Woolfish Perception

Virginia Woolf might be at once the English novelist who is the most accomplished and the most shrugged off. The characters of Mrs Dalloway were never going to appear on cigarette cards, as Dickens’ characters did. Orlando even irritated Elizabeth Bowen (because it had too many in-jokes for Vita Sackville-West). Admirers must admit that, as Penelope Fitzgerald said, Woolf’s techniques were taken as far as they could go. She had the genius to exhaust a whole line of artistic inquiry, and many have felt exhausted by her. 

And she was personally unlikeable: racist, snobbish, uncharitable, snide, a malicious gossip. Perhaps her feminism rankled readers, but that her nastiness has put off a great many more is surely undeniable. This is the Virginia Woolf we think we know: hard to read, easy to hate. That is the image of her which has calcified in popular imagination. But the image of her is an artifact we have created, and the women, her books, and her world are stranger to contemporary readers than they have been to any previous ones. Her novels were written when our grandmothers or great grandmothers were in their cradles. If, on her centenary, we can cast off a century of accumulated interference, we might begin to see her less familiarly, less divided from us. 

As you have likely heard by now, Mrs Dalloway has just turned one hundred. She keeps good company. 2025 is the one hundredth anniversary of Carry On Jeeves, The Great Gatsby, The Trial, and The Painted Veil. But Mrs Dalloway is not the Woolf book I have come to praise. This year is also the anniversary of her first collection of critical essays, The Common Reader. Woolf was the great critic of the twentieth century and The Common Reader deserves as much praise and celebration as all its fellow centenarians. In her essays, Woolf showed herself to have been deeply influenced by England’s greatest critic, Samuel Johnson. She places herself in his tradition and claims it for her own.

The Common Reader, along with Woolf’s Diaries, belongs to a class of English books which are not as famous or beloved as the great novels, dramas, and poems, but whose elegance and insights secure a steady readership. Along with Lamb, DeQuincy, Walton, Addison, Johnson, Coleridge, Hazlitt, Swift, Pepys, and, perhaps her own favorite, Thomas Browne, Woolf’s non-fiction (an entirely inadequate term) is a storehouse of fine prose and a dispensary of practical wisdom. She knew what it took to be read centuries hence. “Should you wish to make sure that your birthday will be celebrated three hundred years hence,” her essay about the diarist John Evelyn begins, “your best course is undoubtedly to keep a diary.” Well, rarer than great diarists are great critics. Rarer than both are those who write great novels and great criticism. A full appreciation of Woolf’s genius requires an examination of her essays on equal terms with her novels. 

Woolf wrote when close reading was being developed and when criticism was becoming increasingly academic. I.A. Richard’s Principles of Literary Criticism was published the year before Dalloway, followed by Practical Criticism in 1929. Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity came in 1930. Woolf does not read like these men; she does not read closely. She breaks down no inherent ambiguity of language. She splits no hairs, makes no bones, chases no theoretic dreams. She is determinedly biographical, humane, and personal. She has no jargon and no program. She did not have what Johnson called in the Life of Pope, “the cant of those who judge by principles rather than perception.” 

Like Johnson, she is not a critic of abstract principles, but of fine taste. The critical ideas she does stipulate are the fruit of extensive reading and cultivated preferences. All taste is the product of knowledge, and few have been as well read as Woolf. Like Johnson, erudition allows great latitude in how she treats a subject. She is not beholden to any external measure. She can delight in Elizabeth prose writers or Defoe’s novels without worrying herself about their suitability for modern ideals. 

In The Common Reader Virginia Woolf, the great modernist, the great acerbic, the great snob, wrote affectionate, traditional, old-fashioned belles lettres. She is constantly fresh, always surprising us. Who expects her to be an admirer of Moll Flanders? Everyone knows she called Middlemarch “perhaps the only novel written for grown-ups” (one of her few patently incorrect pronouncements), but she also wrote, “The compositions of Addison will live as long as the English language.” We know about her knowing (or not knowing) Greek, but she also knew enough to compare the lesser known Elizabethan and Victorian dramatists. Her friend Lytton Strachey did not care for Mrs Dalloway, but he thought The Common Reader was “divine, a classic.” It is un-put-down-able.

