two collections of essays in her own lifetime – The Common Reader first series (1925) and The Common Reader second series (1932).

Leonard Woolf discusses the difficulties of locating and verifying these examples of her non-fiction writing in the editor’s notes which preface these collections. The problem of identification was exacerbated by the fact that many of them had been published anonymously. Until relatively recently for instance, essays and book reviews in The Times Literary Supplement were not attributed to any author. Another reason for essays remaining undetected was that some of the earlier examples had been published under her maiden name of Virginia Stephen.

Granite and Rainbow was first published by the Hogarth Press in 1958. Since that time, any further non-fiction prose writings by Virginia Woolf that have come to light have been published in the six-volume edition of her complete essays edited by the distinguished Woolf scholar Stuart N. Clarke.

Granite and Rainbow – critical commentary

The essays and reviews in this collection are arranged in two parts. The first is The Art of Fiction and the second The Art of Biography, and it has to be said that her richest and most profound observations come in the first half amongst her meditations on the nature and the future of fiction.

‘The Narrow Bridge of Art’ explores reasons for the death of poetic drama. She argues that the poet cannot fully cope with the contradictions of modern life and that poetic ideas might be taken over by the novel. Speculating about the nature of what such a novel might be, she is in effect talking about her own work, which combines prose narrative with a poetical sensibility. But she does so without actually mentioning it – which is commendably modest.

‘Hours in a Library’ is a meditation on the relationship between classic and modern literature. She is urging modern readers to look sympathetically upon contemporary writing, but she knows that it will be judged against the standards of the past. Her argument is however cast in characteristically dialectical manner in which she sees a reciprocity of influence:

But if we need all our knowledge of the old writers to follow what the new writers are attempting, it is certainly true that we come from adventuring among new books with a far keener eye for the old.

This is not unlike the apparently paradoxical argument made by the Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges – that a contemporary writer can ‘create’ his own precursors. In other words, the work of modern authors can alter the way in which we view the writing of the past

Woolf finds qualities in apparent failures — such as DeQuincy whose ‘impassioned prose’ she offers as a positive model to other writers, even though his own work (with the exception of the Opium Eater) is now largely forgotten.

It’s interesting to note that she even makes efforts to see positive merit in George Meredith, a writer who had been a major literary figure during her own lifetime, but whose reputation had gone into decline. She notes his poetic style, his lavish metaphors, and his lack of ‘realism’ – but she realises that his time has passed.

The most ambitious essay in the collection is a long article from The Bookseller in 1929 called ‘Phases of Fiction’ in which she looks at a collection of novelists and categorises them as Truth-Tellers (Defoe, Maupassant, Trollope) Romantics (Scott, Stevenson, Radcliffe) Character-Mongers (Dickens, Austen) Comedians (Peacock, Sterne) Psychologists (James, Proust, Dostoyevski) and Poets (Meredith, Hardy, Bronte).

These studies offer what we might now call a ‘reader response’ type of criticism. She does not analyse the subject matter of their texts that makes them so valuable, but concentrates instead on what effect they have on her – which she generalises as ‘us’. She describes Henry James’s concentration on psychological states for instance:

By cutting off the responses that are called out in actual life, the novelist frees us to take delight, as we do when ill or travelling, in things in themselves. We can see the strangeness of them only when habit has ceased to immerse us in them, and we stand outside watching what has no power over us one way or the other. Then we see the mind at work; we are amused by its power to make patterns; by its power to bring out relations in things … It is a pleasure somewhat akin, perhaps, to the pleasure of mathematics or the pleasure of music.

The second section of this collection dealing with biography is mainly book reviews of biographies, letters, and memoirs. The subjects range from Walter Raleigh, via Laurence Sterne and Horace Walpole, to Thomas Coutts (the banker) and the best-selling novelist Marie Corelli – which was not her real name.

Woolf wrote biographies herself, and she sees the art of biography as a difficult choice between the ‘granite’ of hard facts and the ‘rainbow’ of the subject’s personality. Too many facts, and the account of someone’s life becomes boring (or even unreadable): too much rainbow, and the account becomes fiction. This is possibly why her own fictional biography Orlando (1927) is so dazzlingly successful, and her fact-heavy Roger Fry (1940) very dull.

She argues, quite justly, that Harold Nicolson held these two elements of fact and invention in successful equilibrium in his hilarious collection of biographical vignettes, Some People (1927):

he has devised a method of writing about people and about himself as if they were at once real and imaginary. He has succeeded remarkably, if not entirely, in making the best of both worlds. Some People is not fiction because it has the substance, the reality of truth. It is not biography because it has the freedom, the artistry of fiction.

Granite and Rainbow – study resources

Granite and Rainbow – Amazon UK
Granite and Rainbow – Amazon US

Complete Works of Virginia Woolf – Kindle -Amazon UK
Complete Works of Virginia Woolf – Kindle – Amazon US

The six-volume Complete Essays – Amazon UK
The six-volume Complete Essays – Amazon US

Granite and Rainbow – free eBook format – Internet Archive

Grantite and Rainbow – complete contents

Part I : The Art of Fiction

The Narrow Bridge of Art
Hours in a Library
Impassioned Prose
Life and the Novelist
On Rereading Meredith
The Anatomy of Fiction
Gothic Romance
The Supernatural in Fiction
Henry James’s Ghost Stories
A Terribly Sensitive Mind
Women and Fiction
An Essay in Criticism
Phases of Fiction

Part II : The Art of Biography

The New Biography
A Talk About Memoirs
Sir Walter Raleigh
Sterne
Eliza and Sterne
Horace Walpole
A Friend of Johnson
Fanney Burney’s Half-Sister
Money and Love
The Dream
The Fleeting Portrait:
1. Waxworks at the Abbey
2. The Royal Academy
Poe’s Helen
Visits to Walt Whitman
Oliver Wendell Holmes

Virginia Woolf – the complete Essays

1925 — The Common Reader first series

1932 — The Common Reader second series

1942 — The Death of the Moth

1947 — The Moment and Other Essays

1950 — The Captain’s Death Bed and Other Essays

1958 — Granite and Rainbow

More on Virginia Woolf
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It All Adds Up

May 14, 2017 by Roy Johnson

essays, memoirs, cultural history and criticism

It All Adds Up (1994) is a collection of non-fiction writing that Saul Bellow published shortly before his last two novels, The Actual (1997) and Ravelstein (2000). The collection includes reflections on the relationship between literature and politics, travel writing, potted biographies of his famous contemporaries, and a clutch of interviews – one of which he conducts with himself.

