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Virginia Woolf and the Critic as Reader

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Mark Goldman
Mark Goldman*
Affiliation:
University of Rhode Island, Kingston
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Extract

Virginia woolf's title for the two volumes of essays collected in her lifetime, The Common Reader, has been taken for a descriptive image of the critic as impressionist or amateur reader. In the preface to her first Common Reader, Mrs. Woolf explains her title and epigraph, taken from Dr. Johnson's “Life of Gray,” in place of a statement of purpose. Her description is deliberately casual and informal, but she provides a structure and point of view for her essays by adding that the common reader does wish to create from his reading “some kind of whole—a portrait of a man, a sketch of an age, a theory of the art of writing.” Though Mrs. Woolf's deceptive remarks on the function of criticism may partly account for the persistent view of her as “reader” rather than “critic,” other writers have contributed to the stereotype of Virginia Woolf as an occasional essayist and impressionist, as a literary portrait painter and miniaturist; or as an antiquarian rummaging through the attics of a rather charming but peripheral past. Unsympathetic readers have carried the belletristic image further and coupled it with the conception of her fiction as a total immersion in pure subjectivity or (in Sean O'Faolain's view) as an exercise in the novel as narcissism. Yet, in fairness to reviewers of Virginia Woolf's essays, it should be noted that both favorable and unfavorable com'ments seem to be based on a similar conception of her as an appreciator or impressionist rather than a serious critic. Thus Horace Gregory, while presenting what he feels is a just and favorable estimate of Virginia Woolf as an essayist, tends to ignore her real value as a literary critic.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 80 , Issue 3 , June 1965 , pp. 275 - 284
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1965

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References

1 The Common Reader, first series, 1925; The Common Reader, second series, 1932. These have been supplemented by a series of posthumous volumes edited by her husband, Leonard Woolf (The Death of the Moth, 1942; The Moment and Other Essays, 1947; The Captain's Death Bed, 1950). Though Mr. Woolf announced, in the Editor's note to The Captain's Death Bed, that this would be the last posthumous collection of essays, another volume appeared in 1958 (with an explanatory note by Mr. Woolf) entitled Granite and Rainbow.

2 “The Common Reader,” in The Common Reader, first series, 1925 (London, 1951), p. 11.

3 Sean O'Faolain, “Narcissa and Lucifer,” in New World Writing, x (November 1956), 161–175.

4 Horace Gregory, “On Virginia Woolf and Her Appeal to the Common Reader,” in The Shield of Achilles (New York, 1944), p. 192.

5 Diana Trilling, “Virginia Woolf's Special Realm,” The New York Times Book Review, 21 March 1948, p. 28.

6 Ibid.

7 Mark Schorer, “Virginia Woolf,” The Yale Review, xxxii (December 1942), 379.

8 “The Frontiers of Criticism,” in On Poetry and Poets (London, 1957).

9 “Phases of Fiction,” in Granite and Rainbow, ed. Leonard Woolf (London, 1958), p. 93. This series appeared originally in The Bookman, April, May, and June, 1929. Though many of Mrs. Woolf's essays are fugitive pieces, or were originally reviews, some of the most important criticism derives from deliberately conceived critical essays (such as “Phases of Fiction,” which was originally planned as a book on the novel). One can discover an underlying form or design by tracing dominant themes through the essays, and it is possible to arrange Mrs. Woolf's essays in chronological or historical order so that her experimental interests are seen against a traditional framework, revealing the artist-critic conscious of the need to create from the reality of the present while conservative of the values of the past. Her conception of reality (see n. 15) leads to the concern for a literary form adequate to the modern sensibility, and thus to her many essays on the novel and the art of fiction. Even these essays may be seen in historical sequence, as a kind of survey of the novel. From this larger perspective, one finds that Mrs. Woolf's approach to modern fiction and to her own work is more traditional than has generally been recognized. Her interest in a possible balancing of prose and poetry in fiction is incorporated into a more conservative theory, or a new synthesis for the modern novel. Her own fiction can then be seen as a more comprehensive progress toward this synthesis rather than as an increasingly subjective evolution that reached its climax with The Waves and declined steadily thereafter in vain attempts to repeat her earlier performances.

10 Allen Tate, “Preface” to The Man of Letters in the Modern World: Selected Essays; 1928–1955 (New York: Meridian Books, 1955), p. 7.

11 “Hours in a Library,” in Granite and Rainbow, p. 24. Originally printed in the Times Literary Supplement, 30 November 1916, the title of the essay is taken from her father's collection of essays and reviews.

12 “Leslie Stephen,” in The Captain's Death Bed, p. 72.

