Though best known as a novelist, Virginia Woolf wrote more words of nonfiction than fiction. Her nonfiction oeuvre spans six dense volumes of collected essays, six volumes of collected letters, five volumes of collected diaries, plus the book-length essays A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas and the biography Roger Fry.
In much of her best nonfiction, Woolf brings the techniques of a fiction writer to the essay form. Her most affecting essays are speculative, full of what-ifs and maybes; they use characters and scenes to work through ideas; they tumble and turn and spin back on themselves, but never in a chaotic way.
Recently, I shared my 2019 essay “Time Passes: What Do We Do with Woolf’s Offenses”, which proposes a Woolfian generosity toward the past, an idea of lives as improveable, a position of speculation about history. Those propositions are ones I gleaned from Woolf herself, as I hope to make clear now.
Here, I want to look at the opening essays in the two collections Woolf published during her lifetime: The Common Reader (1925) and The Second Common Reader (aka The Common Reader: Second Series, 1932). The beauty of these essays is that while they have some things to say about their ostensible subjects, they are most affecting about other topics, and so a reader who doesn’t care or know much about either Chaucer (Common Reader) or the Elizabethans (Second Common Reader) is at no disadvantage. The essays are demanding in the way that fiction is demanding: they ask us to begin reading them with few assumptions and to let the unspooling of the narrative show us what matters and how the essays make meaning.
The first of the essays, “The Pastons and Chaucer”, is one I avoided for many years, because I did not know why I should care about any of it, not being much of a Chaucerian. This was an error. I should have read the essay as I would a short story. Then I would have known how to access its wonders.
We should begin, though, with the brief introduction to The Common Reader, because “The Pastons and Chaucer” serves as something of an elaboration of it.
Woolf notes that her title comes from Samuel Johnson’s Life of Gray, wherein Johnson wrote: “. . . I rejoice to concur with the common reader; for by the common sense of readers, uncorrupted by literary prejudices, after all the refinements of subtilty and the dogmatism of learning, must be finally decided all claim to poetical honours.” The common reader, Woolf says, “is guided by an instinct to create for himself, out of whatever odds and ends he can come by, some kind of whole — a portrait of a man, a sketch of an age, a theory of the art of writing.”
A portrait, a sketch, a theory. This is what both of Woolf’s Common Reader volumes offer. But also more.
We must remember that Woolf’s own education was a mix of self-study, tutoring, and some college courses. In her own telling of her educational history, she portrays herself as someone whose schoolhouse was her father’s excellent library. The theme of education, and particularly women’s education — and lack of it — runs through her work from the early days to the end. I’ve often thought of her book reviews and literary essays as in some way or another addressed toward her younger self, or toward someone like her younger self, someone seeking guidance in how to read. The final essay in The Second Common Reader is, in fact, “How Should One Read a Book”. Putting it last might seem like an odd spot for such an essay, since most writers might have set it at the beginning, but Woolf seeks to empower her readers, to send them off into the world full of curiosity rather than answers. The first paragraph of that essay all but denies its own title, and ends with lines now famous, and still powerful and necessary: “To admit authorities, however heavily furred and gowned, into our libraries and let them tell us how to read, what to read, what value to place upon what we read, is to destroy the spirit of freedom which is the breath of those sanctuaries. Everywhere else we may be bound by laws and conventions — there we have none.”
The title of both her essay collections might have been How DOES One Read a Book?! Often, what Woolf writes is less literary interpretation or criticism than it is a presentation of scenes of reading. Again and again, she shows us characters reading and thinking about what they read. Her essays are invitations. “We’re over here reading,” she says. “Won’t you join us?”
Woolf seeks a bottom-up view of literature rather than the patriarchal view common to schools of her time. She engages with canonical writers, but always in an off-kilter way, and often positioning the reader as someone quite ordinary. Woolf of course had her own limitations and lived a life circumscribed by her own class and race, but even as she sometimes displayed a sense of superiority to and romanticization of the working classes, she did not want to think of readers as garbed in regalia and festooned with prizes of the realm. The experience of reading needed to be available to all who desired it, all who hungered for it, all who sat determined to do the hard work of imagining a world from words.
