The Common Reader by Virginia Woolf
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The first thing that occurs to you while reading Virginia’s essays is that they are not laced with academic, high brow language and style. In fact, her writing is so accessible that it easily seems to mirror a common reader’s thoughts and expressions. While writing these essays, nearly twenty five of them in this collection, Virginia offers a glimpse into her mind and it becomes clear how she manages to write so lucidly yet so unassumingly. She writes as she knows the reader will enjoy reading. And it goes without saying for both her novels and essays, though if I may add; it is her essays which demonstrate her skill as a writer more effectively.

In this collection, most of the essays are memoirs of people both well known like Chaucer, Jane Austen, Defoe, Montaigne, Bronte sisters, George Eliot, Joseph Conrad as well as relatively lesser knowns like Edgeworth, Pilkington, Ms. Mitford, Bentley and a few more.

We also have some well known essays like ‘Modern Fiction’, ‘The Modern Essay’ and ‘How it strikes a Contemporary’ in this beautiful collection.

Woolf’s words, quite naturally, turn from being sincere and open to joyously humorous and sensibly satirical, as and when her thoughts demand, so that there is never a dull moment when we read her. As a matter of fact, her words come out so effortlessly that the essays seem to be written over in single sittings each, perhaps without any editing being ever done.

I am quoting here some of the quotes which I loved in this collection, and I recommend a reading of this volume to the readers who enjoy Woolf’s writing as well as to the aspiring writers who find themselves struggling between the glorious past of literature and the mayhem which seems to be spreading over the present or the future of contemporary writings.

From “The Pastons and Chaucer”:

It is safe to say that not a single law has been framed or one stone set upon another because of anything that Chaucer said or wrote; and yet, as we read him, we are absorbing morality at every pore.

From “The Elizabethan Lumber Room”:

We carry with us the wonders we seek without us; there is all Africa and her prodigies in us.

From “Montaigne”:

For beyond the difficulty of communicating oneself, there is the supreme difficulty of being oneself. This soul, or life within us, by no means agrees with the life outside us. If one has to ask her what she thinks, she is always saying the very opposite to what other people say. Other people, for instance, long ago made up their minds that old invalidish gentleman ought to stay at home and edify the rest of us by the spectacle of their connubial fidelity. The soul of Montaigne said, on the contrary, that it is in the old age that one ought to travel, and marriage, which rightly, is very seldom founded on love, is apt to become, towards the end of life, a formal tie better broken up.

From “Modern Fiction”:

Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.

Contrary to her troubled mind, her writing is, strangely, quite optimistic towards life.


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