The collection benefits from spanning more or less the whole of his writing career – from the immediate post-war period when he visited Europe for the first time, up to his personal memoir of friendship with Allan Bloom that formed the basis for his highly acclaimed and last novel.

The assembly of these essays and social criticism also confirms the consistency of his interests and beliefs. He was very conscious throughout his writing career of being the son of a poor Jewish immigrants (his father was a bootlegger during the Depression). He was also from Canada – though the family moved to live in Chicago. This was a city with which he felt powerful emotional ties, even though he was well aware of its violence corruption.

As he became more successful he took up university teaching posts in New York and the Eastern seaboard – which he repeatedly contrasted with the mid-West in order to take the moral and social temperature of America as a whole. And as an immigrant he never stopped thinking about the choice every immigrant has to make – to maintain ethnic origins, or to assimilate as an ‘American’, even though it might never be possible to comfortably believe in oneself as such.

The earliest study is a piece of reportage commissioned by Partisan Review the left-wing journal with which Bellow (as a Trotskyite) was closely associated. The essay documents travels through Spain at a time when General Franco still held his dictatorial grip on the country. It includes details of the grinding poverty, the police arrests, and such bizarre details as the fact that possession of a radio required a permit.

He clearly felt at home with the freewheeling (and hard-drinking) intellectuals with whom he shared his academic life. He taught joint courses in political philosophy and what we now call cultural history with Allan Bloom. He supported the poet John Berryman in his battles again an unsympathetic administration and against the alcoholism that eventually contributed to his early death by suicide.

The collection also includes his acceptance lecture on being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1976 The essay is a spirited and thoughtful summation of his reflections on literature and society. As something of a conservative he sketches a picture of falling standards and trivialization in public culture. (His friend Allan Bloom’s major opus was called The Closing of the American Mind.) Against this perceived vulgarity and ignorance he poses the humanising influence of classics:

The essence of our real condition, the complexity, the confusion, the pain of it, is shown to us in glimpses, in what Proust and Tolstoy thought of as ‘true impressions’. This essence reveals and then conceals itself. When it goes away it leaves us again in doubt. But our connection remains with the depths from which these glimpses come.

This is quite a difficult argument to justify theoretically, because it assumes that we are somehow ‘morally improved’ by exposure to high art. John Carey in his excellent study What Good are the Arts? challenges this supposition using the term ‘the religion of art’. But it has to be said that Saul Bellow, throughout all his novels and his non-fiction writing has wrestled with this problem of the potentially ennobling power of great literature – and it was for this reason he was awarded the Nobel Prize.

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Saul Bellow, It All Adds Up, New York: Viking, 1994, pp.327, ISBN: 0141188820

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Oxford Book of Essays

July 29, 2014 by Roy Johnson

classics of the essay genre written in English 1700-2000

The Oxford Book of Essays is a compilation of short literary prose studies edited by John Gross of pieces written in English stretching from Francis Bacon in 1625 to Clive James in 1980. He admits in his introduction that it’s almost impossible to define the literary essay (as distinct from the academic essay). The essay has no set rules or even recognisable shape: it can take the form of a moral homily, a character sketch, a piece of travel writing, or even a book review. The only requirement (to paraphrase Henry James) is that it should be interesting.

The grand-father of the Renaissance essay is Michel de Montaigne – who is actually mentioned in Fancis Bacon’s earliest entry in this collection – a figure who almost ‘invented’ the modern discursive essay, which generally combines personal reflection, entertaining anecdote, and historical background reference.

Some of the best of the earliest essayists in this plump volume have a genius for casting their thoughts almost in the form of aphorisms. Thomas Browne for instance, in his essay On Dreams reflects ‘[Sleep] the brother of Death extracteth a third part of our lives’, going on to observe that ‘If some have swooned, they may also have died in dreams, since death is but a confirmed swooning’ (1650). And Swift is equally succinct in On Good Manners: ‘Pedantry is properly the overrating any kind of knowledge we pretend to’ (1714).

As a literary genre the essay came to its first maturity when an educated readership coincided with the establishment of a vigorous periodical press. This was during the heyday of the The Spectator and the Tatler edited by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele.

These journals also introduced the idea of a persona who made comments on coffee house gossip and social characters of the time . In the ‘Sir Roger de Coverley Papers’ Addison pushed the boundaries of the essay form towards narrative fiction. And he writes entertaining reflections on mortality and death couched in essays on the buildings at his disposal – Westminster Abbey and The Royal Exchange.

In general the pieces written around this golden era tend to be witty, satirical, and deeply engaged with contemporary events. They represent the forming of modern post-Renaissance consciousness – the Age of Enlightenment. Even James Boswell’s slightly self-regarding style cannot dampen the impact of his passionate tirade against militarism in On War, a piece occasioned by a visit to the Arsenal in Venice.