“The Pastons and Chaucer” begins with ruins:
The tower of Caister Castle still rises ninety feet into the air, and the arch still stands from which Sir John Fastolf’s barges sailed out to fetch stone for the building of the great castle. But now jackdaws nest on the tower, and of the castle, which once covered six acres of ground, only ruined walls remain, pierced by loop-holes and surmounted by battlements, though there are neither archers within nor cannon without. As for the “seven religious men” and the “seven poor folk” who should, at this very moment, be praying for the souls of Sir John and his parents, there is no sign of them nor sound of their prayers. The place is a ruin.
As with much in the essay, we won’t really know what this all means until later. (This is an essay that benefits greatly from re-reading.) As we’ll see with “The Strange Elizabethans”, Woolf is setting us up to think of the past and its literature as fundamentally strange, even inaccessible, a ruin. This is in absolute contradiction to the official idea of literature as the glory of the nation, a tradition to be celebrated in the present as something we can appreciate unbroken and untouched, a jewel in the crown.
Woolf then brings us more ruins: “the ruins of Bromholm Priory, where John Paston was buried, naturally enough, since his house was only a mile or so away…” When I first encountered (and set aside) this essay as a college student, I thought I was ignorant for not knowing who John Paston was. It is possible Woolf assumed her readers knew something of the Paston family and the Paston Letters. But even in 1925, I have a sense that for British readers this was pretty esoteric stuff. Certainly, scholars of the Medieval era would know something of Sir John Fastolf and the Pastons, but a common reader?
Woolf treats Fastolf and the Pastons like characters in a novel, and the easiest way to read the essay is with the open mindedness we need when starting to read a family saga. We know with such a novel that the various characters and their names will become clear soon enough, and that’s the case with this essay, too. “Who are these people?” is, in fact, a useful question to keep asking as we read.
The essay starts by getting us to reconcile our knowledge with the past, to imagine our way toward these ruins, to build them up a bit and to imagine people in them. We get necessary background on the families, but Woolf’s attention always goes toward the marginalized people, even among the wealthy and powerful. Mrs. Paston, for instance. Like everyone of their class, the Pastons sought to “buy land, to build great houses, to stuff these houses full of gold and silver plate (though the privy might well be in the bedroom)”, an acquisitive quest that was, they thought, “the proper aim of mankind”.
Woolf says of Mrs. Paston’s “long, long letters” that they could have included tales of the wars of her youth or the difficulties of her life as a woman, but they do not. Woolf’s paragraphs in this essay are all many lines long — except for one:
But Mrs Paston did not talk about herself.
(Always pay attention to Woolf’s paragraphing. She believed style was fundamentally about rhythm, and paragraphs were a key to that rhythm, which is to say a key to both her effect and her meaning.)
Look at how that paragraph stands out among the larger, more ordinary paragraphs in an American first edition of the book:
It draws the eye. It proclaims its importance. And also, the absence it points to, the absence of Mrs. Paston’s self-presentation, her own narrative, her personal sense of identity.
Soon enough, we get to a question that Woolf uses to drive the rest of the essay: Why didn’t John Paston’s son erect a tombstone for him? The tombstone was mentioned right in the second paragraph as something pilgrims coming to see a fragment of the true cross at Bromholm Priory would have noticed. Finally, Woolf writes: “if we consider the character of Sir John Paston, John’s eldest son, and his upbringing and his surroundings, and the relations between himself and his father as the family letters reveal them, we shall see how difficult it was, and how likely to be neglected — this business of making his father’s tombstone.”
The question of the tombstone, posed first as a brief and passing query from pilgrims, leads us to Woolf’s real concern, which is not with the Paston family itself, really. What she’s most interested in is how we understand historical context. How we sense and imagine our way into the historical record.
