The Common Reader: Virginia Woolf in The Yale Review

The Common ReaderVirginia Woolf in The Yale Review Claire Messud (bio) 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 [End Page 16] 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, [End Page 17] Click for larger view View full resolution Over the years, The Yale Review published ten pieces of Virginia Woolf's nonfiction. Portrait of Virginia Woolf from October 1929. [End Page 18] 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...