The form of the assay is certainly loose, but there always seems to be a danger of falling into triviality – as in William Hazlitt’s piece considering the affectations of Beau Brummell or Anthony Trollope’s Pooteresque railings against plumbers. But on the other hand there is no rule that says the essay must always be serious. Nevertheless, it is those essays and reviews that embrace a rigorous critical attitude which remain the most impressive.

G.K. Chesterton’s defense of ‘penny dreadfuls’ which predates George Orwell’s essay on ‘Boy’s Weeklies’ by forty years is one of these. Philip Larkin’s review of the work of the Opies on children’s street rhymes is impressive as it calls the whole concept of childhood into question. V.S. Naipaul takes a similar attitude, smashing the reputation of Christopher Columbus (real name Christobal Colon) into pieces. And the finest work in the collection is an impassioned study of the White Man and the Black Man in America written by James Baldwin when he was staying in a remote Swiss village.

In terms of selection and editing, John Gross does seem to be cheating somewhat by including ‘essays’ which have been created by shortening longer pieces of work (by writers such as Lord Macaulay, John Stuart Mill, and Matthew Arnold). This approach devalues the very notion of the essay as a genre and reduces its definition to any short example of prose. But Gross compensates by including some excellent pieces from later twentieth century writers we might not normally think of as essayists – proving that the genre is still alive and in very good health.

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John Gross (editor), The Oxford Book of Essays, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008, pp.704, ISBN: 0199556555

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Saul Bellow essays

March 11, 2018 by Roy Johnson

essays, memoirs, cultural history and criticism

Saul Bellow generated a prodigious output as a writer of novels, stories, novellas, travel books, even plays – though these were largely unperformed. But in addition he wrote essays, book reviews, memoirs, lectures, and towards the end of his life he produced lengthy surveys of the culture and politics of American life at the end of the twentieth century.

He published his own selection of non-fiction in It All Adds Up (1994) which was issued whilst he was still alive. There is Simply Too Much to Think About is a collection of book reviews and occasional essays from Partisan Review, Commentary, and The New York Times Book Review. The selection also includes interviews – one of which he conducts with himself.

He takes almost as a recurrent theme the issue that illuminates all of his mature fiction – that he is the son of an eastern European immigrant who has grown up in the United States (and Canada). He feels both passionately attached and occasionally divided by the two cultural traditions these sources of his identity represent.

One the one hand his intellectual roots are in Europe and he is dismayed by what he sees as unbridled Western capitalism. On the other hand he does not wish to be held back by his family’s traditional Judaism, and he relishes the liberty and the free-wheeling culture afforded to him as a successful immigrant.

Stylistically his great strength lies in having the courage to combine fine writing with the language of the street. His mental hinterland is furnished by the Great European Classics, but he is prepared to combine their prose rhythms with the cadences and vocabulary of the inner-city tenement, the Russian bath house, and the interstate highway diner.

He’s at his best with character sketches. A Talk with the Yellow Kid is a marvellous account of the Chicago confidence trickster Joseph ‘Yellow Kid’ Weil, who is like a figure from one of Bellow’s novels. Weil is a man who made millions from rackets, scams, and Ponzi schemes, then lost it all in legitimate business investments.

There are some marvellous bon mots. He observes ‘Hemingway detested tourists – other tourists’. And of film writer Ben Hecht he says ‘He is one of the creators of Spectre of the Rose, a picture I would rather eat ground glass than see again’.

If there’s a weakness in his approach it’s a tendency to discuss large issues in rather abstract terms with lots of generalising. I found myself mentally supplying the concrete examples I wished he had mentioned as evidence to support his arguments.

His survey of ‘Recent Fiction’ (1963) throws up some interesting judgements. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is … ‘A pedestrian work, lacking in colour and passion, in dramatic vision’. And James Baldwin’s Another Country … ‘should perhaps be judged as a document and not a novel. It is hard to believe that Baldwin, with his talents, could himself take it seriously as a piece of fiction’. But for J.D. Salinger he has nothing but praise: ‘a brilliant performer, easily the best’ of modern American writers.

Being a self-confessed humanist and a writer who has enjoyed many invitations to lecture and write on the ‘modern condition’, he has a tendency to repeatedly drift into a lot of social anthropology – a subject he studied at university. And yet he is very sceptical about received opinions and philosophies – even about his former heroes Freud and Marx. However, his social anthropology is put to excellent use when explaining the lack of intellectual culture in New York City or the flight of modern writers into the universities.

And we need to take his critiques seriously, for they are built on an intimate knowledge of the basics. He was reading Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky in the 1930s, and he sees, rather perceptively I believe, that Freudianism is a form of literary criticism, an analysis or close reading of the text of someone’s life. It is certainly not a science, with objective tests, measurements, and repeatable experiments.

He writes with great feeling about the formation of his own cultural history – growing up in Chicago conscious of his Russian family heritage, his sympathies for its revolution, and his identity as a Jew in America. He became a Trotskyist, and even went to interview the revolutionary in Mexican exile, only to arrive on the day of Trotsky’s death at the hands of Stalin’s assassin.

This is an intellectually bracing collection that throws interesting light on the background to Bellow’s greatest works of fiction. It also confirms that most of his novels have distinctly biographical origins for their plots – both from his own life history and those of others.

