clew's reviews: a book log

The Common Reader, Virginia Woolf

The common reader, as Dr. Johnson implies, differs from the critic and the scholar. He is worse educated, and nature has not gifted him so generously. He reads for his own pleasure rather than to impart knowledge or correct the opinions of others. Above all, he 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. He never ceases, as he reads, to run up some rickety and ramshackle fabric which shall give him the temporary satisfaction of looking sufficiently like the read object to allow of affection, laughter and argument.

Adsum.

From "On Not Knowing Greek", which bothers the daughter-of-an-educated-man: The French, the Italians, the Americans, who derive physically from so different a stock, pause, as we pause in reading Homer, to make sure that they are laughing in the right place [in Wycherly], and the pause is fatal. Huh.

An essay on how nobody reads Joseph Addison, even in the Spectator, which moved me enough to look up the link.

Lots of mentions of women writers; the plain letter-writing Paston, Maria Edgeworth and her portentous bore of an energetic, inventing father; Eleanor Ormerod, a self-taught entomologist of a very practical turn; and then the increasing numbers of respected woman novelists. She dismembers a ladylike biography of Mary Russell Mitford by Miss Hill, who limited herself too much when choosing a subject:

...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...

That's all Woolf's supposition of how Hill eliminated possibilities.

Looks like Woolf isn't in the public domain in the U.S., although some of these essays were clearly written before 1923.

Woolf, Virginia. The Common Reader. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1925.