Woolf's Essay Revisions

            Virginia Woolf tinkered with her essays after their initial publication, often publishing a revised version in a transatlantic magazine just weeks after the first version came out in England or America. She put together several of her reviews of an author to construct an overall view of the work, and we can see the result in overview essays of the novels of Meredith, Conrad, and Hardy. A further polishing was exerted on essays that made it into one of the two collections she published during her lifetime, The Common Reader (1925) and The Common Reader: Second Series (1932). Her revisions are always granular, changing individual words and phrases, but they also often eliminate, substitute, or change the emphasis of whole sections and switch out the rhetorical figure of an ending from a metaphor to a bit of dialogue, for example. The revision almost always improves the piece of writing or changes it into an entirely different but equally happy animal.

            One exception that stood out for me was “How Should One Read a Book?” which in its journey from a talk given at a girls’ school in 1926 (the version published in Yale Review that October) to its publication in The Common Reader: Second Series in 1932 loses a good deal of its particularity, candor, and charm.

            The first version of “How Should One Read a Book?” has us imagine ourselves in a library. Woolf advises reading a book “as if one were writing it.” Thus we will be alert to the differences between writers’ worlds. How does Defoe get his verisimilitude? By being precise, by dropping in “some little unnecessary fact," and keeping attention away from style. Austen, on the other hand, gives us background (say about Emma’s father) and then immediately shows us him, letting his words confirm the background, and then shows him through another’s eyes. Hardy’s character will be seen against the background of nature and destiny; “he is cumbrous, involved, metaphorical.”

Great writers “require us to make heroic efforts in order to read them.” Reading is “arduous and exhausting.” But the kinds of books she spent a lot of time reviewing, “biographies and memoirs, all the hybrid books which are largely made up of facts” restore us. From biographies, though, we expect facts, not the kind of pleasure the novelist gives.

We have to have “an immense reserve of imaginative energy “to read poetry, which gives no “gradual introductions” to its “violent, opposite, unrelated” world. We need “a rash, an extreme, a generous state of mind” to read poetry rightly. The devices of poetry make us “read with the senses, not with the intellect, in a state of intoxication.” Poetry brings “the sudden conviction, the sudden recollection” as if we had already said what Shakespeare is saying.

 Of course we also compare and judge; our sympathetic reading stops when the book is finished. Some time after, the book comes complete to the mind. How do we decide if it’s good or bad? We have to compare with what we’ve read and ask questions: is the period a factor? Is it a translation? When we’ve made a judgment we can look at those others: “Every book…has the right to be judged by the best of its kind.” We get “nothing whatsoever except pleasure from reading,” she says, and then suggests, no, we get civilization.

In the revision, the library setting of the original is a vague assumption. Reading a book as if we were writing it becomes “Do not dictate to your author; try to become him.” The comments on Defoe, Austen are Hardy are diluted into a few phrases of generalities. The section on biographies is one place where she expands and improves on the original. The difficulties of reading are smoothed over, as is the direct impact of poetry. Finally, she replaces the conclusion about reading and civilization with a limp imagined conversation between “the Almighty” and Saint Peter about heaven having nothing to offer souls that show up carrying books.

I can only imagine that Woolf thought the readership of The Common Reader essay would be more general, or even that in her address to the schoolgirls she had condescended and needed to erase that impression. She does not condescend. In pieces written for the Working Women’s Guild or for school addresses, Woolf shows herself incapable of condescension.

I have ignored an intermediate stage of revision of this essay written as a preface to a bookseller’s publication in 1931 recommending titles of book to read. And all I can say is, if you have only read “How Should One Read a Book?” in the version published in The Common Reader, you owe it to yourself to chase down the original.