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Saul Bellow, There Is Simply Too Much to Think About, London: Penguin/Viking, 2015, pp.532, ISBN: 0670016691

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The Captain’s Death Bed

February 11, 2016 by Roy Johnson

essays on literature, biography, and cultural history

The Captain’s Death Bed (1950) is the third volume of collected reviews and essays to be published by Leonard Woolf at the Hogarth Press after the death of his wife Virginia Woolf in 1941. They represent her work as a journalist, book reviewer, lecturer, and essayist over the last twenty years of her life – a period which saw the production of her most famous experimental novels – Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and The Waves.

first edition – design by Vanessa Bell

The Captain’s Death Bed – critical commentary

In his introductory editor’s note to this collection, Leonard Woolf suggests that these essays and reviews would have been rewritten and polished for republication by Virginia Woolf had she lived – as she had had been in the habit of doing with all of her work. This may well be true, but the advantage for the reader is that the essays are in the condition in which they were first released for publication, and we can trace the development of her style as the years progress. Not that there was a great deal of development: she was writing fluently and imaginatively from almost her earliest work. These pieces span the years 1924 to 1939.

As in many of her essays and reviews, she offers interesting reflections on keeping diaries, something she did herself to great effect. For instance, Parson Woodforde is a completely ordinary man, to whom nothing of any importance happens, but this gives her the launching pad for one of her favourite literary topics – the rhythms and content of everyday life in all its mundanity. This was a theme she was to explore again and again in her fiction – the fact that our lives are not composed of high dramas and spectacular conflicts, but of fleeting thoughts, shifts of mood, evanescent memories, and fragments of observation – what she called ‘life itself’.

In one sense this is something of a naturalistic approach when applied to the creation of fiction – but Woolf combines it with both a lyrical, quasi-poetical literary style and a philosophic meta-critique of the phenomena she is describing. If Mr Smith thinks of his wife whilst making his commute to the office, she generalises the nature of memory and the shifting significance of individuals in each other’s lives.

Similarly, the captain of the title piece is a seafarer (the novel-writing Captain Marryat, no less) whose works capture the everyday facts of life in a way that no later novelist can:

because no living writer can bring back the ordinary day. He sees it through a glass, sentimentally, romantically; it is either too pretty or too brutal; it lacks ordinariness.

She presents sympathetic portraits of writers as diverse as Goldsmith, Ruskin, and Turgenev, and even some whom she knew personally such as Thomas Hardy and Joseph Conrad, both of whom were friends of her father Sir Leslie Stephen.

The most famous piece in the collection is the much quoted and reprinted lecture of 1924 on character in fiction, entitled Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown. This is a variation on a subject she had treated before, in her 1920 short story An Unwritten Novel – which describes the attempt of a narrator to explain the character of someone unknown occupying the same carriage on a railway journey.

In this piece she takes issue with Arnold Bennett, John Galsworthy, and H.G. Wells as novelists who had failed to notice her famous claim that ‘in or about December, 1910, human character changed’. She suggests that Wells would have put Mrs Brown in one of his impossible Utopias; Galsworthy would place her in an economic analysis of her class; and Bennett would offer a sociological sketch of her house and its surroundings. In other words none of them would capture the essence of her character as a credible human being.

But she asks herself what have later, Georgian writers to offer as alternatives? She identifies the work of Forster, Lawrence, Eliot, and Joyce as brave attempts at establishing new contracts between author and reader, but urges patience, giving them time to develop. We now know that they did develop – none more so than the one great writer she modestly leaves out of the list – which is herself.

In an article on book reviewing first published as a Hogarth Press pamphlet in 1939 she spells out the history and the condition of book reviewing as distinct from serious literary criticism. She suggests it is a difficult and an often-abused system, and so proposes an alternative whereby authors pay a certified reviewer a consultancy fee for an advisory interview conducted in private. Leonard Woolf, as her editor, adds a note which sums up In three pages the whole business and the economics of publishing book reviews.

There are also some delightful surprises – essays on what was then modern technology – for instance, the cinema and flying. She views the early movie classics and immediately perceives that cinema has at its disposal a ‘secret language’ of symbols and metaphors which make laboured explanations of what is happening on screen unnecessary.

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.

The most amazing piece is her account of Flying Over London in which the novelties and incongruities of solid human beings hurtling through the air are explored in a series of aerial metaphors and shifts in point of view. Given the danger of this enterprise, it is not surprising that before long images of death and extinction are mingled with impressions of floating through clouds and witnessing City traffic congestion like lines of crawling insects. But the real beauty of the essay comes from the fact that she never left the ground, and has not flown at all. It is a work of fancy and utterly convincing imagination.

The Captain’s Death Bed – study resources

The Captain’s Death Bed – Amazon UK
The Captain’s Death Bed – Amazon US

Complete Works of Virginia Woolf – Kindle -Amazon UK
Complete Works of Virginia Woolf – Kindle – Amazon US

The Captain’s Death Bed – free eBook format – Gutenberg

The Captain#s Death Bed – complete contents

Oliver Goldsmith
White’s Selborne
Life Itself
Crabbe
Selina Trimmer
The Captain’s Death Bed
Ruskin
The Novels Of Turgenev
Half Of Thomas Hardy
Leslie Stephen
Mr. Conrad: A Conversation
The Cosmos
Walter Raleigh
Mr. Bennett And Mrs. Brown
All About Books
Reviewing
Modern Letters
Reading
The Cinema
Walter Sickert
Flying Over London
The Sun And The Fish
Gas
Thunder At Wembley
Memories Of A Working Women’s Guild

Virginia Woolf’s Essays

1925 – The Common Reader first series

1932 – The Common Reader second series

1942 – The Death of the Moth and Other Essays

1947 – The Moment and Other Essays

1950 – The Captain’s Death Bed and Other Essays

1958 – Granite and Rainbow

More on Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf – web links
Virginia Woolf – greatest works
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The Common Reader first series

October 12, 2015 by Roy Johnson

essays on literature, authors, and cultural history

The Common Reader first series is a famous collection of essays by Virginia Woolf that explore the rich history of literature and English writing from the classical period to what was the present day of 1925 when the book was first published. The essays had appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, the Atheneum, the Nation, the New Statesman, the London Mercury, and in America in the Dial, and the New Republic. The publication proved so successful that it led to another collection (second series) in 1932.

first edition – design by Vanessa Bell

Virginia Woolf had been writing essays, occasional pieces, and book reviews ever since her earliest work had appeared in the Manchester Guardian in 1905, and this present compilation reflects both the depth and the wide range of her interests and her literary education. Although she never had what we would now call formal schooling, she had educated herself, via access to the private library of her father Sir Leslie Stephen, who was an eminent Victorian man of letters and the first general editor of the Dictionary of National Biography. She had read the classics, the Elizabethans, novelists of the eighteenth century onwards, and was up to date with contemporary fiction. It perhaps helped that Thomas Hardy and Henry James were friends of the family.