13 In The Captain's Death Bed.

14 In The Common Reader, first series.

15 A discussion of Mrs. Woolf's conception of reality would require a separate essay. It would be possible, as a matter of fact, to arrange her own essays chronologically for a survey of literature seen from the perspective of her ideas on reality. Mrs. Woolf's approach to the real in literary history resembles Erich Auerbach's, in his book Mimesis; The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard Trask (Doubleday Anchor Books, 1957). Though much of Mrs. Woolf's criticism is an attempt to deal with a specific work, she is also concerned with the age in which the work was written and how it influenced the author's perspective or view of reality. As an experimental novelist, however, she subscribed to an evolutionary theory of the real leading to the modern triumph of the inner spirit over external matter, the real over the realistic.

16 “Reading,” p. 141.

17 “How Should One Read A Book?” in The Common Reader, second series, p. 259.

18 Ibid., p. 260.

19 Ibid., p. 266.

20 “Thoughts on Criticism by a Critic,” Cornhill Magazine, xxxiv (November 1876), 564.

21 “The Esthetic Judgment and The Ethical Judgment,” in Modern Literary Criticism, ed. Ray B. West (New York, 1961), pp. 215–216.

22 T. S. Eliot, “The Perfect Critic,” in The Sacred Wood (London, 1920; University Paperbacks, 1960), p. 15.

23 “How Should One Read A Book?” p. 269.

24 Mrs. Woolf's thoughts on reviewing, and its relation to criticism, can be found in an essay (originally a pamphlet) called “Reviewing,” in The Captain's Death Bed.

25 “How Should One Read A Book?” pp. 269–270.

26 In The Moment and Other Essays.

27 “On Re-reading Novels,” p. 130. In discussing Turgenev's fiction, Mrs. Woolf states that he saw his novels not as a “succession of events; but as a succession of emotions radiating from some character at the centre” (“The Novels of Turgenev,” in The Captain's Death Bed. p. 58).

28 London: Chatto and Windus, 1949.

29 Included in Vision and Design (first published in 1920; reprinted by Meridian Books, New York, 1956).

30 For a discussion of these “fallacies,” see the first two essays in W. K. Wimsatt's The Verbal Icon (Noonday edition, 1962).

31 Bell, Art, p. 62.

32 Fry, p. 37.

33 Fry, “The Artist's Vision,” in Vision and Design.

34 “On Re-reading Novels,” p. 130.

35 Ibid., p. 13.

36 See Joseph Warren Beach, The Method of Henry James (Philadelphia: Albert Saifer, 1954), p. 31.

37 See the chapter on Bloomsbury aesthetics in J. K. Johnstone, The Bloomsbury Group (New York, 1954).

38 Virginia Woolf, Roger Fry: A Biography (New York, 1940), p. 240.

39 See especially “Modern Fiction,” in The Common Reader, first series; and “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” in The Captain's Death Bed.

40 “Some Questions in Aesthetics,” in Transformations (first printed in 1926, reprinted in 1956 by Doubleday Anchor Books), p. 11.

41 Ibid. See Charles Mauron's The Nature of Beauty in Art and Literature (London, 1927), a book published by the Woolfs and translated by Fry.

42 In West, Modern Literary Criticism, p. 42.

43 In Selected Essays: New Edition (New York, 1950).

44 See especially the first two chapters of Murray Krieger's The New Apologists for Poetry (Minneapolis, 1956).

45 See Murray Krieger's article, “Benedetto Croce and The Recent Poetics Of Organicism,” Comparative Literature, vii, No. 3 (1955), 252–258.

46 Quoted in Brooks and Wimsatt, Literary Criticism: A Short History (New York, 1959), p. 515.

47 See Allen Tate's article, “The Present Function Of Criticism,” in West, Essays in Modern Literary Criticism, pp. 145–154.

48 See the chapter on Richards in John Crowe Ransom's The New Criticism (New York, 1941), and Ransom's article, “Criticism as Pure Speculation,” in West's anthology, cited above.

49 René Wellek, “Walter Pater's Literary Theory and Criticism,” Victorian Studies (September 1957), p. 30.

50 For a full-scale treatment of the ethical and aesthetic influence of G. E. Moore on Bloomsbury, see J. K. Johnstone, The Bloomsbury Group, especially Part i.

51 Walter Pater, “The School of Giorgione,” in The Renaissance (Modern Library Edition), p. 111.

52 Ibid., p. 114. The phrase “imaginative reason” derives from Matthew Arnold.

53 “Walter Raleigh,” in The Captain's Death Bed, p. 85. There is a more sympathetic essay on Raleigh by the Bloomsbury critic Desmond MacCarthy, in Portraits (London, 1931).

54 “How It Strikes A Contemporary,” in The Common Reader, first series.

55 A Writer's Diary: Being Extracts From The Diary of Virginia Woolf, ed. Leonard Woolf (New York, 1953), Monday, 16 Nov. 1931, p. 172.

56 Ibid., Wednesday, 16 August 1933, pp. 203–204.

57 Ibid., Tuesday, 17 Sept. 1940, p. 337.

58 “The Frontiers of Criticism,” pp. 117–118.

59 Henry James, “Criticism,” in Essays in London and Elsewhere (London, 1893), pp. 276–277.