Which brings us to Chaucer. In the first pages of the essay, it’s easy to forget that Chaucer is in the title, that he and The Canterbury Tales are somehow or other relevant here.
Woolf offers various possible reasons why Sir John neglected his father’s tombstone, but she eventually makes her way to his reading of Chaucer: “For sometimes, instead of riding off on his horse to inspect his crops or bargain with his tenants, Sir John would sit, in broad daylight, reading. There, on the hard chair in the comfortless room with the wind lifting the carpet and the smoke stinging his eyes, he would sit reading Chaucer, wasting his time, dreaming — or what strange intoxication was it that he drew from books?”
(I wonder if it’s a longstanding typo, that “or” after the dash. It’s in every edition, but still, I wonder. Shouldn’t it be “for”?)
What Woolf has done is use Sir John Paston to bring us to the pleasures and wonders of reading. The paragraph from which I’ve quoted the first sentences is a powerful description of the ways that reading can take us away from the cares of the world, can nourish us when nothing else will. When it comes to reading, Woolf begins with pleasure.
She uses Chaucer for something few professors ever would: as an exemplar of a writer who knows how to tell a story and hold a reader’s interest:
To learn the end of the story — Chaucer can still make us wish to do that. He has pre-eminently that story-teller’s gift, which is almost the rarest gift among writers at the present day. Nothing happens to us as it did to our ancestors; events are seldom important; if we recount them, we do not really believe in them; we have perhaps things of greater interest to say … For the story-teller, besides his indescribable zest for facts, must tell his story craftily, without undue stress or excitement, or we shall swallow it whole and jumble the parts together; he must let us stop, give us time to think and look about us, yet always be persuading us to move on.
Paston is behind us now. Now, Woolf is zooming toward her larger points, and they are points of comparison with contemporary writing, the writing of her parents’ generation and her own. In some ways, her asides about her contemporaries can feel slighting. But she never exempts herself from her criticism. Theirs is a failure not of individual works or individual writers, but of the era. How, Woolf often wonders in her nonfiction, are any of us to write anything of real value in times like these?
One of my favorite passages in the essay is this:
…to Chaucer the country was too large and too wild to be altogether agreeable. He turned instinctively, as if he had painful experience of their nature, from tempests and rocks to the bright May day and the jocund landscape, from the harsh and mysterious to the gay and definite. Without possessing a tithe of the virtuosity in word-painting which is the modern inheritance, he could give, in a few words, or even, when we come to look, without a single word of direct description, the sense of the open air.
And se the fresshe floures how they sprynge
—that is enough.
Nature, uncompromising, untamed, was no looking-glass for happy faces, or confessor of unhappy souls. She was herself; sometimes, therefore, disagreeable enough and plain, but always in Chaucer’s pages with the hardness and the freshness of an actual presence.
That is enough. It’s a lovely statement, a paean to directness and simplicity, to the beauty of the straightforward statement, the precision of unadorned language.
This reminds me of something the character of Treplev says in Chekhov’s play The Sea Gull (which Woolf was familiar with):
I’ll start with the hero waking to the sound of rain, and get rid of all the rest. The description of the moonlit night’s too long and contrived. Trigorin has perfected a technique for himself, it’s easy for him. He has a shard of broken bottle glisten on the dam and a black shadow cast by the millwheel — and there’s your moonlit night readymade. But I’ve got to have the flickering light, and the dim twinkling of the stars, and the distant strains of a piano, dying away in the still, fragrant air … It’s excruciating.
(Chekhov had given his brother writing advice that was similar in a May 1886 letter advocating simplicity in description.)
Woolf goes on to praise Chaucer for the power of his writing about bodies, his indifference to impropriety, his position as more layman than priest. She talks about poetry and the ways ordinary things can be transformed into poetry.
