As well as her famous novels, Virginia Woolf wrote a prodigious number of essays and reviews, over 500 in all. The definitive edition of her collected essays runs to six ‘meaty’ volumes and contents range from the book-length polemics A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas, through numerous book reviews, talks and lectures, introductions to other people’s books, critical essays about novels and biography, meditations on women’s writing, descriptions of London and the countryside, to fugitive pieces she contributed to student magazines. Tracking these down has been a labour of love and taken decades.

The Oxford World Classic edition of ‘Selected Essays by Virginia Woolf’ edited by David Bradshaw brings together 30 of these prose pieces and groups them under four headings:

1. Reading and Writing
2. Life-Writing
3. Women and Fiction
4. Looking On

Summarising each of the essays was taking so long that I’ve broken my review up into separate blog posts. This is by way of being an overall introduction to the main themes and ideas.

Woolf’s aestheticism

I found Woolf’s essays hard to read for a number of reasons. On the face of it the essays cover a range of topics, at different lengths, and using different approaches, from the reasonably logical to the whimsical and impressionistic. But they all have two or three things in common, which, I suggest, are:

• their foundation on a doggedly aesthetic or arty set of values
• an emphasis on a poetic approach to writing, which explains and justifies her often impressionistic and hard-to-follow style
• all of which sounds radical but embodies an underlying attitude which is often surprisingly conservative and backward looking

The modernists I read as a lad – T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis and T.E. Hulme – consciously rejected the hazy verbosity of late-Victorian Romanticism and called for a new poetry and art which was to be hard, brief and unsentimental, hence Imagism in poetry and Vorticism in art.

Woolf is the opposite. Her heroes are the hard-core Romantics John Keats in poetry and Charles Lamb and Thomas de Quincey in prose writing and her prose displays the very qualities of belle-letterist posing, of poetic prose and digressions and imaginative fantasias, which those other modernists despised and rejected.

In her most famous essays, the ones criticising the Edwardian novelists and setting out her own views of what fiction should be about, Woolf is making a polemical point and so is reasonably easy to follow. But much of the time she approaches her subject in a deliberately roundabout, digressive manner and in a prose style which continually strives for very conservative notions of Elegance and Beauty.

Above all, Woolf committed the anti-modernist sin of constantly making her prose aspire to the condition of poetry. Her writings are obsessed with this thing called Poetry which she very narrowly insists represents the highest possible art, the highest expression of human values, harping on about Truth and Beauty in a way which makes her sound just like John Keats from a hundred years earlier.

Woolf’s conservative conception of the essay

Woolf’s conception of the essay is surprisingly conventional, almost conservative. She looks back to the classic English essayists of the nineteenth century, Hazlitt, Macauley, etc and especially to the essays of Charles Lamb who she regularly name-checks (‘no one has approached the Essays of Elia’).

In her view an essay doesn’t set out to analyse or explain anything. Instead it is a charming distraction, an entertainment whose main purpose is to reveal the character of the author, a magic spell. In this, as in so much else, Woolf has a very late-Victorian, Aesthetic attitude.

The principle which controls [the essay] is simply that it should give pleasure; the desire which impels us when we take it from the shelf is simply to receive pleasure. Everything in an essay must be subdued to that end. It should lay us under a spell with its first word, and we should only wake, refreshed, with its last. (Modern Essays)

It’s not just me who finds her whole attitude puzzlingly anti-modern, nostalgic and backward looking. The editor of this edition and big Woolf fan, David Bradshaw, freely acknowledges it:

At a time when Modernists such as Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot turned their backs on the ‘amiable garrulity’ of the late-Victorian and Edwardian personal essay, Woolf embraced this belletristic model as an appealingly ‘egotistical’ model. (Introduction p.xiii)

So even a devoted fan and scholarly expert on Woolf concedes that she is deliberately belletristic, she is consciously egotistical, she is contrivedly poetical, in a deeply old-fashioned way – Keats and Lamb.

Personally, I’ve never really bought the idea of Woolf as a modernist precisely because her style is so self-consciously mellifluous and euphonious, elegant and refined. No matter how fragmented and experimental her narrative structure, when it comes to style her primary concern always seems to be to maintain good taste and good manners. It’s a snobbishly high-minded attitude which explains her disdain for the vulgar energy of more realistic and rackety writers from Dickens to H.G. Wells, the ‘materialist’ novelists who she famously criticises in several of the essays included here. Hers is consciously fine writing which you are meant to savour in the same way that a connoisseur savours fine wine.