Woolf was aware of her powers, and was eager to, as she put it in her diary, demonstrate her credentials. Ambition is realized through effort, and she keeps telling herself to labour: she reads and she reads and she reads. She works and she works and she works. Now she is shivering in bed with flu, worrying about not doing her work; now she is popping into the London Library to find a reference; now she is recording in her diary that she must work harder. 

Her model was Samuel Johnson. In some ways, it is hard to think of two more dissimilar figures in English literature. But Woolf resembles Johnson quite distinctly. Johnson is the presiding spirit of The Common Reader, and his Lives of the Poets is the great critical work which haunts this one, and from which Woolf derived her title (it is a phrase from the Life of Gray). The structure of Woolf’s essays is Johnsonian. Lives of the Poets was innovative when it was written  in the 1770s. It combines biography with criticism. Johnson sketches the personage, appraises their morality and personality in anecdotes and aphorism, before surveying, describing, and judging the works. He does so much, and he does it in such a brief space. Woolf has a Johnsonian ability to enliven a subject through summary and condensation. She selects the right facts —the shining ones, intricate and revealing as carved stone — and she arranges them in careful display, so that we move past her organized pictures feeling lively, as if a great curator has stepped out to conduct us on a tour of English literary history. 

Their similarities extend beyond the page. It has been said that Johnson was the only great English writer who knew how to bind a book. Woolf knew how too. Johnson was raised in his father’s shop, where books were made in the back and sold in the front. He read ravenously in that shop and learned the trade (and trade-gossip which, decades later, informed the Lives of the Poets). Woolf was also raised in her father’s literary shadow: Leslie Stephens edited the DNB and she read through his library like a hungry caterpillar: poems, novels, diaries, letters, essays, histories. 

Johnson was awkward, accused of rudeness, and he suffered myriad afflictions (dropsy, indigestion, semi-blindness, facial scars, some form of compulsive disorder due to which he was, at least once, compared to a lunatic, and regular periods of melancholy): Woolf is famous for her meanness, her biting comments, her depressions, her difficulty putting on weight. They were both sexually frustrated. Neither had graduated from university: he for lack of money (he left after a year), she for lack of Y-chromosomes. They both worked on the open market, and catered (somewhat) to publishers or readers. They both wrote in fine, delicate, highly worked-up styles. They both venerated the writers of the past; were witty, never frivolous; studied classical languages; had a special love of biographical writing; enjoyed staying at their friends’ grand houses; were curious about the mechanisms of the world; wrote aphoristically; and both wrote quest narratives. 

Woolf’s love of Johnson was unusually in degree but not in kind. (Woolf records her mother in law quoting Rasselas at tea one day.) When Lytton Strachey came to tea the pair talked about their respective merits as writers and then read parts of the Lives of the Poets aloud. She quotes off-hand, obscure passages from the bowels of Boswell’s Life of Johnson. She visited Johnson’s house in Gough Square — sometimes just to walk by.

The Addison essay in The Common Reader is the most Johnsonian: it borrows its ideas directly from Johnson’s Life of Addison. Unlike Johnson, Woolf does not write much about Addison’s life; she assesses the work; and her assessment follows Johnson’s. They agree that, in Johnson’s words, Addison seldom reaches greatness but rarely enters dullness. She quotes Johnson’s joust that Addison “thinks justly, but he thinks faintly.” They both see Addison as a writer who must be read. Johnson advises that whoever wants to write prose that is “familiar but not coarse, and elegant but not ostentatious, must give his days and nights to Addison.” Woolf concurs. It is thanks to Addison, she says, that “prose is prosaic.” He has “innumerable progeny.” Read Addison now, she says, and you will realize that we have lost the art of writing essays. Addison’s essays are “highly finished,” and full of “neat, clean strokes”: so are Johnson’s and so Woolf’s. 

