Then I read Virginia Woolf and think: why bother? why try to write anything? Her essays are far above mine, not that, it is true, I always follow or grasp her meaning. She has a tendency to meander, and comes from a different literary world, as do I, I suppose, from my elders, my contemporaries and youth. It is my reading of her, I think, that is at fault. Her essays should be read not as they are contained in a volume, one succeeding another, but savoured on a different day like a sermon given, the 'thought for the day', to be thought on, and perhaps discussed, during its course. But pages are for me made to be turned for an interval of time and therefore I cannot just stop where one essay ends, for then I will be left with time on my hands and nothing to read.
So I read on, turning page after page, until my mind is confused and unsettled, which is as much my fault as it is Mrs Woolf's. Mine, as I said, because I should be less word-greedy, and her's because, despite being penned with the common reader in mind, there's a presumption I will have read what she's read and know what she knows, or at very least appreciate the angle from which she is approaching her subject. (The editor of this Vintage Classics edition makes the same mistake: presumes if I'm reading Woolf then I must have some knowledge of French and Greek (I don't) to translate the occasional sprinkles of them, which in Mrs Woolf's defence are often direct quotes, and offers no translation, not a footnote or a note.)
Now, it could be argued that my schooling was better than hers, as in I had the privilege – being female – to be educated to a certain age and a certain standard, but beyond this I didn't continue to study, assisted by a tutor or an institution, literature, or indeed anything higher than a vocational subject, which had no interest in the world of literature, English, French, or Russian, or any other. (Perhaps, with hindsight, I should have listened to the urgings of my English teacher, but no, I've always been stubborn and doubtful of my abilities.) The point could also be made, however, that Woolf had the advantage, for she had not the distractions of modern day and so could pursue, doggedly, her own interests in her father's library.
Her perspective, therefore, to return to it, I find, even if I do have a smattering of knowledge of whom or of what she is speaking, surprising, for it goes down roads I'd hadn't considered, unaware (unlike her) that they were there to be taken. And still some other roads, unknown to me, I go down simply because she led me, so that I go on to research the Pastons, Sir John Fastolf (the real Falstaff) and Sir Thomas Browne; or to decide, despite my interest, I do not have the patience to read Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, though perhaps I have the adequate amount for Defoe's Moll Flanders; I have already gone a-rambling with the diarist John Evelyn. Just as she leads me to pick up my pen, or to flex my typing fingers and begin...
Picture credit: Ravenswood and Lucy at the Mermaiden's Well, 1886, Charles Robert Leslie for The Bride of Lammermoor by Sir Walter Scott (source: Wikipedia).
A journal entry on reading The Common Reader (volume I) by Virginia Woolf, May 2021.
