The Common Reader and Critical Method in Virginia Woolf's Essays

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Virginia Woolf's fiction has received considerable critical attention in the past five years; at least a half-dozen books have appeared to analyze various aspects of her novels. Yet her essays, comprising an appreciable body of criticism, have been relegated to secondary importance by both her contemporaries and later commentators. Those who write about Mrs. Woolf tend to note in a short chapter, if at all, her critical acumen, her unsystematic critical method, and the sharp contrast between the styles of prose found in the essays and in the novels. Then, after praising the essays with a generally high degree of commendation, they largely ignore them except as they illuminate the philosophy of her own novels and form a rationale for her own fictional innovations. Such an approach can represent only a severely limited assessment of a significant corpus of her writing four volumes of collected essays. These essays reveal an unusual analytical intellect and critical lucidity responding to a large and diverse body of literature. Certainly they merit further inquiry. I am concerned here with ascertaining the tenets of Virginia Woolf's critical method rather than with extrapolating from the essays any theories about literature in general, about the specific genres, or about their applicability to her own fiction, although the essays assuredly yield abundant food for thought in these latter categories. But this investigation seeks to examine the essays as criticism, to outline those attitudes and assumptions that underlie Mrs. Woolf's substantial contribution to criticism. And the matter is, perhaps, not so difficult, since she has