So: Woolf’s essays are often hard to read because they are more concerned with maintaining a style appropriate to this aesthetic worldview, and with the airy digressions thought appropriate to the belles-letterist tradition she espoused, than in conveying her thoughts clearly and concisely. You often have to wade through passages of highly subjective verbiage or deliberately whimsical digressions to find the nuggets of insight.

Admittedly these nuggets are usually well worth the effort, and she does have interesting things to say, especially about her core subject, modern fiction and modern novels. Some of the observations of contemporary life, and even some of the fantastical passages, are rich and rewarding. I can see that 1) she was a great writer and 2) her opinions about writing are historically and aesthetically important, 3) her writings on feminism and women authors ditto – but God, what a slog wading through the swamp to get there.

Maybe a savvier way of putting it is that Virginia Woolf’s essays can be, and often are, every bit as demanding as her most demanding novels.

It is symptomatic that of all the authors in a collection of modern essays which she reviews (in Modern Essays) she thinks by far the best is Walter Pater because of its aesthetic ‘purity’.

There is no room for the impurities of literature in an essay. Somehow or other, by dint of labour or bounty of nature, or both combined, the essay must be pure — pure like water or pure like wine, but pure from dullness, deadness, and deposits of extraneous matter. (p.15)

You can see from this excerpt how earnestly she aspired to a refined and aesthetic purity untainted by facts, arguments or even opinions.

So if you’re looking for logic and argument you might, like me, find it a grind to work through her deliberately digressive and self-consciously elegant style. If, on the contrary, you are happy to be beguiled and distracted, and to submit to her many extraordinary fantasias, passages of delirious description which make barely any sense – such as the storm which seems to end civilisation at the end of Thunder at Wembley or the death visions in Flying over London or the extraordinary description of the whole planet dying in The Sun and The Fish – to submit to her magic spell, then there is much to revel and lose yourself in.

But I couldn’t help continually comparing all this with the straightforward intellectual pleasure offered by the lucid essays of George Orwell or the perspective-changing insights of T.S. Eliot’s wonderful essays. Much easier and much more opinion-changing, because so much clearer.

Woolf’s long career but narrow range

Woolf had a long writing career. She published her first reviews in the Times Literary Supplement in 1905 and her last novel in 1941 – 36 years of writing and publishing, in total. And she was incredibly prolific: besides the nine novels and two biographies, her collected essays fill six ‘meaty’ volumes.

The Oxford World Classic edition claims these 30 essays show Woolf’s thoughts on ‘a range of subjects’ but when you look closely, the most striking thing is just how narrow her range of subjects was. I’ve tweaked Bradshaw’s section titles to make their subject matter clearer.

1. Writing Fiction and Criticism
2. Writing Biography
3. Women and Writing
4. Miscellaneous pieces

Writing novels, reading and criticising novels, writing biography, criticising biography, theorising about fiction and biography, women and writing, writing about the world around her, mostly London – it’s not a massive range, is it? After a while it feels like Woolf circles round and round a relatively small number of the same issues like a goldfish in a bowl. A word about her background maybe helps to explain why.

Like father, like daughter

Virginia Stephen grew up in a highly literate and bookish household, deeply influenced by the example of her father, Leslie Stephen, the eminent author, critic, historian and biographer. To quote the biographical note to this volume:

Both her parents had strong family associations with literature. Leslie Stephen was the son of Sir James Stephen, a noted historian, and brother of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, a distinguished lawyers and writer on law. Her father’s first wife was a daughter of the great Victorian novelist, William Makepeace Thackeray. His second wife was an admired associate of the Pre-Raphaelites and had aristocratic connections. Stephens himself is remembered as the founder of the Dictionary of National Biography but he was also a remarkable journalist, biographer and historian of ideas.

So her father was a writer of journalism, essays and biography and she grew up to be… a writer of journalism, essays and biography. The fact that Bradshaw’s first two categories are ‘Reading and Writing’ and ‘Life-Writing’ (biography) indicates just how little distance she travelled from her father’s interests: literature and biography. And, as above, it’s not just me saying so. Bradshaw’s introduction to this book quotes Woolf scholar Rachel Bowlby as saying:

Woolf was directly following in her father’s footsteps, in a move that was composed of both rivalry and honour; in fact, she took over where he left off, quite literally, since she began publishing… just after he died [in 1904]. (quoted in the introduction, page xii)

Woolf was a nepo baby

So she had the big advantage in terms of instruction, guidance and support of having a famous, well-connected literary figure as your dad – then you learn that her first two books were published by the company set up by her half-brother George Duckworth – and you begin to get a feel for the immense advantages in terms of useful family connections which Virginia Woolf enjoyed compared to most other women (and male) writers of her time. D.H. Lawrence grew up in a cramped coal miner’s house and could only read what he found in the school library.