And then, at the end of the essay, she returns to Sir John Paston and the grave without a tombstone, then Mrs. Paston and her matter-of-fact letters, the language of her family and era:
They jest rather stiffly; they hint rather clumsily; they make a little scene like a rough puppet show of the old priest’s anger and give a phrase or two directly as they were spoken in person. But when Chaucer lived he must have heard this very language, matter of fact, unmetaphorical, far better fitted for narrative than for analysis, capable of religious solemnity or of broad humour, but very stiff material to put on the lips of men and women accosting each other face to face. In short it is easy to see, from the Paston letters, why Chaucer wrote not Lear or Romeo and Juliet, but the Canterbury Tales.
The language of more-or-less ordinary people used for more-or-less ordinary purposes is compared to the language of one of the greatest English poets as a way of explaining not why he was one of the greatest but why he was different from another of the greatest who lived in an era after him. Chaucer’s language has more in common with the language of the Pastons than the language of Shakespeare, Woolf suggests. We are destined to use the language of our day. The genius of an era has more in common with the common readers and writers of that era than with geniuses of another era.
This idea continues in the first essay of The Second Common Reader, “The Strange Elizabethans”. Like “The Pastons and Chaucer”, this essay was written specifically for the book, in this case, Woolf said in her diary, as a “prelude”. That perhaps accounts for how much it feels like a sequel to the earlier essay.
The first paragraph of “The Strange Elizabethans” lets us know what’s at the forefront of Woolf’s mind: the impossibility of reading as if we were in the past, and the great desire to do so:
There are few greater delights than to go back three or four hundred years and become in fancy at least an Elizabethan. That such fancies are only fancies, that this “becoming an Elizabethan”, this reading sixteenth-century writing as currently and certainly as we read our own is an illusion, is no doubt true. Very likely the Elizabethans would find our pronunciation of their language unintelligible; our fancy picture of what it pleases us to call Elizabethan life would rouse their ribald merriment. Still, the instinct that drives us to them is so strong and the freshness and vigour that blow through their pages are so sweet that we willingly run the risk of being laughed at, of being ridiculous.
Right from the beginning, she emphasizes both the risk and necessity of imaginative reading. Great writing is, in this framing, a kind of dazzlement — we fall under the spell of the beauty and art, and we let go of our rational sense of things. Maybe we get laughed at, maybe we’re ridiculous … but it’s worth it. Our imagination is freed. This is the joy of art.
The second paragraph proposes an interesting idea about prose and poetry, an idea that is in some ways a development of ones in “The Pastons and Chaucer” … and also perhaps contradicting them.
Woolf says that Elizabethan prose “for all its beauty and bounty” was too close to poetry; it
was almost incapable of fulfilling one of the offices of prose which is to make people talk, simply and naturally, about ordinary things. In an age of utilitarian prose like our own, we know exactly how people spend the hours between breakfast and bed, how they behave when they are neither one thing nor the other, neither angry nor loving, neither happy nor miserable. Poetry ignores these slighter shades; the social student can pick up hardly any facts about daily life from Shakespeare’s plays; and if prose refuses to enlighten us, then one avenue of approach to the men and women of another age is blocked. Elizabethan prose, still scarcely separated off from the body of its poetry, could speak magnificently, of course, about the great themes—how life is short, and death certain; how spring is lovely, and winter horrid—perhaps, indeed, the lavish and towering periods that it raises above these simple platitudes are due to the fact that it has not cheapened itself upon trifles. But the price it pays for this soaring splendour is to be found in its awkwardness when it comes to earth…
This is quite different from what Woolf said about Chaucer. She does not draw the distinction herself — her focus is on the difference between Elizabethan prose and modern prose. But if we keep “The Pastons and Chaucer” in mind, we get a sense of literary history as a push and pull between prose and poetry, between the quotidian and the abstract, between soaring and walking, between priests and laymen.