Woolf never sounds more Johnsonian than when she borrows his favorite rhetorical device: parallelism, used to deliver sound moral or aesthetic judgement. Parallelism, in Johnson and Woolf, is a device of certainty. Mary Russell Mitford and her Surroundings is “not a good book” because “it neither enlarges the mind nor purifies the heart.” (Couldn’t Johnson have written that?) Modern novelists like Arnold Bennett “spend immense skill and immense industry making the trivial and the transitory appear the true and the enduring.” In the Life of Dr. Bentley she found “much that is odd and little that is reassuring.” 

She does this with chiasmus too. Tolstoy proceeds “not from the inside outwards, but from the outside inwards.” Like Johnson, she makes snappy judgments that might at first sound parochial but which are sharpened by an under-the-skin understanding of literary construction: George Eliot “allows her heroines to talk too much”; Defoe “leaves out the whole of vegetable nature, and a large part of human nature.” And she genalises with Johnsonian magnificence (who wrote in the Life of Cowley that “Great thoughts are always general”): “The second-rate works of a great writer are worth reading because they offer the best criticism of his masterpieces.” The Common Reader is founded on such general phrases. “The impressions of childhood are those that last longest and cut deepest.” “There is a dignity in everything that is looked at openly.” All Johnsonian phrases, all written by Woolf.

Woolf’s essays feel conversational but it is the grand, domineering conversation of a figure of Johnsonian learning and perspicacity. The same collection minus her gravity would be “Table Talk” And Johnson is the same way: become acquainted with both minds and you might forget which one of them it was who said, “Sir, I have found you an argument. I am not obliged to find you an understanding.” I think they would have liked each other: Johnson was a great admirer and helper of auto-didactic women writers, and while his sexism occasionally inspires Woolf’s exasperation, he would earn her admiration, too, for his ability to recognize talent even beneath a bonnet. 

Woolf’s diaries show a preoccupation with her own limits: not just her jealousies, angers, snobbisms, and prejudices (Merve Emre’s annotated edition of Mrs Dalloway points out that Woolf’s fiction occasionally ironizes her prejudices), but also her constant consciousness of the limits of her ability relative to her ambition. She shares with Johnson a preoccupation about whether she can develop her talents fully, whether she is working hard enough. 

Where she departs from Johnson is in her attentiveness to English prose. Woolf loved prose, and dedicated her essays in The Common Reader to the best English prose. She has a genius for ventriloquizing a person or period (as in her Montaigne essay, or when Orlando moves through the centuries and the narration takes on the style of each period) while still sounding Woolfish to the utmost. The Common Reader is to prose what the Lives of the Poets became to poetry. In the marvelous opening of her DeQuincey essay, she positions herself implicitly as a counterpoint to Johnson. 

It must often strike the reader that very little criticism worthy of being called so has been written in English of prose — our great critics have given the best of their minds to poetry. And the reason perhaps why prose so seldom calls out the higher faculties of the critic, but invites him to argue a case or to discuss the personality of the writer — to take a theme from the book and make his criticism an air played in variation on it — is to be sought in the prose-writer’s attitude to his own work. Even if he writes as an artist, without a practical end in view, still he treats prose as a humble beast of burden which must accommodate all sorts of odds and ends; as an impure substance in which dust and twigs and flies find lodgment. But more often than not the prose-writer has a practical aim in view, a theory to argue, or a cause to plead, and with it adopts the moralist’s view that the remote, the difficult, and the complex are to be abjured. His duty is to the present and the living. He is proud to call himself a journalist. He must use the simplest words and express himself as clearly as possible in order to reach the greatest number in the plainest way. Therefore he cannot complain of the critics if his writing, like the irritation in the oyster, serves only to breed other art; nor be surprised if his pages, once they have delivered their message, are thrown on the rubbish heap like other objects that have served their turn.