She begins with a formidable piece on the Paston Letters and Chaucer, vividly re-imagining medieval English history in a manner she was later to make famous in her own novel of fictional biography Orlando (1927). ‘On Not Knowing Greek’ is not just an appreciation of classical literature, it is also a discussion of what distinguishes it from and defines the essence of post-Renaissance literature that is so much closer to us.

The essays are arranged in chronological order of subject – from medieval literature to Joseph Conrad – but there is no reason why they should be read in this order. They were written at widely different times and for a variety of audiences. But it has to be said that the spirit that pervades them all is remarkably consistent. Her writing is poised, fluent, humane, and distinctly non-academic. She takes her definition of the common reader from Samuel Johnson:

The common reader, as Dr. Johnson implies, differs from the critic and the scholar. He is worse educated, and nature has not gifted him so generously. He reads for his own pleasure rather than to impart knowledge or correct the opinion of others. Above all, he is guided by an instinct to create for himself, out of whatever odds and ends he has come by, some kind of whole— a portrait of a man, a sketch of an age, a theory of the art of writing.

A review of Hakluyt’s Voyages is the springboard for reflections on exploration which become an analysis of Elizabethan prose styles. And she is not over-reverential. She explains cogently why many minor Elizabethan plays are so bad and even boring – because their authors were operating in a different cultural medium than obtains in the modern world.

She repeatedly compares the way ‘we’ see things (writing in the early twentieth century) to the way writers have seen them in the past. Montaigne revelling in the diversity and contradictions of life; John Evelyn calmly recording the events in a torture chamber. She throws off perceptive remarks on nearly every page: ‘the late plays of Shakespeare … are better read than seen’ and ‘the second-rate works of a great writer are worth reading because they offer the best criticism of his masterpieces’.

Sometimes she takes creative liberties. An essay written to commemorate two-hundred years since the publication of Robinson Crusoe becomes a detailed examination of Moll Flanders and Defoe’s other novels, all of which she sees as the foundation of modern realism.

Similarly, a volume of Jane Austen’s juvenilia is the occasion for an appreciation in which she shows how a great novelist’s technique actually works:

she shows up those deviations from kindness, truth, and sincerity which are among the most delightful things in English literature. She depicts Mary Crawford in her mixture of good and bad entirely by this means. She lets her rattle on against the clergy, or in favour of a baronetage and ten thousand a year, with all the ease and spirit possible; but now and again she strikes one note of her own, very quietly, but in perfect tune, and at once all Mary Crawford’s chatter, though it continues to amuse, rings flat.

Woolf makes a spirited explanation of the essence of Russian literature – which had only recently been made available in English at the time of her writing. There is discussion of the apparently inconclusive endings of Chekhov’s stories; the restless and chaotic soul-searching of Dostoyevski; and the sharp-eyed observations of Tolstoy.

There is even an essay about the nature of essays themselves, which she insists should not be heavy, didactic, or composed of polysyllabic prose. This is a piece from which Max Beerbohm emerges triumphant: ‘the spirit of personality permeates every word that he writes. The triumph is the triumph of style’.

A tribute to Joseph Conrad plays interestingly with the relationship between Conrad the author and Marlowe his regular first person narrator and it ends with the provocative notion that it is the early novels – Youth, Lord Jim, and Typhoon – that will survive as Conrad’s highest achievements, whilst the later works – Chance, Nostromo, and Under Western Eyes – will be seen as curiosities. It might have seemed so in 1924 when this essays was written, but my guess is that most serious (if not common) readers of Conrad will today think just the opposite.

But she anticipates such arguments – acknowledging that each generation will make its own review of the literature handed down to it – and since this collection is almost a hundred years old, still in print, and still being discussed, we have every reason to say that it has assumed the status of a classic.

Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader: Volume 1, London: Vintage Classics, 2003, pp.288, ISBN: 009944366X

The Common Reader first series – study resources

The Common Reader first series – Amazon UK
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Complete Works of Virginia Woolf – Kindle -Amazon UK
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The Common Reader first series – free eBook formats – Gutenberg

The Common Reader first series – complete contents

The Common Reader
The Pastons and Chaucer
On not knowing Greek
The Elizabethan Lumber Room
Notes on an Elizabethan Play
Montaigne
The Duchess of Newcastle
Rambling round Evelyn
Defoe
Addison
Lives of the Obscure–
1. Taylors and Edgeworths
2. Laetitia Pilkington
Jane Austen
Modern Fiction
“Jane Eyre” and “Wuthering Heights”
George Eliot
The Russian Point of View
Outlines–
1. Miss Mitford
2. Dr. Bentley
3. Lady Dorothy Nevill
4. Archbishop Thomson
The Patron and the Crocus
The Modern Essay
Joseph Conrad
How it strikes a Contemporary

Virginia Woolf’s Essays

1925 – The Common Reader first series

1932 – The Common Reader second series

1942 – The Death of the Moth and Other Essays

1947 – The Moment and Other Essays

1950 – The Captain’s Death Bed and Other Essays

1958 – Granite and Rainbow

More on Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf – web links
Virginia Woolf – greatest works
Virginia Woolf – criticism
More on the Bloomsbury Group

The Common Reader second series

December 10, 2015 by Roy Johnson

essays and reviews on literary and cultural history

The Common Reader second series (1935) is a collection of essays by Virginia Woolf, the second to be published in her own lifetime. It followed on the success of The Common Reader first series which was published in 1925. Sales of the first volume had surprised both Virginia Woolf and her husband Leonard working together at their own enterprise, The Hogarth Press.

first edition – cover design by Vanessa Bell
The amazing thing is that whilst Woolf was producing all her great novels of the English modernist period, she was also a very productive journalist. This collection includes critical essays, journalism, and book reviews that had previously appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, Life and Letters, The Nation, Vogue, The New York Herald, The Yale Review, and Figaro.