Too often, we have a teleological sense of literary progress, a Whig history of how we got to the expansive, enlightened place of our own writing and language. Woolf, in these essays, creates something different, a more periodic history, a history of rises and falls, affordances and limits, blindspots and trade-offs. As with “The Pastons and Chaucer”, she proposes a literary history where language and literature are inseparable from their era, and we readers are trapped in our own. The language and literature of the past is in some sense always inaccessible to us because we cannot live as readers and writers lived then. Against that inaccessibility, though, we have imagination.
Woolf then demonstrates the power of imagination for the reader via the tools of the fiction writer. She tells the story of Gabriel Harvey and his milkmaid sister, Mercy. As always, her attention starts with the marginalized/forgotten women of the historical record. Mercy caught the eye of a lord who tried to make her his mistress, and she escaped him. Woolf seems to like her resolve and independence. She also likes that there are in fact, some traces of Mercy surviving: “This is probably no uncommon story; there must have been many milkmaids whose hats blew off as they milked their cows, and many lords whose hearts leapt at the sight so that they plucked the jewels from their hats and sent their servants to make treaty for them. But it is rare for the girl’s own letters to be preserved or to read her own account of the story as she was made to deliver it at her brother’s inquisition.”
Mercy is a particularly useful character for Woolf because she exemplifies Woolf’s idea that an era’s language sets the limits of people’s possibilities. Mercy was a particularly strong and particularly articulate woman … and yet her prose is not our prose, and the perceptual limits are her world — and of ours — are apparent in the differences.
As Woolf compared the Pastons to Chaucer, she compares Mercy to a woman of very different class and education, and finds more commonalities than differences between them:
…when it comes to dealing exactly in a few words with some mean object — when, for example, the wife of Sir Henry Sidney, the daughter of the Duke of Northumberland, has to state her claim to a better room to sleep in, she writes for all the world like an illiterate servant girl who can neither form her letters nor spell her words nor make one sentence follow smoothly after another. She haggles, she niggles, she wears our patience down with her repetitions and her prolixities. Hence it comes about that we know very little about Mercy Harvey, the milkmaid, who wrote so well, or Mary Sidney, daughter to the Duke of Northumberland, who wrote so badly. The background of Elizabethan life eludes us.
We do not have access to the stuff of their lives because, whether high born or low, eloquent or not, the language to describe the everyday life of women was not available to either Mercy Harvey or Mary Sidney.
The idea of language here is not simply referring to words. Of course Mary Sidney and Mercy Harvey had words for everyday life. The could have described their lives. But Woolf’s point, as I read it, is that language is about more than words. (Wittgenstein, famously: “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.”) It is about structures of grammar and diction embedded within structures of society, structures of imagination, structures of feeling.
After exploring Mercy’s prose, Woolf then turns to her somewhat more famous brother, Gabriel Harvey, and discovers something else about Elizabethan prose: on the page, it is repetitive and overwhelming, because it is not prose for the page but for the mouth and ear:
As we go round and round like a horse in a mill, we perceive that we are thus clogged with sound because we are reading what we should be hearing. The amplifications and the repetitions, the emphasis like that of a fist pounding the edge of a pulpit, are for the benefit of the slow and sensual ear which loves to dally over sense and luxuriate in sound—the ear which brings in, along with the spoken word, the look of the speaker and his gestures, which gives a dramatic value to what he says and adds to the crest of an extravagance some modulation which makes the word wing its way to the precise spot aimed at in the hearer’s heart.
Here I think about the glory of the Elizabethans: their theatre. When I was young, I wanted to be a playwright, I trained for it at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, I wrote play after play and had the pleasure and horror of seeing some performed. But I soon gave it up. One of my limitations and frustrations as a playwright was that theatrical subtlety and prose subtlety are different things, and my interest is actually more toward the affordances of prose than of theatre. Unless you are a wildly successful playwright, most audience members will only hear and see what your script offers once. Making your script depend on small, subtle clues of unrepeated language is a recipe for confusion and failure. The theatre is capable of immense beauty, subtlety, and wonder, but the experience of a live performance of course is vastly different from the experience of reading words on a page. The audience member cannot go back and check something they might have missed. Repetition, and structures of repetition, are essential for an effective live presentation to be comprehensible in a way that those same structures are unnecessary and, in fact, counterproductive in prose for reading.