There’s no doubting that Woolf was a nepo baby, which the internet defines as: ‘a term for someone whose career is similar to their parents’ successful career. It’s short for “nepotism baby”.’

Harsh? Not according to Rachel Bowlby: ‘Woolf was directly following in her father’s footsteps.’ What she added to her father’s interests were 1) an interest in just observing the life around her, especially the hectic street life of modern bustling London and 2) her feminism.

1. Woolf’s observational essays

1) Mrs Dalloway, Orlando and The Waves famously contain passages doing nothing more than describing London’s endless hustle and bustle; To The Lighthouse is so wonderful for the calm and lyrical descriptions of life on the idyllic holiday island; and this selection contains many impressionistic essays in the manner of Street Haunting (1927), The Docks of London (1931) and Oxford Street Tide (1932).

Then again, this was hardly a new subject. Charles Dickens (who the snobbish Woolf disliked for his vulgarity and lack of artistic purpose) began his career with ‘Sketches by Boz: Illustrative of Every-day Life and Every-day People’, observations of London life and people published in various newspapers and periodicals between 1833 and 1836 i.e. just about a century before Woolf’s comparable pieces. Obviously Woolf’s pieces deploy the distinctive subjective, free-associating point of view which she perfected in her modernist novels, but the basic idea is the same.

2. Woolf’s feminism

The one category in this book which is definitely new and unique to Woolf (unlike Dickens, her father, Lamb, Macauley or Samuel Butler or any other male writer) is her feminism. Personally, I don’t think any of the six feminist essays included here really cut it. They all pale by comparison with her book-length polemic Three Guineas which is a masterpiece.

In my opinion, anyone who’s interested in Woolf should read Three Guineas. Reading even the modernist novels can easily give you the impression of a posh, privileged, upper-middle-class white woman who writes airy, dreamy, drifting fantasias about other dreamy, impractical middle-class women (Clarissa Dalloway, Mrs Ramsay, the female characters in The Waves, Mrs Swithin and Isabella Oliver in Between the Acts) who drift along in a cloud of flowers and tea parties.

Compared to the studied inconsequentiality of her novels, Three Guineas is a revelation of Woolf’s stone-cold fury at the legal, financial, traditional, educational and professional oppression of women, at women’s systematic exclusion from all aspects of life except marriage and baby-making by a ferociously repressive and woman-hating patriarchy, right up to the time of its writing, the 1930s. It’s a sensational, eye-opening book, not only for the genuinely shocking roster of facts it marshals but for the unexpected fury of the author.

Woolf’s mental illness

But for me the really distinctive quality Woolf brings to her observational essays is her mental illness. I thought her description of a ramble across London at dusk, Street Haunting, would be a fun description of the bits of London I know as they appeared a hundred years ago and, up to a point, it is. But the most powerful passages describe her mind being assailed by multiple selves clamouring for expression and rather harrowingly portray her desperate attempts to calm her neurotically anxious thoughts.

The same anxiety dominates the piece titled Evening Over Sussex: Reflections in a Motor Car, namely the problem of how to control the many voices in her head. And what you’d expect to be a larky in the essay titled Flying Over London, contains extended passages about wanting to be dead.

I don’t raise this as a criticism. As the father of two children with mental health problems I feel pretty sensitised to the issues. Which is in fact why, maybe, I feel so sensitive to the thread of mental illness running through all her texts, fiction and non-fiction, why I can almost physically feel the difficulty she had concentrating, her evasion of the dangers of introspection, her preference for escaping into long descriptions of a steady stream of surface images, passing sights and sense impressions, rather than risk deeper thoughts. I find it in all her writings and it has deeply coloured my response. Basically, I feel desperately sorry for her.

Woolf is weird

And, last point, many of the essays contain passages which are strange, often very strange, far stranger, more lateral, random and sometimes inexplicable than David Bradshaw makes out in his sensible and useful introduction. Woolf was often just plain weird.

It’s one reason why you should always read her works rather than summaries and commentaries by academics. Academics and critics have to make sense and if you only read them you’d think Woolf did too. But she often really didn’t and rejoiced in the fact, and her refusal to conform to ‘male’ standards of reason and logic may, after all, be a really important aspect of her enduring appeal.

Credit

‘Selected Essays of Virginia Woolf’ was published by Oxford World Classics in 2008. Most of the essays can be found online. The OWC introduction can be read on Amazon.

Related links

• Collected Essays of Virginia Woolf on Planet Gutenberg (a different selection)
• The Virginia Woolf Society

Related reviews

• Virginia Woolf reviews