The Common Reader second series – commentary

Following the pattern established in The Common Reader first series the essays are arranged in chronological order by subject. The volume begins with a study of Elizabethan writers and ends with an appreciation of Thomas Hardy – who was a friend of Virginia Woolf’s father, Sir Leslie Stephen. This collection also includes the much-quoted essay “How Should One Read a Book?” in which Woolf offers some profound reflections on the relationship between reader and text. In the first instance her advice appears deceptively simple:

“The only advice, indeed, that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions”.

But it turns out that these instincts and this reason are to be based on a very wide reading experience indeed – of novels, biography, history, and poetry. And the experience itself will be multi-layered, for each book must be compared with others of the same kind, and will finally be judged against the best of its kind. And this is not offered in any spirit of elitism – because she fully realises that much of what we consume as readers will be fairly trivial:

The greater part of any library is nothing but the record of … fleeting moments in the lives of man, women, and donkeys. Every literature, as it grows old, has its rubbish heap, its record of vanished moments and forgotten lives told in faltering and feeble accents that have perished. But if you give yourself up to the delight of rubbish reading, you will be surprised, indeed you will be overcome, by the relics of human life that have been cast out to moulder.

At their best these essays combine a high degree of erudition with the enthusiasm of a writer who is a great lover of literature but who also wants her opinions to be read. Her study of John Donne is part biography, part practical analysis and also an explanation of why he is so ‘modern’ after three hundred years. She explains the relationship between the subjects of his poems and the audience or individual patrons for whom he was writing. She also traces his acceptance of contradictions in himself and life in general which makes him appeal to modern sensibilities.

An essay written on the occasion of the death of Thomas Hardy in 1928 is a survey of his entire work as a novelist. It reveals her deep appreciation of his talent as a creator of powerful human dramas, a countryman and self-taught scholar with poetry at his fingertips, Even though Hardy was a friend of Virginia Woolf’s family she is not at all sycophantic in her judgements. She sees flaws in Jude the Obscure (overly pessimistic) and is even critical of his style.

Her article on Robinson Crusoe is not only an appreciation of the novel in the context of a history of the English novel, but also a meditation on fiction and biography. She takes a topic, brings a great deal of literary erudition to bear upon it, but then relates the topic to a much larger cultural context – as well as generating sparkly digressions that show her to be a passionate reader herself.

The range of her interests is quite breathtaking. There are articles on Swift, on Laurence Sterne, Lord Chesterfield, De Quincey, Hazlitt, Gissing, and on George Meredith, who in her own lifetime had sunk from untouchable fame to a writer who nobody read any more. [Today his critical reputation is more or less extinct.]

It is certainly true that the pace and tone of the literary essay was significantly different one hundred years ago when these examples were composed. Writers even as well informed and technically skilful as Woolf were given license to ramble and generalise in a manner that would not generally be permitted today. But in the essay form she demonstrates a profound cultural intelligence to which the occasional flights of fancy are an acceptable and very stylish bonus extra.

The Common Reader second series – study resources

The Common Reader second series – Amazon UK
The Common Reader second series – Amazon US

Complete Works of Virginia Woolf – Kindle – Amazon UK
Complete Works of Virginia Woolf – Kindle – Amazon US

The Common Reader second series – free eBook formats – Gutenberg

Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader second series, London: Mariner Books, 2003, pp.336, ISBN: 0156028166

The Common Reader second series – contents

The Strange Elizabethans
Donne After Three Centuries
“The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia”
“Robinson Crusoe”
Dorothy Osborne’s “Letters”
Swift’s “Journal to Stella”
The “Sentimental Journey”
Lord Chesterfield’s Letters to His Son
Two Parsons
1. James Woodforde
2. The Rev. John Skinner
Dr. Burney’s Evening Party
Jack Mytton
De Quincey’s Autobiography
Four Figures
1. Cowper and Lady Austen
2. Beau Brummell
3. Mary Wollstonecraft
4. Dorothy Wordsworth
William Hazlitt
Geraldine and Jane
“Aurora Leigh”
The Niece of an Earl
George Gissing
The Novels of George Meredith
“I Am Christina Rossetti”
The Novels of Thomas Hardy
How Should One Read a Book?

Virginia Woolf – the complete Essays

1925 — The Common Reader first series

1932 — The Common Reader second series

1942 — The Death of the Moth

1947 — The Moment and Other Essays

1950 — The Captain’s Death Bed and Other Essays

1958 — Granite and Rainbow

More on Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf – web links
Virginia Woolf – greatest works
Virginia Woolf – criticism
More on the Bloomsbury Group

The Death of the Moth

January 4, 2016 by Roy Johnson

essays on literature, reading, and cultural history

The Death of the Moth (1942) is the third volume of Virginia Woolf’s essays to be published after the success of her earlier collections The Common Reader first series and The Common Reader second series. Early preparations were made by Virginia Woolf herself, and then it appeared one year after her death, edited by her husband Leonard Woolf.

