Abstract
WHEN I FIRST ENCOUNTERED this haunting passage from Virginia Woolf 's Modern Essay, some thirty-seven years ago, I took no more note of it than I did of any other passage in the essay. To tell the truth, I didn't pay much attention to anything in that piece, compared to the time I spent on her other essays in The Common Reader. They were as signed reading for an undergraduate survey of modern British literature, and I made my way through them, as I did through the essays of T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster, and George Bernard Shaw?to discover Woolf 's ideas about literature, especially about great authors, great books, and the great literary forms. Essays, of course, didn't belong anywhere in that pantheon. They were about literature and therefore couldn't be literature too. So, it didn't seem especially important to hear what she had to say about the modern essay. Never mind that three out of twenty essays in The Common Reader were about essayists and the essay. Never mind that she, the doyenne of the Bloomsbury Group, had achieved her reputation as much for her essays as for her novels. Never mind that her reflections on the modern essay resonated with so vivid a play of personality that I might well have taken the piece for a dramatic monologue. I was one and twenty, no use to talk to me:
Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