By making her point about Harvey’s repetitious prose, Woolf is not only illuminating a common and somewhat bewildering aspect of an earlier era’s writing; she is also showing us how we might imagine our way toward perception:
How, we ask, as we slither over the pages, can we ever hope to come to grips with these Elizabethans? And then, turning, skipping and glancing, something fitfully and doubtfully emerges from the violent pages, the voluminous arguments—the figure of a man, the outlines of a face, somebody who is not “an Elizabethan” but an interesting, complex, and individual human being.
As we do this work, Gabriel Harvey begins to come alive for us, we begin to sense and perhaps even know things about him that we could not before. Woolf explores him as she would a character she was writing in one of her novels. She perceives him as someone failed and frustrated in many ways, but sensitive to poetry and poets. She has found his virtue, his beauty.
However, this is Woolf, who never has but one purpose. Yes, this is an essay about the strangeness of Elizabethan writing and the distance of the Elizabethan era from Woolf’s own, but it is also an essay about reading and writing about reading. Taking Edmund Spenser’s description of Harvey as a “looker-on” (in a good way), Woolf writes: “Poets need such “lookers-on”; someone who discriminates from a watch-tower above the battle; who warns; who foresees.” This is at least partly what we can expect from the following essays in The Second Common Reader. That’s why this essay is a prelude to the rest of the book.
Importantly, Woolf also notes some dangers:
But the looker-on may sit too long and hold forth too curiously and domineeringly for his own health. He may make his theories fit too tight to accommodate the formlessness of life. Thus when Harvey ceased to theorise and tried to practise there issued nothing but a thin dribble of arid and unappetising verse or a copious flow of unctuous and servile eulogy.
Woolf, too, is both a theorizer and a practitioner. Her description of Harvey’s failure as a poet is what she hopes her own essays will not be. What pulled him down is a current she is trying to swim against herself.
She proposes Harvey’s commonplace book as a remedy, a place where he almost escaped the limits of the Elizabethan language. (Note her valorizing of a commonplace book in a book with Common in its own title.) In the commonplace book,
Harvey was forced to be brief, and because he wrote only for his own eye at the command of some sharp memory or experience he seems to write as if he were talking to himself. That is true, he seems to say; or that reminds me, or again: If only I had done this— We thus become aware of a conflict between the Harvey who blundered among men and the Harvey who sat wisely at home among his books. The one who acts and suffers brings his case to the one who reads and thinks for advice and consolation.
Harvey’s great talent and real success was as an observer. He could not appreciate this because he aspired to be a practitioner. There’s a certain tragedy in that, Woolf implies. If only he had known his true talent, his true virtue! Perhaps he might have found some peace, some satisfaction in his own talents. His virtue was there, it was expressed, but it was invisible to him because of the other qualities he and his era most valorized.
And so in the end, Woolf suggests, we have, through imagination and speculation, valued Harvey in a way he could not, just as she has valued his sister Mercy. She is suggesting to us that reading imaginatively is a way to bring something to the past that it could not itself provide. She is suggesting that our distance is not all obstacle and failure, that by reading generously and thoughtfully, we can grant something like grace to both the long dead and to ourselves. We can see, in the end, what is human:
He lived to a very great age for an Elizabethan, to eighty-one or eighty-two; and when we say that Harvey lived we mean that he quarrelled and was tiresome and ridiculous and struggled and failed and had a face like ours — a changing, a variable, a human face.
Perhaps somewhere in the future there is a reader who will find a way to grant the same insight to us.
——
Images: Books photographed by Matthew Cheney; Caister Castle via Wikimedia Commons; Chaucer from the Ellesmere manuscript via Wikimedia Commons; Gabriel Harvey via Wikimedia Commons; Charleston library photo by Jon Santa Cruz via The New Yorker