He explains in his introduction that the essays had previously appeared in The Times Literary Supplement, the New Statesman & Nation, the Yale Review, the New York Herald Tribune, the Atlantic Monthly, the Listener, the New Republic, and Lysistrata. He also goes on to point out that Virginia Woolf took immense care with even the shortest and least important of her essays and book reviews – often producing up to eight versions of a text before she was satisfied.

At the point of assembling this collection Leonard Woolf thought that the totality of Virginia’s finished essays and reviews had been located, edited, and published. But subsequent researches and retrievals from newspaper archives were to produce the later collections The Moment and Other Essays (1947), The Captain’s Death Bed and Other Essays (1950), and Granite and Rainbow (1958).

The Death of the Moth – critical commentary

The brief essay that gives this volume its title illustrates perfectly her gift for spinning literary gold out of straw. The subject is trivial and mundane – a moth fluttering against a window pane. But she observes it as a philosopher who uses the image to reflect on the most fundamental force of nature – the struggle between life and death.

She also draws out the complexities in apparently simple things – such as the words we use to speak and write. In an essay called ‘Craftsmanship’ – which was built from a radio broadcast for the BBC in a series called ‘Words Fail Me’ – she reflects on the volatility of language and our difficulties in pinning down meaning. The following Youtube illustrated audio clip gives an extract from the broadcast:

In some pieces, such as ‘Evening Over Sussex’ she not only explores the complexities of expressing her appreciation of the countryside but she also weaves into the verbal landscape her reflections on the nature of multiple personalities which construct the individual sensibility making such observations.

Three reviews of Henry James – two memoirs and the letters – almost take on the famous style of her author-subject – the long sentences, baroque syntax, and complex metaphors that his fans so admire and his detractors bewail. She dwells mainly on his relationship with England and his not-uncritical admiration for its traditions, through which she expresses her own reverence for James as a figure representing a bygone age.

Her literary criticism is of a kind that hardly exists any more. In an extended study of E.M. Forster’s novels she is lofty and magisterial, but she evaluates the works using bafflingly abstract metaphors:

there are moments — and his first novel [Where Angels Fear to Tread] provides several instances — when he lays his hand on the prize.

She believes that one of his greatest novels is Howards End – it ‘mark[s] his prime’, yet when she gets round to looking at it in detail exclaims ‘we may wonder in what mood of the moment we can have been prompted to call it a failure … the book as a whole lacks force’.

In ‘The Art of Biography’ she points out that fiction and biography cannot be easily combined because they have different goals – one towards factuality, the other towards invention. As a novelist and biographer herself, she resolves this contradiction by suggesting that biography is a young genre, that it should explore new methods, and that it acts as a modest handmaid to the work of truly imaginative and great artists.

Her reflections on the condition of young English poets in 1931 are cast in the form of a letter to ‘John’: (this is John Lehmann, who worked for Leonard and Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press). Against his despair that poetry was ‘dead’ she invokes the great English tradition – of Shakespeare, Donne, Crabbe, Hopkins – urges him and his friends to stop looking inward and write about other people, and implores him ‘for heaven’s sake, publish nothing before you are thirty’.

The volume ends with some vivacious polemics – a critique of lectures as a teaching method in the university education system (sixty years ahead of its time); an account of how she was forced to kill the Victorian notion of ‘The Angel in the House’ (the ideal woman) in order to become a professional author; and what might be the best antidotes to the clamour for aggression and war.

These essays are a wonderful reminder of how Woolf managed to successfully combine serious and profoundly new ideas about everyday life (particularly the lives of women) with both the wit and the erudition of someone who was truly steeped in the traditions of English literary culture.

The Death of the Moth – study resources

The Death of the Moth – Amazon UK

The Death of the Moth – Amazon US

Complete Works of Virginia Woolf – Kindle -Amazon UK

Complete Works of Virginia Woolf – Kindle – Amazon US

The Death of the Moth – free eBook formats – Gutenberg

The Death of the Moth – complete contents

The Death of the Moth
Evening Over Sussex: Reflections in a Motor Car
Three Pictures
Old Mrs. Grey
Street Haunting: A London Adventure
Jones and Wilkinson
“Twelfth Night” At the Old Vic
Madame de Sévigné
The Humane Art
Two Antiquaries: Walpole and Cole
The Rev William Cole
The Historian and “The Gibbon”
Reflections at Sheffield Place
The Man at the Gate
Sara Coleridge
“Not One of Us”
Henry James: 1. Within the Rim
Henry James: 2. The Old Order
Henry James: 3. The Letters of Henry James
George Moore
The Novels of E. M. Forster
Middlebrow
The Art of Biography
Craftsmanship
A Letter to a Young Poet
Why?
Professions for Women
Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid

Virginia Woolf – the complete Essays

1925 — The Common Reader first series

1932 — The Common Reader second series

1942 — The Death of the Moth

1947 — The Moment and Other Essays

1950 — The Captain’s Death Bed and Other Essays

1958 — Granite and Rainbow

More on Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf – web links
Virginia Woolf – greatest works
Virginia Woolf – criticism
More on the Bloomsbury Group

The Moment

January 4, 2016 by Roy Johnson

essays on literature, reading, and cultural history

The Moment (1947) is the second collection of essays and reviews by Virginia Woolf that were gathered and edited by her husband Leonard after her death in 1941. She herself had supervised the earlier collections The Common Reader first series (1925) and The Common Reader second series (1932) which were published during her lifetime

The Moment and Other Essays includes writing on literary criticism, biographical sketches, political polemics, and book reviews. Some of the essays were being published for the first time; others had appeared in The Times Literary Supplement, The Nation, the New Statesman and Nation, Time and Tide, the New York Saturday Review, and John Lehmann’s New Writing. The collection includes two essays with the same title, Royalty; the first was commissioned, but not published by Picture Post; the second was published in Time and Tide.