But sometimes we meet even in prose with writing that seems inspired by other aims. It does not wish to argue or to convert or even to tell a story. We can draw all our pleasure from the words themselves; we have not to enhance it by reading between the lines or by making a voyage of discovery into the psychology of the writer. De Quincey, of course, is one of these rare beings. 

We can draw all our pleasure from the words themselves. We can say the same of Woolf’s prose which glides through clause after clause, phrase after phrase, linked by semicolons. Her deep love of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is everywhere visible in her long segmented sentences. But in her short, cogent remarks, she is a woman of her own time, too.

Today we have a surfeit of literary essays that are really personal essays; and a surfeit of literary essays that are excuses to write cultural criticism, or to complain about why some authors are, or are not, the voices of their generation, or to speculate cooly, but with professed concern for the sake of editorial urgency, about what Sally Rooney’s novels reveal about modern sexual politics. Today’s critics, like our forefathers, too often use their essays as a vehicle for clever quips and glib assertions. We are besieged by the cant of principles. 

Woolf is ought to be our model and antidote. She is intensely literary, and her criticism is largely free of politics, ideology, or the persistent drag of contemporary concerns. When she does let her politics bite, as in her scathing review of Mary Russell Mitford and her Surroundings, she does not make profound pronouncements but jokes:

…the stock of female characters who lend themselves to biographic treatment by their own sex is, for one reason or another, running short. For instance, little is known of Sappho, and that little is not wholly to her credit. Lady Jane Grey has merit, but is undeniably obscure. Of George Sand, the more we know the less we approve. George Eliot was led into evil ways which not all her philosophy can excuse. The Brontës, however highly we rate their genius, lacked that indefinable something which marks the lady; Harriet Martineau was an atheist; Mrs. Browning was a married woman; Jane Austen, Fanny Burney, and Maria Edgeworth have been done already ; so that, what with one thing and another, Mary Russell Mitford is the only woman left.

In this passage, her satire is sharpened by her Johnsonian rhetoric. It bristles with what Boswell called Johnson’s “wonderful fertility of mind.” Woolf knew that while great thoughts are general, general thoughts about politics do not always sound great. Saying that the Brontës “lacked that indefinable something which marks the lady” whets her point with vitality and humor, and humor induces agreement. It is an example of Johnson’s dictums  of criticism, which appeared in Rambler 92,

It is, however, the task of criticism to establish principles; to improve opinion into knowledge; and to distinguish those means of pleasing which depend upon known causes and rational deduction, from the nameless and inexplicable elegancies which appeal wholly to the fancy, from which we feel delight, but know not how they produce it, and which may well be termed the enchantresses of the soul.

Does this contradict Johnson’s warning against,  “the cant of those who judge by principles rather than perception”? Not quite. Johnson was resisting the impulsive, subjective, un-literary criticism of his time, full of loud judgement and proud moralizing. He was opposed to those critics who judged by their principles rather than working to establish principles from perception. Woolf’s opposition to women who cannot write about the Brontës is Johnsonian in this sense. They arrive with their principles about what marks a lady and are therefore unable to allow the Brontë genius its due. They lack perception because they are blinded by principle. Part of the constant work Woolf recorded in her diary was to remain a principled critic, but also a perceptive one. 

The other tradition she breaks from is the Victorian mode of large ideas. She is not a Carlyle or an Arnold or a Wilde. She has no larger ideological scheme, nor much of a larger literary one. She is the student of Johnson, author of the Rambler, not Johnson the Shakespeare editor; she would never have produced, as he did, a Preface to Shakespeare (that is still one of the great theories of Shakespeare’s work). She is, as Strachey was, resolutely impressionistic, imagistic, essayistic. She had no grand scheme. She chose to be herself, not  the representative of any ideology. 

And we are richer for it. In The Common Reader Woolf gave us all she could, all she had. She gave us all that criticism ought to be.