Virginia Woolf's other centenary
praising the great critic of the twentieth century
I am delighted to have written for Liberties today about The Common Reader, Virginia Woolf’s book of critical essays, which was published one hundred years ago. Woolf was the great critic of the twentieth century and I am very pleased that was so interested in this idea. Everyone is praising Mrs. Dalloway and rightly so, but The Common Reader is a supreme achievement too, and deserves as much celebration.
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.
As well as heaping praise upon Woolf, I make the case that The Common Reader was inspired by Samuel Johnson.
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.
And I argue that Woolf can be a model to us today.
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 ought to be our model and antidote.
There is much, much more at the link. Again, the piece is free to read.
When I read the productions of the post modernists, I often think of Johnson and Woolf. And Ozymandias.
I am so pleased to see the appropriate praise heaped on Johnson here. Woolf's criticism I do not know, so I have reserved them, the two Common Reader volumes from the local Library, where they were languishing in the reserve stock in Lowestoft somewhere! At least, somewhat to my surprise, they were still there...
Great literary critics tend not to be academics, or are on the margins of the academy, such as Empson (who in his early books is a humane and constantly illuminating critic), or not in universities at all, such as Edmund Wilson, Coleridge, or T S Eliot. Then there is F R Leavis, of course...