The Moment – critical commentary

There are some essays in this collection that have become quite well known in their own right. On Being Ill for instance takes as a starting point the subject of illness in literature, a topic which she spins out into an extraordinary display of reflections on subjects including solitude, the psychology of reading, and the nature of language.

‘The Art of Fiction’ is one novelist’s response to the theorising of another – her critique and appreciation of E.M. Forster’s now classic study of fiction, Aspects of the Novel (1927). She agrees with his analysis of plot and structure, but playfully rebukes him for not paying more attention to the very medium of literature, which is words.

She is a writer (and a reader) who is inclined to look at the most fundamental aspects of her subject – which is the production and consumption of literature. In ‘Re-Reading Novels’ for instance she tackles head-on the problem of reading long Victorian novels such as Vanity Fair (1847) and (Meredith’s) Harry Richmond (1870).

First, there is the boredom of it. The national habit of reading has been formed by the drama, and the drama has always recognised the fact that human beings cannot sit for more than five hours at a stretch in front of a stage. Read Harry Richmond for five hours at a stretch and we shall only have broken off a fragment. Days may pass before we can add to it; meanwhile the plan is lost; the book pours to waste; we blame ourselves; we abuse the author; nothing is more exasperating and dispiriting.

She argues with Percy Lubbock’s notion of the novel’s ‘form’ — in The Craft of Fiction(1921) — that it is not something analogous to visual ‘shape’ in painting, but an arrangement of feelings with which we are left after the first reading of a text, and which might be re-arranged on a second or subsequent reading.

It’s a popular myth about Woolf and her fellow Bloomsbury artists and writers that they were elitist and not interested in politics. An essay such as ‘The Leaning Tower’ shows how the exact opposite was true. She analyses the tradition of English literature from an ideological, almost Marxist point of view, showing how the education of its writers was based on class privilege. It is no accident that the majority came from families who had the wealth to afford a public school and university education. She ends her survey with a rallying cry for an end to class divisions altogether, and the hope that ordinary men and women will borrow more books from public libraries. But then this essay was delivered as a paper to an audience of the Brighton Workers’ Educational Association in 1940 – so maybe we should not be surprised at its radical message.

This is not to say that all the essays and sketches are deadly serious. The attitudes she struck were obviously determined by the publications for which she was writing. There are shorter and more lightweight pieces such as her satirical account of the life of Benjamin Haydon, monumental painter and diarist, her reflections on the relationship between painting and literature, and even some thoughts on the poetry of fishing.

But whether the essays are short and witty or long and serious, she always has something thought-provoking to say. For instance, on individual writers, she admits her reservations regarding D.H.Lawrence, but produces a deeply felt appreciation of Sons and Lovers. She recognises that people have stopped reading the novels of Walter Scott altogether – but still manages to find something admirable in his ambition. And although she believes that David Copperfield is part of the national consciousness, she confesses that considered as a human being she ‘would not cross the road to dine with … Dickens.’

The Moment – study resources

The Moment – Amazon UK
The Moment – Amazon US

Complete Works of Virginia Woolf – Kindle -Amazon UK

Complete Works of Virginia Woolf – Kindle – Amazon US

The Moment – free eBook format – Gutenberg

The Moment – complete contents

The Moment: Summer’s Night
On Being Ill
The Faery Queen
Congreve’s Comedies
Sterne’s Ghost
Mrs. Thrale
Sir Walter Scott. Gas at Abbotsford
Sir Walter Scott. The Antiquary
Lockhart’s Criticism
David Copperfield
Lewis Carroll
Edmund Gosse
Notes on D. H. Lawrence
Roger Fry
The Art Of Fiction
American Fiction
The Leaning Tower
On Rereading Novels
Personalities
Pictures
Harriette Wilson
Genius: R. B. Haydon
The Enchanted Organ: Anne Thackeray
Two Women: Emily Davies and Lady Augusta Stanley
Ellen Terry
To Spain
Fishing
The Artist and Politics
Royalty
Royalty

Virginia Woolf – the complete Essays

1925 — The Common Reader first series

1932 — The Common Reader second series

1942 — The Death of the Moth

1947 — The Moment and Other Essays

1950 — The Captain’s Death Bed and Other Essays

1958 — Granite and Rainbow

More on Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf – web links
Virginia Woolf – greatest works
Virginia Woolf – criticism
More on the Bloomsbury Group

essays on literature, biography, and cultural history

Granite and Rainbow – critical commentary

Granite and Rainbow – study resources

Grantite and Rainbow – complete contents

Virginia Woolf – the complete Essays

essays, memoirs, cultural history and criticism

classics of the essay genre written in English 1700-2000

essays, memoirs, cultural history and criticism

essays on literature, biography, and cultural history

The Captain’s Death Bed – critical commentary

The Captain’s Death Bed – study resources

The Captain#s Death Bed – complete contents

Virginia Woolf’s Essays

essays on literature, authors, and cultural history

The Common Reader first series – study resources

The Common Reader first series – complete contents

Virginia Woolf’s Essays

essays and reviews on literary and cultural history

The Common Reader second series – commentary

The Common Reader second series – study resources

The Common Reader second series – contents

Virginia Woolf – the complete Essays

essays on literature, reading, and cultural history

The Death of the Moth – critical commentary

The Death of the Moth – study resources

The Death of the Moth – complete contents

Virginia Woolf – the complete Essays

essays on literature, reading, and cultural history

The Moment – critical commentary

The Moment – study resources

The Moment – complete contents

Virginia Woolf – the complete Essays

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